It’s true that I’m at least 25 years older than my classmates in the Adult Beginner-Intermediate Ballet class at a well-known local dance studio. It’s true as well that it’s the highlight of my week. Not because I harbor any fantasy of dancing like I once did when I was young. Not because I imagine performing on some stage again. Instead, it’s about those seconds for which I can only set an “inner” stage, so to speak, and wait.
Seconds when something beautiful happens in me, no one can see, when I’m working hard to hold my posture at the barre or trying to follow a movement sequence across the floor. It isn’t about perfection. Not enough years left for that. No. It’s about those seconds that arise of their own accord and then are gone to reverberate across time. They’re like sparks of joy, only the sparkler never goes out.
Doing something we love changes us or rather returns us to a place we may have forgotten, a place where life suddenly breaks through like the sun after a violent storm. It says no matter how dark the night, no matter what we’ve endured, we are alive and each moment, each step, can be a new beginning.
Gratefully, we don’t have to look far to find such sparks, for those who have shared their love in the midst of such dark nights. A March 2022 article from the New York Times highlights how when Ukrainians found themselves under siege from Russian forces, many artists turned to music for comfort and connection. They filled streets, apartment buildings and train stations with the sounds of Beethoven and Mozart.
A cellist, Denys Karachevtsev, performed Bach in the center of a deserted street in Kharkiv, with the blown-out windows of the regional police headquarters behind him. Vera Lytovchenko, a violinist for the Kharkiv Theater of Opera and Ballet, gave impromptu concerts almost every day for a group of 11 neighbors. In the cold, cramped basement, with nothing in the way of decoration except candles and yellow tulips, she performed Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky and Ukrainian folk songs. A man played the Ukrainian national anthem on his trumpet in a subway station being used as a bomb shelter. A pianist played Chopin in her apartment surrounded by ashes and debris left by Russian shelling.
And sometimes, sharing what we love is not a personal choice but, rather, something one could say is brought to life by the unseen hand of providence working through us. Such a time was the creation of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, consisting mostly of young female Jewish and Slavic prisoners, who played daily for long hours by order of the SS for 19 months. They were, indeed, “playing for time” as one of the members, Fania Fenelon, would title her autobiography. But the music they made lives on.
Some might say that to go enjoy life is selfish when all the world appears to be dismantling from one crisis after another. I would disagree. It turns out that sharing our love, our joy, what sparks us alive, can also spark a remembrance in others when life’s circumstances can leave any one of us feeling alone, desperate and helpless.
It says I will not escape into safety but will sit with you as the bombs fall, the children are maimed and the stench of our burning neighbors fills the air. It says I will hand you, my brother on the street corner, a fast-food card and a blanket because, yes, beauty and kindness lives here.
So, I go dancing. For when I’m home and still can’t stop myself from twirling around in our tiny kitchen, I feel alive and sparked by life in all its forms. It allows me today to be more available, to hear and respond to my loved ones, neighbors, strangers ahead or behind me in line, as I am drawn.
For in the end what calls us to love is not about us. Instead, it makes us a conduit for the beauty so easily forgotten when life chokes off our joy. It reminds us that what binds us together as fellow human beings transcends national, cultural, political agendas. It reminds us that it is always the gift of love, in any form, that endures when all else falls away.
This gift may or may not conform to our social norms or expectations. Recently, I saw a video from the Royal Academy of Dance of Silver Swans around the world. In one group, there was a very old woman, all hunched over, determined to move her feet alongside the others, dancing away. Every time I think of her, I smile and think, “Thank you, my teacher, for you have called me to love.”
Rev. Dr. Stephanie Rutt is founding minister of the Tree of Life Interfaith Temple in Amherst. She lives in Nashua.