Surely there is something to be learned from sitting still.

I try to remember the eyes of my homeless man. 45th and 8th – Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan – my very first apartment alone. He sits, not bothering to shake a cup – just sits right down on that grimy sidewalk, knee level to one thousand preoccupied pedestrians. Profound, the difference of perspective in our lives – we, the movers and he....stationary. My homeless man makes eye contact with me. I try now to remember the wisdom in those eyes gained from this sitting still.

Perhaps the reason I don’t watch television is not some enlightened response to a mediocre world, but actually the same reason I despise airplanes and the entire reason I work out four hours a day: I experience life through movement. Body and emotion become motion. For me, motionlessness feels like death. Certainly there is nothing more dreadful to the human species than boredom, breeding complacency, apathy – leaching life force, stealing breath. A vampire succubus physical boredom is to me. What gurus have learned from silence and peace, I have learned while bouncing off walls.

For me to be alive, there is no choice but to dance. Lucky for me, others like to watch.

So when the physical therapist said to heal I must rest, I tried to recall the eclipse last month and how the moon just sat there letting the shadow slink over. I imagined the downhome Michigan hunters and how they hold their breath when the trophy buck is near. Or the Venus Fly Trap in Ft. Wayne Indiana’s botanic garden – doesn’t exactly walk right up to the fly, shake hands and invite him to dinner, now does she? Like a grandfather clock with no momentum. Like the air before a tornado. Like delta waves too slow for dreaming, I too must become still.

Rehabilitate. Recuperate. Recover. Revive. For a pain-free STOMP career and a lifetime of dance, resting now is the least I can do. Nature’s shift to winter seems painfully appropriate, light dustings of snow and a wind that tears skin, as I sit in my mother’s house warmly decorated for the holidays, waiting...waiting to heal. Still, “inactivity” consists of daily 4 mile walks, ballet floor barre class, the usual sit ups and stretches. Optimist that I am, I see this as an oportunity and am taking the next week to perform the extended fast I was always too active for in the past. So it’s been two days without food. I am faint and sensitive, sleeping like Beauty herself as a delicious detox now sets in.

Healing is happening. Pedestrians are speeding by. I will sit on my sidewalk and learn.

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