Chicago winter. Words of ominous potency that uttered in whisper, send chills down a Texan’s spine, place a pea under the Valley Girl’s mattress and cruise the Vegas Strip with six thugs hanging out a limo window like the notorious bad-girl rock stars they are. Maui to Massachusetts, the nation knows that Chicago’s winter will not be messed with.

The truth of this statement impacted me last nite when speaking with one of my dearest Windy City friends, Jerry, about the “mildness” of the current December weather. He said, “it’s only getting down to 20 – it hasn’t even been cold, yet.” I agreed. Having lived there for four and a half years, I know that 20 degrees is practically surfing weather this time of year – time to catch some rays, set up the volley ball net, have a family reunion or something.

Some of my raw friends change their diet in the cold months, adding in warm vegetable soups and steamed veggies. Apparently they become quite sensitive to the chill and their sweaters, central heating and cuddle partners just can’t keep them satisfied. But with tulips practically blossoming in Chicago this winter season, I’d say there is still time, My Chicago Friends, to try out a new raw food restaurant before the negative 20 degree wind chill freezes the tears right in your eyes and the blizzard snow, like quicksand, swallows your car without a trace.

Vitality Foods, just 10 minutes north of Chicago city limits, is a café/health food store/studio space in Wilmette IL serving raw for over a year now. Since it is a short drive from the city, I can not exactly call it “competition” for Karyn’s in the heart of Lincoln Park, but more like another strong gathering place and educational outlet for Chicago’s raw food community, and even in December, defiantly worth the drive.

The store itself is situated on the Main St. of Wilmette’s quaint and homey shopping center. The feeling of safety, cleanliness and in general lightness of the neighborhood is only amplified inside Vitality by full length store front windows, bathing one in sunlight as they shop or sit at the little café. The health food store carries an impressive library of health oriented books and magazines, a complete selection of bulk grains, cereals, and nuts, carefully discerned health and beauty products, as well as (omitting produce) all a raw foodist’s staples: oil cured olives, hemp nut butter, organic food bars and two types of raw crackers made by the owner, Ralph Roberts, himself. In the back is a gorgeous studio open for public rental, currently hosting yoga, dance and theatre company rehearsals. Although a sprung floor was noticeably missing (the first requirement for this professional dancer), I can praise the studio's exquisite fung shui, cared-for wood floors, and soft lighting – indeed an ideal space for no-impact activities. But the best part about Vitality’s studio space was the optional earth-tone curtains hung over the three walls of body-friendly mirrors – something this dancer has always dreamed about having in her own studio/ritual space in the Never Never Land fantasy of "settling down" and domestication.

My girlfriend, Dana, and I were lucky to have been the only patrons dining at Vitality that afternoon, because Ralph Roberts, the owner, scooped us up in his raw arms, delighted us with activist conversation, educated us about the Chicago raw community and prepared for us, as is his way, a fresh organic raw meal completely from scratch. It was nice to see a menu so simple and easy to digest, unlike many of the nut-heavy gourmet creations at raw restaurants nowadays. I dinned on a large dark green salad and a notably refreshing raw milk (not over sweetened or thickened) while Ralph and I discussed super green foods, omega 3 nutrition, and cleanses for the active lifestyle. I am still impressed by the affordability of everything in the store and Ralph’s red bell pepper crackers (I have honestly never tasted a raw cracker so light in texture and intense in flavor). And even more impressed at Ralph’s non-proprietary approach to spreading the raw word – offering all his amazing raw recipes free to anyone interested. And to those of you who think 20 degrees too cold for your sensitive circulation, Vitality Foods offers whole grain bread for their sandwiches or pita for the raw hummus to warm you from the inside until the sun again returns.

I myself, now in Philadelphia, am choosing to stay raw as ever, with a personalized approach to cultivating warmth during the snowy season:

- eat more light fats (like hemp seed and olives)
- practice no-impact chi moving exercises
- allow more time for sleep
- do not remove cozy socks for the next four months
- view coldness as stimulation instead of pain, and
- become your hotel’s most proficient herbal tea party host.

Someone once said, “You can stop a war with a cup of tea”. Well, at least it can wait until spring for renegotiation…

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Tonite I was sitting in the bath and the funniest thing happened. I was thinking about love…and Pilobolus Dance Company…and feeling the water pour from the spout and burn my feet (I must feel it) and floating, being supported continuously more as the water filled up around me, thinking about how much I have to learn from you about flow. And I came to, so to speak, just as the water level bulged over the top of the white tub. I did not move – I became less than movement. So I absorbed the movement from the water and I watched it become horizontally empowered. Like Syrah in my favorite wine glass on a nite when price didn’t matter, when I poured another just to study the color, breathe in the smell, allow it to breathe. My head was spinning and it could’ve been the steam and it could’ve certainly been something else as well.

As for Pilobolus, the name of the dance company is a rapidly spreading fungus. As for love, it may just be the challenge to see how good it can be. To know a feel a understand another so well that you can anticipate their needs and celebrate that connection by surprising them with more than what they didn’t even know how to ask for.

Love cannot be imagined without placing limitations on it, thereby shortchanging nature’s potential. It is imperative to assume you know nothing about love.

So I asked myself how good can it be? And I must have blacked out then because the next thing I remember is sitting in this chair typing passionately about steam and fungus. ‘Find out’ spelled the Ouija board (did she really play alone?). ‘Find out how very little you know about anything and in that, how all is possible.’

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First nite back on tour and hotel security has already found my door. Like second graders in frantic whisper voices when the substitute teacher’s footsteps come clacking down the hall, “Shhhhh! Here she comes!” As if behaving as the teacher enters the classroom door negates the shrieks and spit balls just a moment earlier. Or in this case, choreography to bumpin’ music in my living room, some kind of water wrestling match in my kitchen and an obscenely loud jam session on my balcony for Philadelphia’s entire downtown to enjoy (as well as my above, below and either side hotel neighbors, according to the security guard). Like second graders, STOMPers: busted.

After a month off, we are supercharged by each others’ presence – it is so so good to be back. These lunatics, these entertainers, these superstars that have become my family - all of us itching to hit the stage tonite, to sweat, to listen, to give, to explode. All of us addicts to the performer’s high and the unbridled celebration of life.

Already the Philadelphia Gay News is running an interview with me and I just found out that STOMP will be guests on Jay Lenno New Year’s Eve. Also, I am pleased to announce that I have officially become the first female athlete ever to be sponsored by Manitoba Harvest Hemp Foods – a company I have loyally supported for years, now a relationship of outreach and education.

With lessons of stillness and rehabilitation firmly set, it is time for the cycle to wind. 2004 sounds momentous to me. Substitute teachers and security guards, you have been warned...

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What would I scribble were this a poem? What words would I fumble if you answered your phone? It is fear that makes me want to keep you a city away. Such a fine fantasy - seems a shame to chance disappointment in the flesh when reality inevitably falls short of my moon dust ideals. (After all I’ve been through, am I really still proving my own loneliness?)

Or perhaps I am scared you are a real life human being and inviting you into my life would require a surrender of control that threatens my emotional teeter-totter’s fragile illusion of balance. (After all I’ve been through, am I really still protecting vulnerabilities?)

That you just might be absolute perfection is the true fear here (sealed envelopes without postage). Because if you are more lovely than my wildest dreams, I may just have to evolve stretch transform expand - be my greatest to remain your ever developing equal.

Not someday, not in a fantasy, not safely in my imagination, but now and only now can we dance dirty bare foot delicious in low blue light until four a.m., until the cops write their early morning parking tickets, before snow is scraped from silent sidewalks. Only tonite in the very same city, before my very eyes, in this moment in the flesh - absolute perfect flesh - only now are we one and I am not afraid after all. After all.

After all I have been through, I love harder. Lick the stamp.

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As of late, I am occupied entertaining the incomprehensible. Knowing that to contemplate it would be utterly futile and therefore.... I have nothing to write.

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25 degrees with a brittle stamp collection of snow on the frozen postcard ground. My family sleeps, but I am the raccoon, the opossum, the nocturnal creature rustling through the house tonite. With respect to their slumbers, I rustle myself out the front door and into the frigid air. There is really no choice. I am being called.

Such a ring around December’s moon – ice reflects its light, reflecting the sun’s light, making 1 a.m. as bright as white itself. Awareness permeates and each gesture I make takes on spiritual importance because the world is paying attention, perking its ears, leaning in. Air smells like frozen forest and I find myself leaning back into the unconditional embrace of my favorite childhood climbing tree, both of us shivering so hard we've become still. Looking up through bare branches, I see the full moon has her eye on me. Such an honor to be so interesting tonite.

In the past, I would have timed my cleanse’s finale to the dark moon, not the full. Waning moon dissolves, darkness purifies – the ideal time for banishing toxins and other unneeded things.

Lessons on elimination however, when originally hypothesized to be the focus of this cleanse, turned out only to be scribbles in the margins of a far more encompassing text. For example, I learned what true hunger is. I often say I am insatiable for all things - food, growth, love, life – I cannot get enough and I feed myself accordingly. And for this reason, I imagined 7 days without food would be a monumental challenge. So when the stomach gave me stimulus (isn’t that all “pain” is?), I imagined eating the most decadent dessert and guess what? I always wanted more. It occurred to me that that is not true hunger. True hunger can be satisfied by the blandest of sustenance. It is appetite that is insatiable. I now have a choice: I can rejoice through feeding a perpetual appetite, or I can be satisfied through feeding hunger. This option will come in handy.

I also learned that the secret to good digestion begins with chewing. The slippery spittle that saturates your pillowcase at nite and lubricates sensitive objects at the most important times, is also the enzymatic fluid that gaurds against indigestion and bloating. It is our duty to combine our food so completely with saliva that basically nothing but liquid enters our stomachs. Many of our digestive discomforts can be remidied by thourough mastication. :-)

And in only one week I have shifted to my natural 9 hour sleeping pattern, let go of an unneeded 8 lbs of debris, and through constant loopiness, discovered that rest is far more than a physical phenomenon – it is equally important to slow the mind and emotions by avoiding "muti-tasking" and conflict in general.

The full moon is a time of fulfilled potential - the bulging surface atop the wine glass one drop before spilling over. In this way, it is appropriate that my cleanse culminate tonite instead of on the banishing dark moon. As educational as these elimination lessons have been, they are nothing compared to a climactic purification.

How sensitive I have become through fasting. How easy it is to hear my voice. How exhausting it would seem to try to ignore it. And how natural it feels to not react – not create some imaginary world, imaginary lover, or ambitious dream. Just lean my back on this tree, raise my arms and say…

Thank you.

Be thanked.

Be Thanks.

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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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