blue suede shoes

        My heart is so full, so inspired right now, I barely even know where to start.  Do you ever just have those moments when life makes sense?  When you are perfectly content to just be in the moment?  You forget to look around to see what everybody else is doing because you are just listening, taking it in, letting your carefully placed guard down so that your heart can be left with a clear impression. 

        Because you don't want to miss a thing.  

        And you become soft, vulnerable, and before you know it, something good has gotten in you and your life is bigger because of it.  Or maybe you just feel smaller from the weight of it, but whatever it is, it's good.  And you're changed.

         See, I just spent three hours listening to some incredible live jazz.  

          I mean sweating, no holds barred, jazz musicians just playing for their lives. I could have watched the different piano players all night long, especially when it came time for a solo (which happened about every other minute, I'd say) and every one of their 10 fingers danced deftly over those keys (the sad thing about that last sentence is that I really had to pause for a second because I couldn't remember if we have 10 or 20 fingers...it's late, friends, please be kind...).  When the music is perfect, when the rhythms are locked in a pace that you've been waiting for, and there's an individual freedom that exists despite the fact that there's a strong commitment in place to a certain key, there's a visceral part of me that responds.  I can't help but move a little--sometimes a lot--and it's in these moments that I know that dance isn't necessarily or strictly an art form; it is sometimes, simply stated, the only appropriate response that exists to the kind of music that speaks to the soul.  

          There is a vivid scene from C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia in which Aslan is creating the world of Narnia through song.  He sits over a vast emptiness and simply starts to sing this inspired, creative song, and the land, in utter response to this permeating music, grows; water divides from land, trees differentiate from grass, and the animals start to form. It is beautiful and so right in that I think Lewis got the importance of music and how it grows good things, how it takes a void and fills it. 

        And we need only respond.  

         I did my fair share of dancing tonight, too.  One guy I danced with kept calling me slinky, which, the more I thought about it, the more I realized is just a really weird word and by maybe the third or fourth time he called me slinky, I was sure I didn't want to dance with him anymore.  So I didn't.  Oh, and I danced in my, ah, high-tops since I did not realize that I was going to be visiting this jazz club before I left for the theater tonight.  But who cares, really?  I dance enough in heels as it is.

         Another favorite moment of the night was while I was on the dance floor: I glance over and see a couple who look to be somewhere in their eighties, probably with a hobbit or two far back in their respective family trees, judging from their stature.  He was wearing a very respectable suit, she had on a nice dress with a belt smartly cinched around a waist that had thickened through the years.  She was slightly taller than him, but it could have been the heels, now that I think about it.  Anyway, they were whirling around, dancing, becoming younger with each step to the music, each rotation completed in each other's arms.  

       

          I could only imagine how many times they had done exactly what they were doing right then. And it sure seemed like it never got old for them; it sure seemed like their love hadn't dissipated through the years, either. 

           Tonight was really special.  Music. Dance. Friends. A very old couple.  It gets better sometimes, I guess, but not so often.