Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  Your orientation is earthbound because pain is a reality you live with. Dancing, using the body in creative ways, is one of the oldest arts known to man. But sophisticated forms force and strain the body, challenging its apparent limitations to become unlimited. A good dancer always knows that challenge to the capability of the body involves far more than an orientation to the physical. A superb athlete always understands that there is a dimension of mind and spirit necessary to realize the full potential of the body. So, esoteric, holistic, mysticism, might be words that sound unpragmatic, but when translated into physical terms, the practitioner understands that he or she is simply learning how to use invisible energies to their best advantage.

  I stepped out of the shower. The phone rang. People seemed to know when I was up. I let it ring until the service picked it up. I had learned how a simple phone call could interrupt the alignment of energies for the rest of the day. If I waited until I finished, all news was good news.

  I put on my yoga tape and began my twenty-five postures, feeling the pliability from the hot shower elongate my muscles. The yoga took about fifty minutes, or seven more phone calls, to complete. I felt energized and proud of myself that I had not been seduced by contact from the outside world.

  Now I was ready. I called my service and picked up many messages; among them, that my publisher (Bantam) was expecting to give me a birthday present. They hoped that afternoon would be suitable.

  I dressed and went downstairs to the living room. Sachi and my friends Sandy and Dennis Kucinich were out.

  I felt neglected because no one was there to wish me a real happy birthday. Spoiled rotten, I thought to myself, after the lavishing of affection the night before.

  Simo walked into the living room from the kitchen with a dish of his homemade apple compote and a cup of decaf coffee. Simo worked for me. He did everything. He was my friend, runner of the household, and companion in spiritual quest. We had met through the metaphysical community in Manhattan, and the spiritual path he was treading had reoriented his life as much as it had mine. He just laughed wisely when I introduced him as my wife, because before he came to work for me, I had said, “Look, what I need is a wife in every respect but the bedroom.” He had said, “I’m your man. I’ve always wanted to take care of someone.” So that’s the way it was with us.

  “So, did you sleep after all that last night?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  He shook his head, and his tummy jiggled up and down as he laughed and joked about what had happened.

  “You know,” he said, slowly rocking on his heels, looking up at the ceiling as though he could snare some elusive thought up there. “You know,” he murmured again, “they just wanted to touch you to remind themselves that somebody like you is real, didn’t they?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well,” said Simo, “Christopher said the same thing. After everything that has happened to you over the past year, people wanted to see for themselves that you were not an illusion, not a myth. That you had a wart or two and still, as they say, put on your pants one leg at a time.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “I guess that’s why celebrities are hot items. We’re some kind of symbol that anything is possible—good or bad.”

  “It’s everything,” said Simo. “Your Oscar, the success of all that stuff you’re talking about in Out on a Limb. How it’s so obviously working for you on the stage with this hit show. They feel you have an answer they would like to be a part of. And the people that said you didn’t have all your paddles in the water a year ago are beginning to wonder what they might have missed.”

  I smiled to myself. Gloating was not one of my things. In fact, I despised it. I could never stand people who said, “I told you so,” to me, so I wasn’t about to do it to anyone else. I didn’t even like I-told-you-so’s when they agreed with me. It is so prejudicial and self-serving and ultimately arrogant.

  Simo picked up some dirty napkins from the coffee table and put one hand on his hip. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know. My former friends who thought I was weird because I understood it are really hard for me to communicate with now. We don’t have anything to say to each other.” He hesitated a moment. “But then,” he went on, “there are others who are beginning to see what I was talking about, and I find it easier to be with them.” He walked into the kitchen.

  I looked out the window down First Avenue. It seemed so simple to me, as it did to Simo or to any of us who were pursuing our self-search from a karmic point of view. The concrete difference between the karmic spiritual perspective and the earth plane, “prove it,” materialistic perspective was self-responsibility. When we realized we were responsible for everything that happened to us, we could get on with living in a positive and contributive way. And that went for everything, whether it was a love affair, a death, a lost job, or a disease. We choose to have these experiences in order to learn from them—and to me, that is what life is about: learning. Learning and enjoying the knowledge that life is all about lessons.

  I remembered how I had felt just prior to the publication of Out on a Limb. A few of my friends had said it would be a “career buster.” Was it really necessary to be so public about my beliefs? Couldn’t I have them in private just as well?

  I’d thought a lot about that. Of course I could have safely kept my thoughts and feelings to myself. But my life had been about expression. From the time I was three years old, I was attending dancing classes because I loved to express myself physically. And when, as a teenager, I went from dancing to singing and musical comedy, that expanded experience was a natural and logical extension of self-expression.

  When I carried expression even further, into acting, I felt a different kind of joy, the delight of becoming more specific through the use of words and language, which painted a more detailed portrait than song and dance could accomplish. I loved the intricate mystery of being another character, sorting out background and motivation and meaning, exploring my own feelings and thoughts in relation to this new person.

  Writing became, yet again, another logical and natural extension of understanding and explaining my thoughts and feelings, of trying to understand the thoughts and feelings of others.

  When my internal explorations began to take a metaphysical and spiritual turn, I felt, at first, that this was a purely private matter, a curiosity, something which I would write about only for myself. But then the discoveries I was making began to take on significance and importance not only for me, personally, but as a philosophy with a power of its own. To sit on my fresh awareness would have meant curbing the expression of a whole set of concepts new and vital in my experience. For me, such repression would be tantamount to paralysis. I could not have lived with myself if I had failed to write, or had calculated my writing according to what the market would bear. I would then have been living my life to the dictates of some amorphous public “image.” And that was not in my lexicon of behavior.

  I may have been raised in a middle-class, WASP, “don’t-rock-the-boat” environment as far as behavior was concerned, but the free exploration of thinking was another matter altogether. Both my mother and father encouraged the expansion of curiosity in human thought, mine and everyone else’s. They may have had their concerns about appearances, but never once did they curtail what I might want to think. They were the single most encouraging factor in my development as a free, uninhibited thinker. Nothing was preposterous to them when it came to the natural, spongelike seeking of a young mind, all questions were not only permitted but welcomed and explored, and no restrictions were imposed just as long as I was polite and made a fairly “good impression” as a person. Their open-mindedness in regard to philosophic and spiritual exploration was free-flowing, unthreatened, and unthreatening. As they often said, “If you keep your feet on the ground and your head in the stars, you will be fine.” Their reality was up to them, as mine would be up to me. And m
ine was out in the open.

  So, as I began my book tour to publicize Out on a Limb, I knew I would be discussing reincarnation, spiritual guides, the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrials, and the “reality” of other dimensions in public, and, happily, I found that the open-mindedness of my parents wasn’t all that unusual.

  For me, that was a new kind of liberating miracle, and one that I think could have happened only in America. I was enthralled by how genuinely curious and open-minded Americans really were. I encountered an ingratiating friendliness on the part of talk-show hosts, audience participants, feminists, journalists, students, even doctors and psychiatrists who questioned my point of view without rancor or judgment. The doctors and psychiatrists often said, yes, they sensed there was another dimension to deal with when they treated their patients, but as empirical practitioners of science they had to rely on what they had learned. But I loved the genuine human curiosity that most people displayed. And the humor! So much of it made me laugh. And as soon as it was clear that my own sense of humor had not deserted me while floating down the spiritual path, people relaxed and had fun.

  The male journalists usually questioned me about “proof.” How do you know you have a soul? How do you measure this God-force? How do you know you’ve lived before? Don’t you feel you’re fantasizing these things because civilization has reached the point of collapse and this just makes you feel better? The men were less self-involved. They externalized their reactions, not allowing a personal evaluation to come forth regardless of what it might be. It was an object lesson in left-brain (yang) orientation. They weren’t comfortable exploring their right-brain (yin) intuitive intelligence. They were shy about their “feelings” and didn’t consider them credible. Intuition and feelings were the domain of the female.

  I had known many of the journalists personally throughout the years. They were familiar with my feminism, political activism, antiwar position, anti-nuclear stance, and my attitudes toward personal and sexual freedom. They knew how opposed I was to drugs and that I couldn’t even swing smoking a joint. I was “down to earth” and forthright.

  So when I explained spiritual search as a natural extension of personal and intuitive curiosity, they put it down to my reality, my perspective, and my need to look for more in life than meets the eye.

  The women were another story. Most of them seemed hungry for validation of feelings they had wondered about, been exploring, or possibly even expressing, but were embarrassed to expose. Quietly, in small personal ways, they were on their own search. In private they were comfortable engaging in discussions and consciousness-raising sessions relating to their spiritual lives. Chakkra energy, holistic healing, meditation, and karmic truth were subjects that commanded their attention more and more.

  Exploration might have begun as a search for identity, but it had rapidly evolved into identity assertion. For generations, as women, they had been in pursuit of intuitive understanding, a fundamentally female (right-brain) path to recognizing that truth may exist on an unseen as well as a seen level. Women had been surviving within the male power structure for eons on that basis. Their yin strength was now becoming more developed, more visible, and was steadily accelerating.

  So the female journalists related to their questions with the heart. The men with the mind. Both were a lesson for me. Both were necessary. The men motivated me to become more articulate, which isn’t easy when describing matters of the soul. The women motivated me to just be myself, which, alas, isn’t easy when your task is to find out what self is.

  The letters had poured in. I read many but I knew from the beginning that I shouldn’t and couldn’t offer any explanations. It was each individual’s responsibility to look into his or her own soul and find the answer. Meditate, I suggested. Allocate time every day to “knowing” yourself better. If someone was interested in spiritual channeling, I told them to read books by Edgar Cayce, or Jane Roberts, or Ruth Montgomery. If they were interested in having a more positively functioning body, I suggested they read books on holistic medicine, or food combining, or yoga exercise. If they were interested in opening up the seven chakkra energy centers down the spine, I recommended they go to metaphysical bookstores in their community and ask for advice from the owner. I had found that one book usually leads to another anyway, just as one shared conversation leads to many more.

  I was reluctant to recommend spiritual guides and teachers or trance medium channels because I felt that most people should be guided to their own source of learning. When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

  I cherish the response, but have since come to realize that, for the letter writers, the act of having expressed themselves and shared their feelings was what was important to them.

  I didn’t want to become anybody’s guru, nor did I want to lead or form a spiritual movement. Spiritual self-searching was something a person did on their own, in their own way, at their own pace. Each individual reacts and responds differently to these personal truths. Each person is their own universe of understanding and it doesn’t work in terms of comparative progress. One person might seem more advanced than another, but who could ever really know? Knowledge of self is a lifetime job, and not just this lifetime either. So there is no way to assess progress in a linear fashion. There isn’t a comparative pecking order. A spiritually evolved person in a former lifetime could choose to have the experience of spiritual blindness in this lifetime, just to act as a catalyst for someone like me who needed to be more articulate about what I had come to realize.

  And here I was at fifty, still questioning, still curious, hopefully still evolving, and certainly still doing it all out in the open. What made me the way I was? I no longer questioned whether I had lived before or whether I would live again. I was now questioning how and why.

  Relationships were the heart and core of everything we were. So did we choose to have relationships with people in order to learn? Did we make these choices before we were born? Indeed, did we choose the very parents we wanted to belong to?

  When I went over my life from that point of view, the relationships I had with my mother and father and daughter and friends took on another dimension—a dimension that would help me see them and myself in another light. Yes, life was a dance which was just beginning to come into the light for me.

  I heard voices in the front hall. Sachi and Dennis and Sandy were home.

  “Happy birthday,” they caroled as they came into the room and kissed me.

  “Thank God the stores were open,” said Dennis. “We were so caught up in the celebration yesterday, we didn’t have time to get you a present.”

  “You are the present,” I said, looking at one of the most daring and unorthodox politicians in big-city politics—housed in the body of a twelve-year-old kewpie doll. His eyes were round brown saucers, his hair teenage thick, and his way of walking that of a prancing track star certain that he would win every race possible because he knew he was borne by the winds of his own destiny.

  Dennis Kucinich and his blond wife, Sandy, had a young two-year-old named Jackie to whom I was the godmother. Dennis was positive I had known Jackie in another life and was possibly the only one, later on, who would be able to handle her in this one.

  Behind Dennis and Sandy came came Sachi.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said, lighting up the room as she did every time she walked into one. She leaned over and hugged me and kissed me on my cheek. “Happy birthday,” she said. She handed me two gift-wrapped boxes. “This says it better than I can,” she said.

  I opened the boxes. One was my favorite perfume (and hers too) and the other was a morning coffee mug which said: I LOVE YOU, Mom, every morning.

  I poured what was left of my decaf into her mug and sat back and looked at her.

  She bubbled on about the crowded balcony the night before and Christopher popping out of a plaster-of-paris cake in the middle of the show they put on. She laughed at the spectacle of Liberace wearing a cloak that a
royal queen would have killed for, and the sweet humor of Marvin Hamlisch as he dedicated the heretofore unheard overture to Chorus Line to me.

  As she recalled the theatrical excitement, of the celebration I watched her in delight and reveled in the truth that this pure, lighthearted flower child was really my daughter.

  Sachi had had an international education, having grown up with me in America until she was nearly six, with her father in Japan until she was twelve, and at her request, in boarding schools in England and Switzerland until she graduated. We had spent three months every summer together as well as six weeks during the Christmas and Easter holidays. As she put it once, “It’s the quality of the time you spend with someone. Not the quantity.”

  I was so proud as I watched her. She had a pristine innocence about her. When she was happy in her soul, there was no one I had ever met who brought me more joy. She was nearly twenty-eight years old, but gave the impression of being barely out of her teens. Yet she was shrewd and canny when she knew what she wanted. Long, free-flowing corn-silk hair hung around her freckled, button-nosed face, and when she blinked her porcelain-blue eyes, a minihurricane was stirred up by her very long, thick, absolutely ridiculous eyelashes. Her naïveté had a quality of joyous wisdom. She continually marveled at the wonder of the world around her, and the lives of people who came in contact with her were caught up by her infectious gaiety.

  But Sachi had a depth of understanding which was sometimes stupefying. She empathized with others on levels that made me continually question where her talent for sensitivity came from. I guess parents are always the last to comprehend their children’s discriminating maturity and I was no different. Sachi also had a clear understanding of what she wanted to convey and I had often been on the receiving end of her convictions. In other words, as guileless as she seemed, I knew in my heart that most of the time she knew exactly what she was doing. In fact, that was probably what I, and many others, found so attractive in her. She knew she was a creature of light and she wanted to stay that way.… A complicated process, since the world around her was becoming more and more disheartened.