Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  This was where acting and spirituality merged. Each character I had played had been a help in knowing myself. Perhaps that had been my motivation for being an actress. I had, in effect, been seeking the experience of being alive with all of my selves. I wanted to feel feelings that transcended thought when I was playing a character. I wanted to know what couldn’t be measured. I wanted to understand what couldn’t be named. I wanted to be in the center of feeling where no time existed. I wanted to lose myself in just being the character.

  “Just being” was perhaps the very nature of creativity. I needed to relax into “just being” before I could become a character. So, in order to become a creator of a character, I needed to identify with the essence of life.

  I sat down on the sofa, hoped no one else would come in the motor home for a while, and closed my eyes again. I would surrender myself without judgment to whatever came up for me. Maybe that was creativity anyway. Maybe my character would emerge.

  Out of that creative impulse, where one doesn’t judge, perhaps I would feel the connection to the divinity of all creation. So that the experience of creativity, in its purest form, would be the experience of eternity. Perhaps I loved the creative process so much because, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, “Creativity is the expression of the eternal presence of God.” If I felt in accord with that universal being, perhaps I would lose my anxiety and my sense of judgment about myself and everyone else.

  Perhaps I would liberate my feelings from the prison of judgment that they seemed to be sentenced to. The acting experience then could go deeper into my own mystery, where the real self transcended all thought.

  I closed my eyes, and even in the attempt to let myself go I realized I was thinking too much. We actors were supposed to be children of wonder, each of us a kind of emotional canvas on which writers and directors and camera geniuses could create and manipulate diverse images.

  This was, of course, a colossal contradiction; and yet, in the end, when it came to acting a great part in a really good script with fabulous co-workers, the operative name of the game was “surrender.” They expected us to surrender our conscious identities so that creativity could prevail—surrender to inspiration; surrender to instinct; surrender to intuition; surrender to giving up one’s own contradictions; surrender to the character, which should become second nature enough to allow oneself to be possessed.

  Were we actors primarily expected to be channels for those we were playing? Or were we actually participating in the expression of characters that we had inevitably drawn to us, because they were and are aspects of ourselves yet to be experienced?

  And the really fine directors—the impresarios of emotional pace, the conductors of the rhythms of our talent, the orchestrators of our illusion—were they secretly longing to play all our parts? A really good director has to know and love all his characters, just as a really good actor has to know and love his character.

  So when each actor loves his part and each director loves all the characters equally, there is really no room for competition, or at least not without sabotaging the creativity. Wanting to do one’s best is different from feeling competitive, and surrendering to the character you love is surrendering to the best in yourself.

  I leaned against the back of the sofa and let my thoughts drift, trying not to analyze or hook into any one of them. I breathed deeply a few times and let my shoulders go, my stomach go, my hips, and finally my legs and feet. I felt the feeling of “being” begin to prevail.

  Slowly, slowly, I surrendered to it. I would also, I thought, create a reality where no one would now knock on my door, even to tell me they were ready for me.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sachi

  I had long since learned that without such reflection time, I could be in trouble. I needed to knit the fabric of my thoughts together, needed to see and feel the harmony. If I didn’t I became irritable, short-tempered, and rude. I had come close to that today. I needed to give myself a present of time …

  Meditation could be full of surprises anyway. I never knew what would come up. An internal adventure, you might say, that somehow was always relevant to what was bothering me. It was the language of the subconscious that triggered an understanding in the conscious mind. A kind of alchemy could take place in meditation whereby what seemed an illusion became a reality simply because it was experienced. Daydreams or night-dreams, it made no difference. If the feelings were experienced, the feelings are real. Maybe all illusion had its basis in reality. Could life simply be the coexistence of illusion and reality?

  I breathed deeply and let myself go. I relaxed. A picture began to form and swim into my mind. It had water around it, full of light and pulsating energy. What was I seeing? Was it real or was I making it up? I tried not to question with my mind, hoping to observe with an eye in my heart. There it was—I saw a tiny, tiny baby being formed in my own body. It had an exquisitely angelic face, masses of blond angel-hair, and ethereal arms and legs that wrapped and floated around a plump body. It was my own daughter, Sachi. My daughter. She smiled at me, chuckling at my confusion. Why was I seeing her at this particular time? I laughed. It was too incongruous. Then Sachi spoke.

  “Oh, Mom,” she said with teasing wisdom. “This is the creative process. You can make it what you want, which you will, because you are going to film a comedy-drama. But there is nothing incongruous about seeing me now as you embark on a mother-daughter story. You are going to draw on your experiences with me. I will be here for you, and you will translate it onto the screen. That is part of our agreement.”

  I choked. This was our agreement?

  “Oh, Mom,” she said again. “You know we are friends from so many times and places. Here we are again, with so much to learn about ourselves and each other.”

  I felt as though I were seeing and hearing, within my own self, this tiny profound being who said I had agreed to give birth to her. There was no mistaking her wisdom, her knowledge, her compassion, and even her almost cosmic humor.

  Then the image began to speed up. She grew within me with liquid grace, sometimes laughing as she felt the power of her physical body, alternately confused and irritated that so much of her well-being depended on me and my own movements and frame of mind. Her form blossomed into definition, her personality taking on traits that complemented the form she was living in. She was a distinct entity whose soul I could actually feel using her little body as a channel of expression. Who would she become? What could I do for her? What was this agreement we had with each other? What did she know about our relationships in other times and places? And would we accomplish what she said we had come in to do this time around?

  Her eyes remained calm and sparkling as I asked these questions. She seemed to know everything—so much more than I did. She seemed to be centered in the truth, and aware that she was in possession of it. Truth? And what was that?

  I saw her face become serious. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, as if a dialogue of this nature was not only natural but in need of being recognized. “You are me and I am you. We are all reflections of each other. You may think you are hearing me, but you are hearing you, because you are creating both me and the conversation. Relax with this and use this creative power in everything you do.”

  Suddenly she was no longer a baby within me. She was born, squawling and berating the air, her face stripped of its wisdom and serenity. She seemed lost and confused, helplessly dependent upon physical surroundings of which she had no knowledge.

  Then someone placed her in my arms. She looked up at me. Recognition, a memory of two souls. She relaxed. The crying stopped. Her eyes melted through me, forging a connection in me with their soft heat. I felt her love power stir in my heart.

  What were we meant to do together? Why had I never had any other children? Was our task together so consuming that I couldn’t handle more than one? What could some mother with ten children have agreed to?

  Now Sachi began to walk, and simultaneously, from som
e objective viewpoint, I remembered the day it happened. She stood up on the floor of black and white checkered linoleum, her arms raised in pixie triumph. I had a camera and captured her first step.

  Then I was walking away from her playpen and she cried deeply, and with overwhelming loneliness. I wondered what she was so afraid of. Perhaps she sensed the future—the years I would be away from her when she lived in Japan with her father.

  “It was all an agreement, Mom,” she said to me. “We all knew what we were doing. You didn’t put me on the plane alone for the first time, with my dog tag around my neck, without my agreeing to it. On a deep soul level, I know that. You know it too. So don’t feel guilty. You did what you had to do. So did I. I will take responsibility for that. Now we need to work through what we have learned.”

  And what were those lessons? Perhaps I was drawing so many powerful mother-daughter scripts to me because they were teaching me. I was learning, both from the “script” daughters and from the mothers I was playing in the scripts. And at this juncture in my life no relationships were more important to me than those with my mother and my daughter.

  In actual fact, what could be more profoundly disturbing and exquisitely joyful than a mother-daughter relationship? What could possibly be more fraught with the creative combustion of the universe than two females who were charged with the task of creating and reflecting each other? The thought of it gave creative combustion a new definition. The female energy itself called into question long forgotten attitudes relating to tolerance, nurturing, patience, intuitiveness, emotional support, and matters of the heart. The world was not resonating to these attitudes in any serious way. We were still caught up in male attitudes of dominance, the “logical” intellect, power posturing, and willful manipulation.

  But now we were facing a new age of feminine nourishing in an attempt to survive on the planet. Not only were men having to find and accept the feminine in themselves, but mothers and daughters were having to find the necessary gentleness of acceptance too. The goddess energy, the guru masters called it. The right-brained approach, the doctors and scientists called it.

  The other half of ourselves, I called it. I had been operating with my masculine energy most of my life. That was how I became an overachiever. I was well versed in the ways of willful perseverance, intellectual analysis, logical, linear thinking. What I hadn’t allowed myself was the power of surrender, the ecstasy of allowing what will be to be. I had not heard the music of the universe with my heart. I was dancing with my mind and, as a result, I was discordant with the natural harmony of the symphony of life.

  I could feel it all around me too. So many of my friends were having problems, real problems, in their relationships, marriages, and work, with money, and so on. It was almost as though the earth itself were spinning in a rhythm different from that of the human race. We were dissident, out of harmony, and didn’t even know it, and it was happening so fast that the acceleration of confusion was alarming. Yet barriers were coming down all around the world. People wanted to join each other, touch those who had a different way of life, experiment with freedom, and express individual opinions.

  The problem was nobody knew how to do these things and still keep order and harmony. Our young people knew there was something more to be experienced in their internal reality, but because they hadn’t been taught to nurture and respect it as real, they went to drugs to provide a chemical elation. Greed seemed to prevail as a hedge against the coming annihilation of meaning. Crime and perverse violence continually threw us back into the dark ages of devil fear, and devil worship was alive and well and winning the hearts and minds of at least some twisted humans. We seemed to be plunging headfirst into the abyss of a new millennium with no sense of harmony, security, or peaceful evolvement and survival. What had we become and why had it happened?

  Sachi’s face appeared again. She was wearing a bonnet with a flower centered on the top. Her pug nose was sprinkled with freckles, and her smile was a thousand suns.

  “It’s okay.” She laughed. “It’s all happening just like it should, Mom. Like we all planned it. We just like to learn the hard way.” She was chewing a huge wad of gum, which she fashioned into a bubble with her tongue. The bubble burst all over her face, leaving electric sparks of gumlike light exploding in the air. “See,” she said, “even an exploding bubble can be beautiful.”

  Sachi, I thought, who are you? Are you my teacher, my mentor, a master of knowledge in your naïveté? Should I listen to you, or change you, or teach you away from your own wisdom? How can you know more than I? I’m supposed to be strong and help you learn. I should protect you from my own fears, my own anxieties. I should shield you from this out-of-control world for the rest of your life to make up for the times when I wasn’t there.

  Suddenly I was overcome with the realization that the first lesson I had taught her from the time she could reason was the lesson of negativity. “Don’t do this.” “Don’t talk like that.” “Don’t touch this.” “Don’t, Don’t, Don’t.”

  In a burst of understanding, I realized that I, and probably many other mothers, instilled the concepts of negativity before their babies even had a chance to feel themselves, their individuality, and much less their creative will. Sachi’s development was set in motion the first time I prevented her from making her own move. A negative format that was repeated and reinforced far too often within the convenient framework of being for the benefit of the child. No wonder our children responded in life more to the negative than to the positive. That was what they learned first.

  What had I done to the individuality of my daughter, all in the name of loving protection? How had I suppressed her desires, her will, her creative imagination, by calling something silly or not having the time to pay homage and attention to her childlike dreams, which could blossom into a blazing adult reality someday?

  No wonder so many teenagers finally rebelled by angrily denouncing their parental figures for not recognizing them as capable of doing anything right! They felt physical energies surging through their bodies, and we adults attempted elaborate explanations for controlling, denying, and suppressing them. We left no room for growth in freedom, in self-expression to its ultimate.

  I must have suppressed my daughter’s subconscious mind in ways I couldn’t even fathom while she waited in frustration for release. She would now have to dig through the rubble of negativity I had heaped upon her and try to unleash her natural self. That self had been originally accessible to her. Now it was locked behind doors to which I had the keys, just as my original self was locked behind doors to which my mother had the keys.

  “No, Mom,” said Sachi, wearing a sarong and eating a juicy mango under a tree, “you don’t understand. Give me some credit. I’m as responsible for what’s going on as you are—even though you created me. I wanted all of this. What I don’t want is for you to hide yourself from me.”

  I sat up. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You don’t let me see your pain,” she answered. “Your pain about me. Your pain about yourself. Why don’t you trust me and let me see it?”

  “Trust you?” I asked. “Why would that be trust?”

  “Because you would be respecting me and trusting that I could help you maybe.”

  “But I’m your mother. I shouldn’t burden you with all that.”

  “You’re more than my mother. You’re my friend. But I’ve been your mother. Remember?”

  I remembered.

  “You know how maternal I am about you,” she continued.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, allow me that talent again. I know how to do it. Maybe better than you do.”

  I flushed with embarrassment.

  “No, never mind that,” she said. “We all get to be many characters, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, just trust me that I’ll be there for you. I will, you know. You’ve just been too busy worrying whether you have or haven’t been there for
me. You’re too worried about what you’ve done wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  I thought a moment as she slurped her orange mango. Her fingers glistened with its slimy juice. Why did I always feel I couldn’t bother her with my problems?

  “Because,” I said, “that’s the way it was with my mother. She never let me see who she really was. So I thought that’s what mothers were supposed to do.”

  “Or not do.”

  “Or not do.”

  “Well, what do you think mothers are supposed to do?” she asked. She threw the mango pit away, reached in a basket beside the tree, and retrieved another fruit. Delicately she bit off the end and squished and pummeled the mango juice into her mouth.

  “Do?” I asked. I couldn’t answer. “I don’t know. I don’t know what mothers are supposed to do. I never learned that, so I don’t know.”

  “Nobody knows,” said Sachi. “They just do what feels right.”

  “But,” I heard myself protest, “maybe what feels right wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t be good for you.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. I told you, you don’t trust or respect me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay. So give me a break.”

  “How?”