Dance First
What Beckett, a Mayan elder, and a field full of dandelions have in common
‘Dance first, think later.’ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
I came across this quote while reading a book called How to Write Like Tolstoy. It jumped out at me
And it struck me immediately that a Mayan elder I recently sat in ceremony with in Guatemala said something almost identical. Her name is Ishkik, and what she said was: Feel first, think second. (I’ve written about it here before)
Two people, different centuries, different continents, different cultures, arriving at the same inversion of the assumption most of us were raised inside. The assumption being: reason first, experience later. Think it through, then proceed. Western modernity runs on that operating system. But both Beckett, with his dark Irish comedy, and Ishkik with the weight of an ancient Maya cosmology behind her, were pointing at the same thing. Wisdom lives in the feeling body first. In the touch of felt experience. In the immediate here and now. It might actually be the deeper rationality, the one we were born with and slowly educated away from.
That was one thread moving inside me this week. The other got started by a book.
I’ve been opening the few boxes I had stored away over winter. A yearly ritual of early spring, reclaiming my things from wherever they’d been waiting. On top of one pile was a book I hadn’t thought about in a while: The View Through the Medicine Wheel.
For those unfamiliar, the medicine wheel is an ancient cosmological framework found across many indigenous traditions, particularly in the Americas. It maps reality as circular. Four directions, four seasons, four stages of life, rather than linear. No matter how many times I read about it and implement it in my own stumbling way I feel I am only just touching the surface. It’s an entire way of orienting yourself in the world. And who doesn’t need orientation. Everything around us finds balance through right orientation.
One passage struck me:
Universal Harmonic Law — maximum efficiency, minimum effort. You know those days when nothing goes right, everything takes a long time and you just seem to get nothing done. You are out of harmony with this law. You are operating on maximum effort with minimum efficiency. Slow down, take a break, get into harmony, alignment and balance by taking time to work on the inside of yourself. When you are in harmony, things will work synchronistically with much less effort.
It’s touching on the same thing as the Beckett line and Ishkik’s words. A different language and tradition, but really, very close to the wisdom found in the Guatemalan Maya. It is the same invitation. Stop pushing. Be still. Let something move through you rather than forcing everything forward by strength and willpower.
I put the book down and sat for a while with my eyes closed, trying to actually feel what it would be like to operate as default from that place, a circular, cyclical reality.
Something did relax. That’s the only word for it. The tightness of hurry and the need for immediate palpable results softened. I hadn’t noticed I was carrying them. And with it came a sense of being held inside something much larger than my own plans and intentions, the great cycles of nature, turning without my help, returning always to the same moments. The same spring.
It brought to mind Groundhog Day, oddly enough. A man is forced to live the same day over and over until he learns, not to escape it, but to be fully present inside it. He stops trying to get out and starts trying to get in, engaging so fully with each moment. What if circular time, time that returns rather than just departs, is actually merciful? You get to try again. Mistakes aren’t dead ends, they’re just part of the turn of the wheel.
I can’t fully explain this. It was a feeling, not an argument. Which I suppose is the whole point.
I have a favourite field.
I know that sounds like something you’d say with mild embarrassment, but I’m past that, also I’m Irish, and we have a particular penchant for fields. It’s just outside my door and I love it because nobody has ploughed it for five years. Left entirely alone, it has filled with dandelions, big, bright, and burning yellow right now, on this week, this particular turning of the year.
But it’s more than the colour. The field offers a short walk that moves toward Harbour View beach, not all the way to it, but in that direction, so that as I go, the salt marsh slowly opens out to one side and the sound of waves begins to arrive. The field also catches the evening sun after it has already left my house, so walking there in the late afternoon is like following the light a little further into the day. A small mindful pilgrimage into the last of it.
And this time of year, it’s the best place to harvest spring plants.
Which brings everything back around, literally, to the cyclical reality I was trying to feel my way into on the sofa. Because what I’ve been doing this week, out in that field, is something people on this island have done at exactly this point in the wheel of the year, for as long as there have been people here. I’ve been harvesting nettles to make a simple soup, and gathering the fresh new shoots of cleavers to make a tea.
Cleavers are a sticky, scrambling plant that attaches itself to everything, and it is one of the great spring tonics. The body, after coming out of winter, appreciates it, it may even be craving it without knowing why. Nettle soup is the same. Dark green, simple, warming, full of nutrients, minerals, a kind of conversation between your body and the season.
You don’t think your way into doing any of this.
Try to feel it.
The body knows the season before the mind names it.
Dance first. Feel first. Harvest first.
Think later.
Ahh thank you Christy. Glad you received that from the article 🙏 I really hope for you that cycle shifts soon.
thank you for this. I have been having endless nightmares for at least a year or two about being stuck in a small place with people I don’t want to be with. It’s an overdramatization of my life. And every day, I force my way into the world and try to force a different circumstance, and it seems to force me back into being stuck again. My dreams capture this with grotesque caricatures, and and grotesque structures that are closing in on me… so. after another full night of dreams acting out this drama, reading this was the the breath I needed to ease my way into the day before me… all resonated, but particularly this:
“He stops trying to get out and starts trying to get in, engaging so fully with each moment. What if circular time, time that returns rather than just departs, is actually merciful? You get to try again. Mistakes aren’t dead ends, they’re just part of the turn of the wheel…”
thank you 🙏🏽