Lightly, child. Lightly.
What ballet taught me.
“…So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”
– Aldous Huxley
How do you definte lightness to the ones acquainted only with grief?
How do you define lightness
to the first grader with a backpack
making her delicate shoulders cave
sinking with homework
sinking her to an early grave
How do you define lightness
To the bent-over oak with lightning scars
stooped with obligations and owl nests
never allowed a break
never allowed to break
How do you define lightness
To the solo member of a bomb squad
clutching a wirecutter and the weight
of thousands of lives
of a thousand loves
How do you define lightness
To the Atlas reincarnated in every age
with the boulder called the world
never leaving her shoulders
never leaving her mindI felt everything.
I felt every word, said or unsaid; every emotion, expressed or unexposed; every expectation, communicated or concealed.
It’s as though the anxiety I travelled through life with heightened my radar to sense every molecular shift in the air. Tension like sharp wires, crisscrossing through conversations, were tightropes I’ve learnt to tip toe through since childhood. I had ropeburns on my palms from holding onto promises so tight, scabs on my knees from having the rug pulled from under my feet, bruises on my neck from being suffocated by noose after noose of expectations. At twenty-one I self-diagnosed this as symptoms of Oldest Daughter Syndrome.
“Don’t take it too personally,” was a sentence I’ve heard all my life, echoed through the mouths of different people. “It’s okay to just let it go.”
I would nod numbly but deep within me I found myself screaming: “HOW?”
I am a faulty lightning rod, absorbing fully the intensity of every electrical emotional wave that crashes on me, but not having the tools to let it pass fully through so bits and pieces remain deep within me — but the one that I found embedded the deepest was anger. Anger hums a low-pitched warning, scarlet sparks flying when I probe too deep — a red rage.
I am a chipped mug trying to contain waterfalls. I am an hourglass trying to let all the grains of sand from the Sahara run through. I’m a spitifre with a short fuse in a forest burning around me. I am both arms spread open into a dam trying to hold back oceans worth of tears that gush through my scrabbling fingers.
“Okay,” I say, as I do the limbo under the rod of disagreements. I playact rationale, a clumsy masquerade of logic, and envy my left-brained peers who could cooly detatch so easily from feelings to troubleshoot and problem solve.
“Okay”, I say, when I wished someone would still the waterfalls pouring into me, swallow up the mountains of sands I’ve choked on, quench the forest fires that scorched my memory, hold back the oceans that my heart drowned in.
“Okay,” I say, when what I mean to say is: “I’m not strong enough. Help me. Hold me. I don’t know how.”
“Lightly,” my ballet teacher called. “Try to balance.”
Ballet captivated my inner child in a way that made her shyly come out of hiding. I felt her light up every Saturday when we showed up in tights and leotards and stood in relevé. Which was hilarious to me because as an eight year old, I was all combat-boots and jorts and short hair, disgusted by the sheer suggestion of anything feminine, delicate, or pink.
That day, we were doing attitudes, this elegant pose that, when my teacher did, looked like she defied gravity as she balanced on one leg and bent the other to form a graceful origami of limbs. But when I do it, I look like a cat with a broken back leg.
Lightly, lightly.
How? I wonder, hopping onto my one leg again. I felt too heavy in my feet, pressing my full weight down against the floorboards, as though I was too afraid of the rug being pulled from under me again. An eight year old throwing her weight around because she needed to be seen.
She goes over to every student, correcting their legs and turn outs and sickle feet. When she comes to me, I get on my toes and tumble, and she catches my weight, encouraging me to find my balance.
“How?” I wonder.
I found myself needing to trust her hands, trust her guidance, trust her words when she says: “I won’t let you fall.” So I shift my weight fully onto my toes, and wobbled around for a bit until I found equilibrium. When her hands left me, for a moment, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
Balanced.
Weightless.
Light.
I felt everything.
The thump of the bass throbbing through my bones, the prickling tears threatening to spill over my cheeks, the reverberating claps bouncing off the wall as the pastor gets on stage and booms out his usual Sunday greeting.
I think it was two weeks after I had my miscarriage. It was Mother’s Day. They ask all the mothers to stand up, and I find myself teetering on the edge of my seat, unsure to stand or sit, but the impossible weight I felt in my still empty belly made me stay seated anyway.
That Sunday, seated in the midst of hundreds of standing mothers, young and old, like tall trees in a forest, I felt alone, so alone.
“What do I do, God?” I pray. “I feel so much grief.”
“Can I hold it?”
The kind, strong voice pulls me back into centredness.
“What?”
“Can I hold your grief?”
So I offer it, palms out, arms raised as worship swells and a thousand voices on both earth and heaven sing. And I feel Him take it from me, cradling it like He would my baby, and the weight is gone from my belly, my chest.
“You can have it back any time you want, but I’ll hold it as long as you want Me to.” I hear Him say.
The tears leave my eyes, the waterfalls empty from my heart and into His hands, and I cry and cry and cry while He listens.
I feel everything. He does too.
I felt everything.
I felt the floor beneath my toes, through my calves, through my thighs, through every trembling muscle resisting gravity and working against my every anatomical restriction.
My ballet teacher counts us all into our plies.
I felt everything, and yet, I did not show it - my shoulders pulled back, tall and regal. Long-necked, soft-eyed, elegantly-poised in a way that did not suggest effort.
I felt an invisible strength rising from within me, coming from deep within my core, that kept me upright with pointed toes. I felt an invisible strength holding me lightly - a strength larger than what I’ll ever know.
To feel deeply and hold lightly begins by trusting there are a second pair of Hands. Hands large enough to catch waterfalls, dessert storms, forest fires and oceans worth of emotions. Hands that shaped the cosmos that are still writing your story.
This is how you teach lightness
To the ones acquainted only with grief
You offer to hold what you can
the small little weights
of dishwashing, of laundry folding, of watching the children
And the things
too big to fit in your hands
like a loved one's death, like panic attacks, like postpartum depression
You help them build an altar
of honesty and surrender
with prayer, with trust, with grace
And lead them to place
that heavy thing
into the Hands that shaped the stars, the skies, and you and IA note from Hannah:
This piece has been in my draft for ages. I had always wanted to write something related to ballet, but it never seemed to come out quite right so I put it off until I could get the words to mean something.
I do adult ballet on the weekends, and it has been something that has brought much groundedness and joy into my life. I respect dancers a lot more now, and I have since discovered that I am more flexible on my left side than my right.
On another note, I’m deciding to revamp these “end notes” after each Substack to be 3-4 quick things on what’s been on my mind, with a quote, book, podcast or song that stood out to me this week that perhaps you may enjoy as well!
📅 CALENDAR UPDATES:
We begin our first week of Lent today!
If you are a fellow Christian wanting to participate or a curious friend wanting to know more, I highly recommend this article by Tsh Oxenreider on “A Practical Guide to Lent”.
She writes:
Much of the Lenten season is about fighting your “noonday devil” — acedia is one of our most universally-felt and univerally-unspoken of enemies in our modern era. It’s spiritual apathy, or as my favorite shorthand definition puts it: it’s a sadness that good things are hard.
The season of Lent is a three-legged stool, with each leg representing the three traditional practices of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. They’re best done in tandem with each other: take one away, and you’ll have to use more of your human effort to not fall over. Practice all three in some way (even in a very small way), and it’s easier to rest all your weight on the seasonal purpose of penance.
Within this trifecta (and as I mentioned earlier), participating in Lent can involve eliminating something in your life — something you sense has a hold on you that shouldn't — yet it can also involve adding something to your life — something you don't yet do but sense could bring you to further unity with Christ.
✍️ QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
“The criterion of how much we love God is the degree to which we love the person we despise the most.”
— St. Gavrilia the Ascetic of Love (+1992)
🌟 A WEEKLY FAVOURITE:
This is a bit of a random one! I’ve been having on some YouTube videos as background noise, in which you follow along bakers, cake makers and street food vendors around in a day and watch them make their goods.
There’s this really charming one about a Japanese sweets shop, and I find that the little thumps, clunks and clicks they make while working help me feel less alone while I’m working.
If you managed to make it this far, thank you! I hope this piece spoke to you in some way, and if you want to show your appreciation in some way, you can buy me a coffee here.