Silly Dancing
The notes of a Strauss waltz, emanating from stereo speakers, bounce around our small home, and we are enticed to engage the rhythm. Our 72-year-old bodies don’t seem to be as light on the toes as they used to be. But that does not keep us from twirling and dipping in a septuagenarian way. Mostly, it is a couple of people who have weathered 50 years together being silly in 3/4 time. This is a ritual Tarn and I perform metaphorically to various tempos and rhythms throughout the day. It is nice to be able to be this childlike after all these years.
I think silliness is necessary in long term relationships. It helps us to take ourselves lightly. The same holds true while traveling a spiritual path. My undergraduate degree was in comparative religions and I noticed that humans do a lot of silly things to slake the thirst of spiritual longing. And there is nothing more silly than the Vajrayana Buddhist path, my particular preference in that regard. When I walk into our little Dharma center, I often giggle when beholding the wild images on the wall.
These images are not meant to be taken very seriously in the way we might think. Or, maybe, they are not to be thought about in the way we take things seriously. Either way, if we are too serious, we bypass our capacity to engage the symbols with childlike joy; the capacity to see things fresh and unconditioned by anything. A child’s eyes are always wide open, poised to discover something new and wondrous. This is a way to master the subtleties of visualization.
The creation stage practice of visualization is mostly about allowing the light inherent in the image to mingle in the mind like a silly dance, never doing the same thing, but letting the rhythm take us where it will. This frees us from the constraints of the conceptual mind and opens us to the wild play in the way we create our reality. It is all our mind anyway, so why not take our mind lightly.
Imagine watching thoughts dance and twirl in 3/4 time, having fun with the way they move, and then spontaneously switching rhythms and tempos to see what happens. This requires a lot of silliness and reintroduces us to the the childlike mind of wisdom. We might be enticed to drop the childish things we do in the name of seriousness and dance life with more joy. If we embrace the lightness of moment, it might occur to us to invite others to dance, dissolving those somber boundaries of divisiveness.
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