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Written by Talin Dabaghian © 2004Before the Age of Man, Terpsichore, the muse of dance, was content never to leave her heavenly home of Mt. Helion. She whiled away the centuries with her sisters, the muses, leaping from cloud to cloud, chasing rainbows, and bathing in golden light. Each morning, she would awaken her siblings by dancing a waltz to the day, using her gentle ports de bras, or graceful stirrings of the arms, to rouse them from their resting places. Each muse would then rise from her loamy mound of moss-fringed earth, with Terpsichore's Gift fresh upon her brow. Terpsichore, the dancer, had showered each of her sisters with the divine dews of momentum, thus enabling each goddess to set into motion her every whim and desire.
And so it was, with Terpsichore's Gift, that the muses each found her calling. Clio, the muse of history, learned to jeter, or make boundless leaps, from past to future, allowing her to navigate the winds of time with strength, grace, and agility. Thalia, the muse of comedy, enacted the reflex of humor, from its origin deep in the belly to its eventual emergence as laughter. And Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, drew lilting cadences and lyrical verses from her mind, later reciting them with sweeping gestures of her body and voice. Meanwhile, Terpsichore sunk into the softness of a grassy glen, and rested, enjoying the serenity of having helped her family.
But she could not stay idle for long, for stillness was not a part of Terpsichore's nature. So she bounced up with the purpose of bringing movement to more of the world. With galloping strides, she traversed the landscape of Mt. Helion, filling her lungs with the beauty of the sky, and marveling in the perfect proportions of mountain ranges in the distance. Beyond the horizon, there lay placid lakes of crystalline liquids, forests of evergreens, and expansive oceans. But all of them were static and motionless, not yet animated by Terpsichore's Gift.
So Terpsichore took up her golden lyre and strummed the stirrings of life into her heavenly home. Suddenly, the seasons began to turn, pirouetting from winter to spring. In the space of a few breaths, Terpsichore beheld blankets of snow melting into quivering droplets and easy rivulets. Delicate fiddleheads unfurled their swanlike necks, as suckling creatures toddled by on sapling legs. Terpsichore was so overwhelmed by the myriad of dances taking place around her, that she wept with joy. And as she did so, her tears rained down upon the land below, thus awakening Mother Nature, and inspiring her to bring life to the Earth.
With this accomplished, Terpsichore raised her shining face to the cosmic sky and felt elated by the world's vitality. It then occurred to her that the planets should dance as well. So she flicked her finger against the red surface of Mars and watched with childish wonder as the orb began twirling about its axis. The revolutions of Mars set Jupiter and Venus into orbit, and so on and so on, until all the planets were engaged in this graceful promenade, Earth included. Soon after began the Age of Man.
One day, Terpsichore slid down a rainbow and found herself nested high in a copse of trees (somewhere in the state of New Jersey). Dance is the art of life in motion, she observed, as nearby branches swayed gently in the breeze. She watched a silver fish performing a swimming dance, and a shiny green snake dancing a slithery twist, and a furry Persian cat stretching its limbs into languid arabesques as it stalked its prey. Terpsichore regarded these animal dances and sought to mimic them. First, she became a doe poised at a salt lick, now a squirrel skittering from one place to another, and now a butterfly alighting upon a daffodil blossom, and BANG!
Terpsichore was stilled by the sound of a piercing shot, followed by the dull thump of a warm body falling stiffly to the ground. BANG! Again, another deer was felled. And suddenly, Terpsichore regarded a creature, a man, carrying an instrument of death with which he had marred these felicitous beings. Terpsichore resented this man, and disapproved of his species for its exercises of aggression against surrounding world. And so she summoned the momentum of change.
Whirling through space and time, Terpsichore harnessed the spirit of dance in nature in order to set forth a warning. She willed the seas to boil and rage into twelve-foot walls of water. She ran in furious circles until a tornado took shape in her wake. Her intent was to demonstrate the fortitude of nature, thereby imploring man to change his ways.
One such tornado touched down in a remote wooded area outside of New York City. The proprietor of this land was himself a lover of dance, and he took Terpsichore's tornado as an omen, a calling from the muse herself to spread the love of dance to others and to inspire them to honor Terpsichore's Gift. He made an example of living artists, past and present, Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Margot Fonteyn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and so on, assembling their spirits in his clearing in the woods as an homage to the goddess of dance.
Terpsichore was appeased by the honors of this man, for he had united the most formal manifestations of dance with its roots in nature. He had revealed for his fellow people the way in which all movement is dance.
Terpsichore smiled.
Knowing her work was done, the goddess embarked upon her journey back to Mt.Helion. As she travelled, Terpsichore regarded man throughout history, dancing. She witnessed a war-ravaged soldier, in a shimmy of fear to avoid being shot. She beheld a man and a woman, engaged in a sexual dance of defiance against the misery of their own lives She recognized a gesture of survival in the uncurling of a beggar's hand. And these were the dances of life. Having seen them, Terpsichore felt expansive for she knew then that her gift had been received.
Terpsichore's Gift is always present within us, and her wisdom is an offering in even the simplest of movements. Look intently at the world around you, at the chaotic dance of a paper bag caught in the wind, at the joyous gait of a dog running, at the rhythmic dripping of water from the eaves. Find the dances, wherever you can. Discover the gift
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