Touched

It's been more than a year since last I walked this dance floor, and I find myself reverting to that time, that age, that dance.

Maybe an even older dance - the dance if when I danced here regularly five years ago. A young dance.

With effort I pull myself back into this time, this age, this dance. I'm at Madrona MindBody, a dance studio a minutes walk from where I used to live. Mama dragged me there when I was thirteen and I kept going. I come and dance on breaks, but the last time was a year and a half, and about that long since the time before.

The faces are familiar mostly. A few new. A few recognize me and smile. I'm back, I smile back. Back for longer.

We dance. I have to keep remembering who I am, and building into who I am becoming. The lesson today is about touch, and how to say yes to touch. This community is so easy about touch they hardly need the reminder. We spiral around each other touching and being touched.

It's nice.

After dance there's a potluck. A small thing, but I brought applesauce, so I stay. The people I wanted to catch up with don't stay. I end up introducing myself as much as saying hello to old friends, but that's fine. I get into the rhythm of “just graduated from college.” “Thank you" “Evergreen doesn't really have majors, but I'm calling it Mythology and Physics"

“Thank you, I think so too.”

I get a ride back with Theresa, and decide to head straight from her house to the Kaisers. I'd just been checking an old email and noticed I was still getting emails about Sweatlodges put on by my neighbors, and there was one just this Sunday. I'd been meaning to go for years.

I knock on the door.

“Pan! Hello.” it's Dana, the second mother of my childhood.

“I heard there were Sweatlodges today?” I ask.

“There are, but not till 3:00 - unless you want to help?”

“Of course.” it's a day of memories, of reverting to what I was. I couldn't refuse to help if I wanted to. She trained me too well.

When I was eight a Swiss family, the Robinsons moved in down the lane. They had a ten year old son, Anders, who I immediately started playing with all the time. I spent half my time in this house, and on this land, and I can't help but wonder what forts and trails survive.

I was ten when what I took as tragedy struck. Anders told Dana, who told Mama, who told me - that Anders didn't want to play pretend anymore. This was a big deal because that's what we played. I could play other things, Legos, building forts, there wasn't a lack there, but what bothered little ten year old me was that he hadn't talked to me himself.

Then I started to notice that we never argued. Ever. We couldn't. It was too well ingrained. The pressure to ask him grew and grew, but I couldn't break the spell, and to this day I haven't been able to talk to him about it.

I stopped calling him, stopped going over. It broke my little heart.

As I go downstairs to help Pastor carry things out to the Sweatlodge, I'm filled with memories. They've changed the basement. The rabbit hutch is gone replaced by garden beds outside.

Yet so much is the same. Dana and Pastor talk rapidly in Swiss-German and as I used to when I was ten I make up a translation “Yes, it is good he has come. He will make a worthy sacrifice.” I always thought that family was plotting to eat me.

I go help chop kindling. Pastor includes me in the prayer and explains the symbology. These are Lakota traditions, passed down from white buffalo woman. A synchronicity I have to note, a friend just brought her up. Pastor constructs a fire around forty nine rocks. I fan one side while another helper fans the other until it's blazing.

By now people are arriving. I hear a small child asking “Mom, why are they waving those things at the fire?” I can't quite make out her answer.

By the time I stop fanning the fire I know the child's name is Tim and that he just got pokemon cards today, and that his favorite card is a fishing pole. After he's made the circuit of people he knows, and since I'm resting, he comes and shows me and I ask all the right questions. He's six.

More people arrive. Anders and his girlfriend. Alice from dance. The majority I don't know, gathered around the fire from the cold and damp. By the time it's three there are thirty or so people, and I'm looking skeptically back and forth between the tiny blanket covered structure and the people. It just won't fit.

But we do all fit. Men on one side, women on the other, purifying ourselves with smoke before crawling through the hole. I end up on a cold patch without a blanket under me scrunched between two men In the back row.

We sing some opening songs in Lakota, complicated enough I can only hum along, and then rocks are handed in on a shovel, glowing orange like Dragon eggs. They burn Cedar, Sage, Sweetgrass, and Tobacco to make smoke. A curious mix of traditions that makes me smile. Then the flap is closed and it's completely dark so even I can't see my hand in front of me. Pastor pours water on the rocks and it gets hot.

We sing. I catch the shape of choruses and add my voice as best I can. There's no attempt made to teach us. There are four rounds and we stay inside between, with one person holding space outside to hand in the rocks and water and drum.

In the beginning I'm trying hard not to touch my neighbors, by the end, drenched in a river of sweat, no one cares. We pass a pipe, and I realize that even though I’m in favor of tobacco used in its sacred context I don't know how to smoke.

By the end my cold bit of ground has become a refuge, and all I can do is breath in steam and cedar smoke and think thank you, thank you over and over again.

When we emerge the world has changed. Everything is covered in an inch of white snow reflecting off the firelight. We stand around the fire for a bit, drying off, and change into normal clothes again.

“Are you going to stay for the potluck?” Dana asks me.

“I didn't bring anything.”

“You worked. Come.”

In the house everyone has gathered most sitting on the floor. Little Tim has been teaching the other children how to play with his cards.

We pray and eat. I find myself introducing myself a lot. Explaining that I live on the lane but that yes this was my first lodge. The number of friendly gorgeous women makes me a little shy.

Tim's mother comes up to me at some point to thank me for being so friendly and I mistake her for someone I know from dance. After having been specifically thanked I make an effort to charm the child and he tells me all about his fairy heritage.

“I'm an ice fairy.”

“That must be nice this time of year but hard in the summer.”

“it's okay. I'm also a wizard, so in the summer my ice fairy part doesn't like it but my sun wizard part likes it and in the winter . . . “ We get along fabulously and he teaches me a new kind of fingerknitting.

I stay until the last group is leaving, and head out into the snow. On the way a cedar has bowed a snow covered branch into the road, and remembering how much I like cedar smoke, I take a branch, and whisper “Thank you"