The Dancing Animal Woman: A Celebration of Life by Anne Hillman
Excerpts
from The Dancing Animal Woman: A Celebration of Life by Anne Hillman
I did not know I was on a search for a passionate aliveness. I only knew
I was lonely and lost and that something was drawing me deeper beneath
the surface of my life, in search of meaning. There is a hunger in people
to touch those depths; to know that our lives are sacred; that our hearts
are truly capable of love. It is a yearning to be all that we can be.
A longing for what is real.
…
For me it was the nagging emptiness in my midsection. I think that hollowness
often propels us on the spiritual journey, though at that time, I didn’t
know what a spiritual journey was. But as I entered adulthood, I began
to ask with an urgency what that might be, of people whom I thought should
know. I talked with ministers and teachers about God and death, and asked
about rituals and parables. Again and again I circled the questions of
meaning and purpose like a beast tracking its prey. I was stalking the
real.
…
I brought books about philosophy and psychology home from the library,
but what I found did not feed my soul. Instead, I was left dry and depleted
by responses that had no relevance to the wonder and ecstasy and fierce
exaltation that I knew in my bones had a kinship with holiness. Some ancient
memory of silence and mystery stirred in me still, and had laid bare in
fragile moments of beauty and firelight and acts of love. But these religious
and psychological frameworks offered me coded interpretations, theories
and metaphors, which never met me.
…
The spiritual journey is a creative journey. It’s about birth. It
calls us past the boundaries of convention. It tests our willingness to
see life in a new way and our courage to express it: for new ways of viewing
life in the face of what is commonly accepted. We become new, and in this
ongoing birthing, we bring new forms to life as well. Life itself has
become a creative act, full of vitality and richness and passion.
…
This is also the story of how my soul found me, and it was a wild soul.
I wasn’t prepared for how wild it was. This soul speaks different
languages than I. I am used to thinking in sentences and paragraphs and
she speaks in colors and sensations I don’t have a name for. Indeed,
the greatest challenge of the journey entailed learning how to be receptive
to her messages. These promptings were not disembodied channelings; they
were grounded in my flesh.
…
It is her presence, there, that provides the missing link. It is there in the
unity of passion and utter stillness that the spirit gazes out of our soft wild
eyes. Thus embodied we look around and discover that we are no longer lonely.
We belong. Like running a finger along the edge of a single Mobius strip, we
see that inside has become outside and outside has turned inward. We have found
the tender connection between our own lives and all that is. For the spiritual
journey ultimately leads to something larger that self – to the eternal,
to all of life, and more tangible, to the earth. …through moist sand and
warm air currents, through granite and birds of prey, deer and iris, butterflies
and tarantulas.
…
Integrity is the utterance of the universe, calling us out of our loneliness
and isolation to depths within ourselves we have not yet dared. The promise
of Integrity hints at our bereavement. It gives us a premonition of a
deeper, more encompassing reality. Integrity is not an achievement, but
a gift. It cannot be taught, but it can be embodied. One cannot be exhorted
in Integrity but the hard choices for truth ease its emergence. Integrity
calls us to creative fulfillment but that fullness comes out of a void.
…
If I am aware, each moment is an experience of membership. Unaware, I
might not notice the hawk, now circling low outside my window. But if
I let it arc into my awareness, the hawk and I are suspended together
in a fleeting, fragile moment. When it dives and disappears, I turn to
the north. A flock of small birds crests the cypress hedgerow behind the
house. The slender green branches at the top nod slightly. The unmown
hay below is still.
…
Membership is offered repeatedly, a tapestry of sunlight and shadow, texture,
creatures and earth. In such a moment I feel embedded. I realize I am
not merely alone but also integral. In that more resonant state, I am
enriched by an abundance of information from the surrounding display.
…
There are quiet and exquisitely subtle moments in sexual intercourse,
when partners are utterly resonant, no longer trying to affect anything
for self or other, beyond knowing whether one or the other is the experiencer.
At such times our awareness of separateness fades and two beings become
one, held momentarily by a sacred bond.
…
At mid-life I was in the midst of a fast paced and stressful career. Structured
for success, I had reached the peak of attainment and at the same time
was consumed with fear. The dream offered a mode of being in direct opposition
to my own: It offered descent – I had always moved upwards; it offered
a quest – I had always been searching for answers; it asked me to
enter the unknown – I had spent a life time craving security out
of what I knew and what I could control.
…
Yet I discovered that I had to learn to welcome and honor that helplessness,
for in those moments when I gave up, pieces of truth gradually emerged.
Tender
I feel tremulous
throat full
(is it tears or song?)
before the approach of something
unseen and long forgotten.
Advent-tender
as if I were about to be known
If
we are to experience our embeddedness, however, we must first become embodied.
To function as an integral part of the whole, we first need to descend
into our bodies, begin to inhabit them, and so doing, find what we have
lost in the dark.
…
Right now I feel a bit like Job: “I have been holding forth on matters
I cannot understand, on marvels beyond me and my knowledge.” This mysterious
path in to reality leads us down from thinking into feeling, through sensing
and instinct, dream and intuition in to the story of the cosmos of which each
of us is a part. It is a journey of reawakening, each layer more subtle and
more informative, rich with language of the universe.
…
On this journey, we redefine what it means to be human. We recognize that all are indeed receivers and that we are intimately related at every level of being.
We discover that we are not masters, but members. In the most humbling sense,
we are integral parts of the whole. Only from this position of humility do we
discover that our roots are already in place: in our bodies, in the earth and
in the ongoing story of life.
