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88 Dancer Origin Story Some say she was born of Snow. I say no. Who her people were no one can tell, but for the mark in her look, the darkness, the heat in her bones shining through the gray day she was born. Was it in the morning? Or did she come in the night after cries and hurried movements of women? Hours and hours it was forward and forward and then oblivious retreat. She paused and thought, she would not join us after all. Then waves sent her forward again and she pounded to be let through. She came through the caul of that other world into ours beating through the body of a woman to be born and breathe. No matter how beyond she may seem, she shares with us that: Breath, our first movement and voice all at once. March 1964. After that fact there’s mystery, curious historical gaps. Possibilities . She may be of the Whale People, the fishing folk who wandered inland long ago hauling with them their cooking pots made from whale skulls, on sleds of whale ribs—precious antiques from centuries lived on the waves. It may be she was meant to leave her arboreal birthplace and go back to living on waves. For she’s all ebb and flow, just as the sea shifts gray-green, blueblack , white-tipped, green again and then red in resigning sun or sun up. Maybe Sea is her sister and looks after her, no matter how far she moves inland , beyond the smell of salt, amid the cliffs of glass and paths of asphalt. Some call her by her work, that verb, dance. But hers is more an inhabitance. Being a being, animate verbs can do that, live within and make its own will, move your way of being in the world. We think we choose, but we are this: movement. 89 It is this Spirit that makes strangers wish her movements were theirs—watching her all unknowing she has already given them away. She is generous and bereft they say. It is the way of her folk, whomever they may be or were long ago. Do you feel the translucent strength of that whale skin around you now, close to her? Indigenous or spontaneous, a graced race surely birthed her. Or was she one of the Wild Man’s young, born in the roar of waves to a lovely human maid stranded on an isle learning all she could from the shore who hushed: Forward, retreat, forward, retreat, scatter, splash, leap, forward, retreat, retreat and forward once more and more, ever once more. ...

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