Plato and Dance

My dance teacher got me talking
and now I have to somehow try to write out
everything I’m thinking
because I can’t fit it all into a text.

Dance is incredible.
I hope you know this
and have experienced it for yourself.
Because there are moments
where I am not me.
I’m more than me. I am
that movement in
that moment in
those notes
and it is something Beautiful and beyond me.

I am reaching for Plato’s Form of the Beautiful
in those moments in dance when I can forget me.
I’m leaving his cave
without being blinded by the brilliance
that cast those shadows on the wall,
because I am more than human
in those moments I forget what the false, evil, and ugly are
.
I cannot,
however,
reach for the Good and True by forgetting.
For that,
I must remember
and learn to turn towards those Forms.
And there are ways I reach for the Beautiful by remembering.

But there’s nothing so like forgetting
I am a mortal tied to Earth
that helps me reach for that universal Beauty.
It’s not contained inside me,
I know that.
It’s out there,
a universal unconcerned with what’s popular or new,
because it’s BBFs with what is Good and True for always and forever.
And when I dance I can touch it.

That thought is so wonderful.

And so terrifying…