I found a book in an old box that made me realize what the last three years of my life have been all about.  Learning to dance.

I bought it at a used bookstore about three years ago, before I filed for divorce, as a gift for my oldest son. The book remained on a shelf at his father’s house after I moved to the other side of town. After two years, when his father moved to another country, and our old house sold, a team of movers boxed up everything my ex-husband left behind, which was quite a lot, and carried it to the home I had created.

One box contained the book, where it remained until I moved to a new city, and finally, I opened it and found it. I haven’t seen it in three years.

The book is “I Hope You Dance,” by Mark Sanders and Tia Sillers, which inspired a song by Lee Ann Womack.  The book is a stream of encouraging words.  Among them:

Whenever one door closes,

I hope one more opens.

Promise me that you’ll give faith

a fighting chance.

And when you get the choice

to sit it out or dance…

I hope you dance.

I remember my last year of marriage.  I was extremely depressed and lonely, and a new life was calling to me.  Some energy was pushing its way out of me, a divine passion aching to be birthed and nurtured.  Ending a marriage, however, is an act loaded with guilt.  When you walk away from a marriage, you are sure to cause suffering.  As a Buddhist, that is the last thing I wanted to do, but my whole being was pushing to get out.  I prayed for guidance, and the message that came into my life over and over again was “follow your heart.”  It was around that time that I found the book, but it seemed fairly meaningless at the time.

Eventually, I let go of my intellectual arguments, my worries about karma, and followed the raging currents of energy moving me into something new.  Surrender.

When I filed for divorce, a symbol appeared to me several times each day in different places and in different contexts.  The red hibiscus.  I wrote about it in May 2008 in the post, “Luminous and Divorcing” and “And New Wheels.”  (PS  I’m moving these over from an older blog.)

I took the hibiscus as a symbol of opening.  Opening the heart.  Certainly, many things happened to encourage that process.  (See post, “Open Heart, A Leap of Faith,” from July 28, 2008.)

One night, I painted the image on my torso, and it became a symbol for me of the choice to follow my heart and discover my passion for the Divine Beloved. The image became one of my Facebook profile photos.

Soon after I left my marriage, I met a man who introduced me to a barefoot ecstatic dance event in a beautiful tai chi room with carmel colored hardwood floors and Zen decor.  It was an experience I’ve written much about. When I entered the dance, I quickly realized that I had painted that very scene about a year before I ended my marriage.  At the same time that I entered the dance, an image of it was hanging on my living room wall.

The painting also represented the willingness to end a marriage, to drop the delicate, expensive vases and let them crash to the floor while leaping through the space with love and trust.

During a time of grief, a song by Lady Gaga came out, “Just Dance.”  “It’ll be okay,” she sings.  I recited her lyrics like a mantra and continued to dance.

One day, I found a burgundy dress, long and flowing, much like the one on a woman in the painting, with ornate golden swirls and jewels, perfect for the dance.  In fact, I could wear it nowhere else.  Eventually, I needed to pack the dress away, but when I moved to a new city, I quickly discovered that my brother was a DJ who had also lost his social world and yearned for something more sacred.  We created a barefoot ecstatic dance event in this new city, and the response was overwhelming.  I wore my burgundy dress again and twirled through the room, so immensely happy.

Before our opening night, I created a logo and placed it in our Facebook group page.  A woman in a red dress spins through space, a galaxy of divine creation.

Creation.  This process of unfolding is so much like a dream, so intimately intertwined with the contents of our minds and hearts.  (If you haven’t seen Inception, by the way, don’t miss it!)  After I created the galaxy logo, I found this image of the Milky Way.

Today, I was reviewing posts in the Facebook page for our ecstatic dance, and I noticed something amusing.  The image of the hibiscus on my torso looks like the galaxy dancer, our logo for our new dance.  The stamen looks something like the dancer’s upper arm, and the petals, her spinning dress.

Perhaps, without realizing it, I was painting an image of my spinning, dancing self, and maybe the symbol of the red hibiscus that appeared so repeatedly during my divorce was an image not just of opening but of dancing.

There is more to this life than what we can see, a harmony and melody to the unfolding that surpasses anything we might expect.  It is this music, I think, to which I am learning to dance.

If every song ended the way some of my relationships tend to end, however, I’d be on the floor covering my ears.  The more passionate the song, the more cacophonous its ending. That is a part of the dance I can’t seem to master.  Why can’t relationships end as gracefully and sweetly as songs end?

I think I know why.  When I first moved here, an arts center downtown held a performance in which lights were connected to the heartbeat of dancers.  As the dancers moved, the lights flickered on and off in response to their heart.

In this cosmic dance, we must not only learn to dance to the music, we must learn that the music is created by our dance.

It’s a feedback loop.  When I experience separation from those I love (among other distressing events), I tend to flail around a lot.  And every flail sets new sirens wailing, which cause me to flail even more.  Sigh.  What I have found, over and over again, is that total surrender is the only way to interrupt the loop and start anew.

The book and song, I Hope You Dance: