The Dance

The wind blows strongly from the south. The sun shines warmly in a cloudless blue sky. My jacket is wrapped tightly around me in the cold, and gloves warm my hands . But the invitation to dance with the waves is too strong to ignore. It has been sitting in my own inbox for a week now, and today is the day I must accept this invitation. Tomorrow will be too late.

 

I had said to my grandchildren, ‘I want to paddle in Lake Michigan before I leave’. They looked at me with astonishment. ‘But you have no boat,’ said the 6 year-old!  ‘ I won’t come,’ said the 9 year-old. Their mum and dad were too busy with their work to join this dance, this day.

 

I walk with purpose along the waterfront with just a few like-minded people. We do not speak, or if we do the wind carries the ‘Good morning’ far distant. How clean, white and engaging is the sand. ‘Come’, it whispers in the wind.

 

It holds firm and supports my purposeful feet as I stride on, wondering at my own folly. Bravely, off come the gloves, the shoes, the socks. Pants are rolled up. My feet join the dance. Oh, how those wavelets dance, darting this way with a whoosh, and that way with a plop, backward, forward, sideways, always gliding as my feet follow their lead.

 

This is not a silent dance. The waves are not the only dancers here today. I hear the seagulls, and then I see them. They too whish and whoosh themselves, to and fro, upwards and downwards in the waltz on the lake. Oh! My heart exclaims, just look at those baby gulls, with their little short legs and flapping wings, learning to dance too in the movement of the lake. How busily their wings flutter and their feet plop as they do their best to stay grouped with their parents in the face of the wind. How protected they are in the middle of that swooping, gliding, shrieking flock, teaching them to dance.

 

My feet are not cold; my heart is singing. I could be walking along the shoreline of Sydney, Australia, with a southerly blowing hard and cold, revelling in the dance of  wind, waves and sand, with sea gulls reeling and swooping. My spirit expands with joy as I sense this universal connection with sun, wind, sand, and waves the world over. And here I am, a speck on this vast lake and beach, at one with the dance that unites the spirit of every beach-lover, on every shoreline, in all nations and islands of our wondrous world.

 

‘I’ve paddled today’, I tell my grandchildren after school. My grand daughter looks at me sceptically, ‘Your hair isn’t wet’, she comments. ‘No’, it was enough just to put my feet in, like the seagulls’, I reply.

‘Was it cold?’, says my grandson.

‘ It was well worth it’, I reply. ‘My spirit enjoyed the best dance, to the best music, in the whole, wide, world’.