Heather in Paradise

I don’t get out much, but last night I went to Bad Boys on the beach between Calles 2 and 4 to see the amazing Brent Parkin and his band playing the kind of rocking Blues that makes it impossible not to tap your feet and wiggle in your seat.  Overwhelmed by the urge, a bunch of folks (including me) got up, kicked off their shoes, and danced themselves silly to the beat.

How I loved watching the parade of humans dancing around me, the noisy, bright, sloppy spectacle, crazily beautiful in its discordance.  We’re fat, we’re skinny, we’re old and young, smart and simple, wrinkled and fresh-faced, but all of us dance and sing, tell jokes, laugh, smile, wink and flirt to get love and attention.  We all need it and deserve it, and if we are true to ourselves there will inevitably be someone–the right someone–to give it to us.  Some of us dance in public with visible scars and the rest of us only with the scars we wear on the inside, but despite the sometimes difficult and painful chore of living and no matter how many times we get knocked down, we get up, we move our bodies, shake our tail feathers, sound our barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world– announcing that we are here, right now, today.

How could I not love a world so full of hope and faith in the process?  This holiday season, I wish you love and peace in the coming year, and urge you to remember every day that our time here is short, but that our lives matter.   And when someone asks you to dance, you really should just dance.  What harm is there in dancing?