Care for a Moment of Pure, Unalloyed Joy to Help Balance Out the World's Woes?

Here ya' go!

There are good reasons to keep fighting to protect and preserve humanity. One of them is our ability to create joy, beauty and community with our full and fully expressed selves.

One of the great joys of my life used to be dancing, especially the gloriously wonderful American social dance form called “Contra Dancing”.

It evolved from English Country Dancing, is always done to live music and is a highly democratic dance form since each dance is taught by the caller before it is performed and then it is called as the dancers dance the dance until everyone knows it and the caller leaves the sound stage to the feet of the dancers and the musicians who are creating the joy with them. Contra dance communities warmly welcome the 4 year old who wants to dance and the 92 year old gently stepping as well as the leaping 22 year old and the sedate 65 year old gent who is recovering from knee surgery. The dancers instantly adapt, adjust and accept whomever they meet in the course of the dance and the joy is very nearly palpable no matter who is calling, no matter who is playing because everyone in the dance is truly dancing with everyone else.

It is a form where couples, designated down the line, as 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, etc., move down the line of dance with each repetition of the choreography (the 1s) or up it (the 2s) (away from or toward the stage is “down” or “up”) so every couple dances with every other couple while dancing with each other as well.

Here is what it looks and sounds like:

As I watched this lovely little clip I saw to my surprise, by the way, that the pianist is my son, Marnen Laibow-Koser. That was a nice surprise for me.

Anyway, I no longer Contra Dance because the group here in Tucson where I live, like every other one that I know, decided that to enter their space for dancing you had to accept (!) and document (!) that you had accepted a potentially deadly experimental gene therapy bioweapon presented as a vaccine (which I would not have accepted, even if it were a vaccine) and now everyone who dances there is shedding God-Knows-What through their sweat (Contra can be a sweaty enterprise), their breath (you are sharing air in a close ballroom embrace and a large ballroom of huffing and puffing dancers), potentially delivering and sharing dangerous or even lethal material without meaning to harm anyone, but doing so, inevitably, possibly for the rest of their lives.

I love dancing, but it is not worth my life, so I no longer attend afternoon or evening dances, weekends, weeks or workshops. But I miss it. I really, really miss it.

Of course, that is not the worst loss of the lies-based propagandemic by far, but I miss the shared joy created by community, movement, physical touch, rhythmic movement, music, spinning, swinging and the resultant wonderful flow of endogenously produced endorphins.

A lot.

But there is still joy in so many places and it still call on us to perpetuate it in whatever ways we can in our lives and the lives of others. That is part of our innate and precious human heritage, isn’t it?

And, by the way, the little clip reminded me that my all-grown-up, sleeps-through-the-night-and-makes-his-own-breakfast son sure can play the piano! And fiddle. And viola. And flute. And who knows what else this week!

Even if he is fully jabbed and boosted and, as he said to me the last time he spoke to me, believes that his mother is a public health hazard who is responsible for the deaths of millions, perhaps tens of millions of people. I asked him, “Are you saying that your mother is Joseph Mengele?” He answered, “Basically, yes.”

Sigh.

Just goes to show you that wisdom (low) and intelligence (high) do not always cohabit the same space. But he sure can play the piano!