Dear you,
Thanksgiving, 2024. I am here, still. To celebrate this holiday of gratitude and indulgence, in my own divergent way, I did not cook the typical turkey but purchased Thai takeout. I went to the Thai Elephant, a good restaurant housed in a a declining strip mall on highway 98, a bit west of my Seagrove Beach home, and ordered delicious Pad Thai and Red Curry Rice and Chicken. While waiting for that order, I strolled around the neighboring businesses and saw this a few doors down:
Oh my, even the art of dance and its glorious Dionysian essence must be sanctioned by religious approval. In this part of the world, that means dancing for the "lord". They refer to the Galilean, who I imagine might not be cool with his teachings being used, misused, abused, as tools for subjection and strangulation. I am glad local students are moving to the beat of something, anything. But please, can these controlling theocrats just get their hands off things they know nothing about, things like art, literature, the essential joy of life in the body?
Our newly empowered theocrats cannot let anything be because they are on a mission, a mission that demands change, a movement away from the progressive trends of the past few decades. Their change is our loss. I am experiencing loss, losing what I knew, know, what I expected to be here every day: individual liberty, freedom of the press, the primacy of facts over fearful speculation, dance/workout sessions NOT designed to save my soul. But here I am, here we are. Their desired change is happening. So, how to be resilient while they enjoy dominance? Psychology Today, in a recent post, discusses resilience as something not steely but bendable. One should, by degrees, adapt and bounce back. They suggest that we: Dance! "Exercise is itself a stressor, prompting release of cortisol. Courtesy of negative feedback loops in the HPA, the more cortisol released by exercise, the less released by psychosocial stress... Walking works. So does running and bicycling. But if you really want resilience, turn up the music and dance." Thanks, Psychology Today! I do dance, daily. But what are we to do when they become the literal lords of the dance? What won't they fuck with? And as for turning up the music, don't get me started on their approved selections of dance tracks.
On the drive home after that Thai pickup and the lordly-dance-school discovery, I passed a dead doe lying in the median of Highway 98. She had been hit by a careless driver and managed to make it to a patch of green grass between the east and west bound lanes to die. There she was. Evidence of what we do here, we, the lord-loving, car-enslaved idiots who know exactly what we do but seek to pray it away. Or dance it away. In the name of the lord.
It is Thanksgiving night, 2024, and I am grateful for so much. I am grateful for knowing I, hugely flawed and far from saintly, I am right to be saddened by the dead deer on Highway 98. I am right to be saddened by the indoctrinated dancers at the lordly strip-mall site too. Both/all are innocents, victimized by something I don't comprehend. I am grateful that comprehension is something I am not built for.
So, on this holiday of gratitude, I thank that deer for her brief and beautiful life. I thank the dancers in those weird strip-mall classes who really feel it and will, in time, get the fuck out of this truly god-forsaken zone.
Still here, still learning, still grateful. Still dancing in a most ungodly fashion.
Love,
Joyce
