"When Irish Eyes Are Smiling"

This must be the Irish section. And this song does have something of the sound of the last two. I feel as if I haven't been really commiting to my singing this past week or so. I caught a glimpse of that dedication to the sensation today with this one, and it was nice.

Someone was asking me about religion the other day, and I was trying to figure out how to talk about what I believed. I do believe in not alienating my new friends unnecessarily with weird terms or exotic-sounding descriptions. Mostly what I do is find sacredness in the ordinary pieces of my life. But I also said something, in this process of trying to feel out how to word my own truth, that felt especially genuine, very real and my own: I enter the sacred realm of understanding through the Gateway of the Body. My path is through the door of physicality, of sensuality. Others may be drawn to intellectual epiphanies, or deep meditative revelations of nirvana--and it is not that I could not imagine these for myself, I have even tasted something of them--but the place I am most likely to start is with my breath and physical perception.

There is something that happens when I dance, it's not exactly a short cut, so much as a sure path, however long it takes. If I dance with the right breath and intention and I'm *here* and *here* and *here*, sometimes I get to *Here*, to the center. For a breath, for a moment or two, the dance is clear and easy and joyous in its simplicity. I am somewhere more real than where I was a moment ago, and somewhere that touches everywhere without having to be anywhere but right here.

Something of this can also happen when I work. I have a few clients who are really able to pay attention, to breathe well, and when I work on them I can forget, a little, whose body is getting this work. I and they are right *here*, this muscle over bone, this sensation, this release, right *Here*, Yes.

When I am entirely in the center there's this calm satisfaction and deep happiness that feels a little like remembering and slipping back into a particularly good dream, and a little like being right in the center of a stream of water, moving along at just the right speed without effort. Even though there is an effort, of sorts. But it's like running, after that first warm-up mile, when I reach a spot where I suspect I could run almost forever.

Today, after a particularly exhausting day, it's nice to remember that there are times where the tiredness ends, when I feel plugged into the Source, rather than the 'someone pulled the plug and there I go down the drain' sensation. And I'll even get to run tomorrow, too. Good things.