Dissonance

Dissonance and I are dance partners. They lead. They spin me until what I thought I knew I realize I never knew at all. They dip me and I lose my balance. I see them everywhere, belly dancing. I try to ignore them, they tap dance through my mind until I rename them migraine.

It has been my blessing and my curse to be able to know, deep within my being, what this is supposed to be. What this looks like, this world, and what it is supposed to look like. I am no pretender - even though I know, I do not act as if I know. Even though I can feel it, it does not change the million mistakes I make. Nor does it change how I live. Mostly. Knowing hope, being imagination, longing love - none of it is sweeping in how it changes me. That’s the truth.

Except - there are moments of energetic brilliance. Not mine. The brilliance is certainly not mine. But I don’t know what other word to use. Moments of such raw, deep, overwhelming connection that I demand my eyes stay open so I can remember it when my head is pounding with the pain of the world.

I guess I would call that demand prayer.

I live each moment knowing we are not that. And knowing that we are. Every moment. I know and I know.

Brilliance. A whisper. A force. An indwelling. Something separate. Something not. More than mystery but not quite ordinary. And it calls to me. If I’ve ever asked you a question or cried with you or preached to you or sung to you or prayed with you or laughed with you, this is the birthplace of that - an energetic brilliance that means you are I are one. That means that oneness is made of every radiant light and that you, as you are, are actually that light. We are the blaze. We are the flame. We are the flashlight I dug in my junk drawer for when the power went out. And we are the battery I had to replace. We are all of it.

And I feel such dissonance because we act like we are none of it. We are separate and individualistic and violent and hateful. We are painfully human. And, even in that burned part of us, there is a glow waiting for a little air to spark brilliance again.

We can’t douse it.

And so, if that’s true, if we can’t truly remove ourself from the brilliance, we are then brilliant.

(I have to laugh at myself and my use of metaphor here. Music and dance and light? Pick one they whisper. No I whisper back.)

My dance partner relies on my having only eyes for them. Because when I look away and stop to go get a drink at the drinking fountain and turn, wiping my mouth on my sleeve, I see they have begun the dance with someone else. When I step into a group and laugh at a joke while seeing the glowing smiles of Us, they flirt with another, hoping I’ll be jealous. So be careful. They will sidle up to you, calling your name, looking you in the eye, directing your attention away from the brilliance. From the we who are that which glows.

They will twirl you until you are too dizzy to see that who you are and who we are and who We are is one.

It is the in-between space, the space where we think we know but we don’t live like we do, that plays the loudest music.

I haven’t yet been able to figure out what dissonance gets from the dance. Partnered, they’re not alone, true. But I’m pretty sure they know that in the end, they can be brilliance, too. So, somehow they think that keeping my attention away from your brilliance will bring about something they desire. Don’t they see that, no matter salsa moves or foxtrot, they are already a part of this and, in the end, will shine?

Don’t you see the same?