Rhythm & The Wild

When I released my first love letter in March and my second one in April, my brain said, ah monthly! How silly of me to forget that the creative force is nowhere near linear, and I’m still getting reacquainted with how I organically get in sync with its untamable rhythm.

My formal affair with rhythm started when I fell in love with dance.

It feels like a lifetime ago, but I can still smell the musk from when sweat fuses with the often-smoggy Manila air that flows through the open sliding doors of the studio.

Like a proper romance, for many summers and beyond, I spent my days and nights head-over-heels, up-in-the-clouds, butterflies-in-stomach crazy over all sorts of ways I got to make shapes with my body. I studied jazz, hip hop, breakdance, belly dancing, Latin ballroom, pole dance, nearly everything except ballet because I thought my toes won’t survive learning it as a young adult.

I danced on and off until chronic pain got in the way.

Without dance, I hardly thought about rhythm, and had no clue how omnipresent it has been in my life.

Looking back, a big part of why I loved dance was probably because I had been disconnected from my body, and dance gave me a safe space to more fully inhabit my body once in a while.

The journey back to my body awakened my consciousness to my relationship with rhythm. I imagine it both inevitable and necessary with how that path connects with the rhythmic nature of pulses and heartbeats and breaths.

My now hot and steamy romance with improvised theater is also essentially about rhythm. Improv, at least how it’s done to my taste, is an exploration of the waves of energy activated when bodies sync up to create reflections of life on stage.

Everything is energy and so rhythms permeate life from the infinite ways that energy flows.

Attunement to rhythm is a deeper kind of listening, which allows us to organically bring into form what’s alive in the moment.

So where does that leave me in my exploration of my creative rhythm?

I recently learned that a baby chimpanzee’s body clock takes about three months to sync up with the earth’s rhythm. That’s from a fresh slate.

I am synchronizing with creative energy while unlearning almost four decades worth of rigid creative conditioning from trauma and all of society’s -isms.

So I guess the short answer is I don’t really know. And finding safety in not knowing is key to accessing more of our capacity to create.

I started this love letter with an idea in my head and a third of the way through I realize I don’t actually know where it’s gonna go, and there’s so much sensual pleasure in following what the moment reveals to me next – an image, a sound, a taste that’s wanting to be a part of this creation.

What I do know is that creative energy is wild and it shall not be tamed. Rigid discipline as a way to contain creation led me to a path of exhaustion and disconnection. My heart calls out to building a sensual relationship with this force of nature that gets us to some version of an ever-evolving rhythmic dance.

Image credit: Thais Aquino
If you haven’t yet, subscribe to Love Letters for free, and if this piece moved you, will you let me know and/or share it?