For Bev

Our friend Bev Melum passed away early Monday morning, October 19th.  A mutual friend said that felt she never really found her spiritual center, but what so many of us have learned is that our contemplative selves are expressed in motion, in action, in our living.  Some are called to sit and meditate, Bev was called to live vitally in her spirit, in the delicate motion of her hula hands, in the joyous click of her tap shoes, in her attentive listening that made everyone feel like s/he was her best friend.  To our friend, Bev:

Mystic in Motion
I am the dance
the light of devotion
and the life of joy.
With my body,
I set in motion
a revolution
that reshapes the world.

I am the simple rise
of Isodora’s hand
to greet a curtain of sky,
an indispensable pale blue
cyclorama of mystery.
For 69 years
I have endeavored to fly.

I am the dance
the soul of the soil,
stirred by indigenous feet.
Once callously earth bound
with acorns, sticks and all the unseen
that conceive precarious landings,
I am now unshod and free.

I am the dance
costumed in rainbow hues,
both contrast and harmony
to gray grief and parched-brown Lamentations.
I am a light-haired Phoenix rising.
I billow and swirl in hula skirts,
launched only by merest accident.

I am an apparition
of butterflies, orchids, flames,
or what on earth imagination fancies.
I am a fleeting illusion,
painting the world as I see it,
still,
here and now.
Follow me,
for to dance is human
and to die is to have lived
fully in the dance.
I am the dance
still
here and now.