saudade

Saudade means longing in Portuguese. 

It is used in conversation quite often.To describe a feeling of missing someone or longing for someone or something. It can be that you have saudades, longings, over someone-something-somewhere through distance and time, or you can express your saudades to a person you are still in the presence of. As to say, I am longing of you already.

I love to speak my saudades (sau-da-geess)

The english usage of the word longing is so rarely spoken in everyday common usage english. Longing has a slight dramatic connotation. A nod to an old world type of tugging in the heart. Instead of longing we say I miss you, meaning, I am missing you where I am.

I use missing. I feel missing. Still, my heart belongs to saudades.

In Brazil, without hesitation: Eu tenho saudades de voce! 

I Have longings of you!

Or simply: Saudades

Longings

When I traveled to brasil in August of 2013, I had no idea what saudades I could feel. After heart break, Brazil and Saudades was my medicine. I was supposed to stay in brazil for three weeks, that was the "plan", but all signs pointed to stay. And so I did.

I remember the day I decided to stay in Bahia, Brazil indefinitely. I called the airline two days before I was supposed to depart to place my return flight on hold. Without telling a soul my "plan" to stay. I made the best decision of my life. 

The next six-moths ahead of me became a great emotional, physical, and spiritual journey. A journey about loss and love. A journey about self-discovery. A journey dedicated to healing what inside me wounded and pained. A journey of the warrior and the artist inside of me. I bloomed a capacity to love deeply. My selfishness, ego, and spite softened into an overwhelming exhale, of gratitude. I fell in love with myself, with portuguese, with Danilo, with my teachers, with my friends, and with the people I met and saw every day of my life there. My studies, recordings and writings are my most cherished relics, and the ceremonies I attended, my most adored memories. The two dance intensives in addition to a six month training process broke my spirit open and  changed my body. Brazil made me strong above all. I made me strong. I wasn't exactly seeking strength, but I gained it with time and dedication, in body and in spirit.

I endured sever aloneness, loneliness, darkness, and suffering. At the beginning of my days cut off from communications, language and knowledge of my surroundings- I stood still in the middle of a world spinning around me- lost and happier than I ever thought possible. So although it was difficult in the beginning, but most of me wanted the severity. I needed to feel inside and outside of myself a powerful woman who could protect herself, proclaim her free spirit, and face her insides. 

Part of this is about the beauty of Trust. Trusting your own seeking. Trusting in the process. Trusting in time. Trusting in patience. Trusting direction. Trusting in language. Trusting in the opening of new passageways of the brain. Trusting in "Strangers". Trusting in the beauty of the world. I developed how I love to love others and how I love to be loved in brazil: With the total freedom and trust to dive into love. Trusting in the process of learning to love, self or other. Trusting in carefulness and respect in love. What is love is also life, so all the same blessings apply. And so my journey was born, lived itself fully, and is still cycling through me, defining and shaping my love today.

Still I couldn't have known what was to come when I called the airline to stay. I couldn't have perceived three weeks would give birth to six months. I couldn't have envisioned making love in the arms of a beloved with tears of joy and ecstasy running down my cheeks. I couldn't have imagined dancing like my spirit is ripping through my skin onto the floor. I couldn't predict being seen by my teachers Rosangela and Vera. I wouldn't dare plan such blessings to come into my life. I listened to my intuition that is all. Now people find my contact, mostly Americans, and they call to me telling me they are thinking of moving to Bahia, Brazil. They ask me what they can do to plan, where they can live, and what is it like to stay. I tell them some logistics and give them my best connections. Though I try to never forget to express to them my wish for them to always allow their intuitions guide them. The intuition is the intimacy and depth of the human spirit. It is intuition that walked with me on the cobble stone roads leading to Escola de Danca, and everywhere I took myself in Salvador. It is intuition, I suppose, that gives women the strength and the surrendering to birth their children naked and full of grace. Surly, Intuition births all of my dreams, and I am eternally grateful to continue falling deeper and deeper into possibilities for life and love.

Saudades, Bahia.

Saudades, D.

Saudades, Rosa e Vera.

Saudades, Escola de Danca.

Saudades, intuición, percepción e equilibrio.

Ate 

Until...

Opening

As she pulled away I saw tears in her eyes like oceans.
No words uttered
No need
One thousand unspoken truths opening.

This evening I had the privilege of performing my own dance at an intimate event in San Francisco. I was so grateful for the opportunity. Dance is the language of my soul. Dance has the power to transform. I have transformed with dance time and again, and tonight was no different. I felt every cell in my body shed and grow again like the skin of a snake does. I saw so many visions and felt myself creating a world within a world. Creating art has this effect; like falling into an entire ocean of possibility, discovery, and love.

My teacher Rosangela Silvestre from Brazil said to me that dance is about discovery and honesty, about possibilities arriving into the body, about communicating with the ancestors and bringing the messages of the cosmic. As her student I would attempt to comprehend the poetic weight of this. Practicing by her side in the studio...eyes closed... beads of sweat running down my face...dancing by feeling. It was all a process in becoming closer to the poetry, the dance, which she envisioned clearly for us to share. Rosangela taught me to come to life and dance with conviction, certainty, attack. Rosangela dances Water, and all the river opens in her very presense. Rosangela dances Ogum the warrior, and a battle is waged. Never underestimate conviction and love, she carried unto me, it builds dances and worlds. I never left her side as a dedicated pupil. All the days in Brazil were for the spirit, for learning, and for visualizing possibilities…

Tonight I felt my own poetry pour fourth a great ocean of dance. It is possible the great artist in me awakened a little more than before. I let the dance take me where I needed to go. I followed all the moments forward. Ego, pride, identity, race, gender, and form were insignificant compared to the meaning of it all. A meaning I have yet to define in words. For now it stands in movement. At the finish when the music ended I came back into myself. I bowed, and I wondered what had I created there?

One thousand truths. My truths? Ours?

One lady interviewed me after I performed. 'What would you say to anyone who is thinking of doing what you did, but may be too afraid to put themselves out there?' I would say, risk it all. You have nothing to loose, and everything to gain. When you express yourself, when you create art, you are revealing yourself, you are empowered, and that is when you feel most Alive. Let's do things that make us feel alive, above all.

It keeps coming back to conviction. Having conviction for what or who you love. Conviction in passion. Conviction in pleasure. Conviction in freedom. The greatest artists, thinkers, innovators, creators have conviction in their ideas and forms. Children have conviction in their pretend worlds, which are real as day to them. No child belittles his dreams, nor should we belittle our's because we are older.

What makes you feel alive? What asks you to love deeply? What dreams beg of you to dream them?

In your eyes like oceans I see, one thousand truths opening…