I'd loved taking dance in college, so I asked to join their ballet class. Twice a week, making an extra trip to town, scraping around the floor of the car for change for the parking meter, slopping through the slush and mud to get to the auditorium. I'm surrounded by 20 vibrant children letting out the day's contained classroom energy, running up and down the aisles, doing flips on the barre. I can barely handle the mental and physical anguish of being alive. I realize I love to dance.
Dance becomes prayer.
I realize how good the stretching of my muscles feels and how like learning to fly the beauty of this movement is. It's Lent on the way to Easter. It's stretching before dance class. It's preparation to fly into those paradisiacal spheres of realized kingdoms revealed in Easter. Lent limbers the wings of the soul.