I’m learning Israeli contemporary and folk dancing. My heart fell in love immediately and slowly my feet are beginning to catch on. And it all happened so dizzyingly fast. Last November I took a sermon writing workshop (that’s a whole another story) and a classmate mentioned there was a beginning Israeli dance class starting up.
I got one of those knowing-feelings. I just knew I had been “called.” It felt right, like my soul and my heart were in harmony and I willed my body to follow along. All my life only powwow dancing has felt right. The Round Dance. Intertribals. I feel the heartbeat of the drum. Men, and women carrying babies, boys and girls, and the elders who barely move, staying close to the earth. Other styles of dancing I’ve experimented with didn’t call my name. Didn’t woo me. But the ancestors were watching, reached for me and pulled me in. I’m favoring Israeli folk dancing over contemporary and Israeli over the dances we’re learning from other cultures and ethnicities. Though I love dancing all of the dances.
In the winter we dance at the temple and in summer weather dancing is moved to the park. I’m not kidding anyone if I pretend I’m good, but I’m having fun. Those I dance with having been dancing for many years and they tell me I’m doing just fine and the only thing that matters is to move in the right direction. We hold hands and form a circle. Yemenite right. Yemenite left. Syncopated Grapevine, right. A Box Step.
All my adult life I have wished to dance and now I am dancing. Once a week I sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of joy and spirit and we dance.
Be'Leylot Ha'Kaitz (On The Hot Summer Nights) YouTube
Hine Ma Tov (How Good It Is) YouTube
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
University of Nebraska Press | Barns & Noble| Bookshop & IndieBound | Amazon
“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence
