The Temple Floor: September 2025 Newsletter

In July, I returned to Los Angeles to do a workshop called “Dancing the Dharma” with Lucia Horan, a veteran 5 Rhythms dance teacher.

For those who don’t know me, I used to call LA home. I lived and danced there for over twenty years. My dance-community roots there run deep. My dance friends watched me grow into adulthood, get married, get divorced, and fall in love again. I witnessed them bear children, nurse dying parents, grieve, celebrate, get lost, and be found again.

When I walked into the workshop and saw that I knew almost everyone in that Masonic Lodge on Venice Boulevard, I knew I was home again.

Late into the second day, we did a walking meditation. We slowly passed one another. As we lifted each foot, we silently said, “birth.” As it moved through the air, we said, “life.” And as we set it down, we said death.

Birth, life, death. Birth, life, death. Over and over and over again.

Exhausted from six hours of dance, I didn’t feel much at the time.

But the next day, I was dancing with JP, one of my oldest friends and dance partners. In our twenties, we “fell in dance love,” picking each other up and throwing one another around, week after week. For over twenty years, we never stopped dancing. If we were both on the floor, we danced together.

At the workshop, I placed my hand on his and thought, or rather felt, “birth, life, death.”

I began to weep, because I felt those words in my bones. Our friends, now twenty years older, surrounded us, a little slower now than before. So much had happened to us, to the world. JP’s house has burned in the LA fires; together we’d ceremonially removed the sign at his deceased father’s restaurant: birth, life, death.

As I cried and we moved, I thought of another friend, Irving Sarnoff, my first dance partner at my very first ecstatic dance. I was 21; Irv was 72. Later, we learned that our birthdays were one day apart. Briefly, we were roommates. It turns out that Irv was one of Southern California’s most influential activists, organizing railroad labor unions, campaigning for racially integrated neighborhoods, and leading anti-Vietnam War protests. We danced together until he died in his mid-eighties. Birth, life, death.

As I remembered Irv, JP waved at the sky, saying something I couldn’t hear. He told me later that he had said, “Hi, Irv.” Irv's memory was embedded in that place, in us, and in our dance. Astonished, I turned and told this to a stranger from San Francisco, who said something that stopped me.

“This is your temple floor. The place where life happens.”

Irving Sarnoff at his 80th birthday at the Masonic Lodge where the workshop was held.

Her words, and Irv, and my LA dance community have been with me as we launch Dance Lab here in Cambridge. How will we christen OUR new temple floor?

Caribbean philosophers and poets, like Derek Walcott and Dione Brand, have written about how History (with a capital H) resides in landscapes. It’s in the plants the colonists seeded. It’s in architecture’s gestures of power. It’s in our senses when our ghosts come dancing. Having experienced the History in LA, I wondered if one way to honor our new home, Margaret Jewett Hall, was to speak to its living, flowing History. So, sitting in our circle, I shared some of the layers of our new home aloud. I share it with all of you as a way of continuing our transition.

The Blessing

First Church is on the ancestral lands of the Massachusetts people. Here, beneath our bare feet, is where the Massachusett people were and are born, living, and dying. I can imagine that on this very spot, they cooked food from the Charles River, nourishing their community. It’s also possible that their blood was spilled here.

We sit in a building that has housed First Church for hundreds of years. From their website: “Gathered in 1633-1636, First Church in Cambridge is considered to be the 11th oldest congregation in New England.” For centuries, this church has married and buried countless souls. It happens to this day in the sanctuary beside our room.

Like most long-standing institutions, this church has ties to slavery. From their website: “In 2011, research…showed that 36 enslaved persons (33 Africans and 3 Indigenous persons) owned by First Church members, including two Senior Ministers, became members of the church in the 17th and 18th centuries.” Cambridge's old buildings and the wealth of the institutions were built with money gained from the slave trade.

For fifty years, this building has been home to a preschool where children play and learn how to be part of a community.

Since the 1960’s First Church has housed free-form dances continuously. Here the first ecstatic dance in the Boston area took place. We are not the only ones who do or have danced here. (On the night I offered this, Linda spoke up to say that she had been dancing here since the 1970s!)

This building houses fourteen people transitioning from living on the streets. On Friday mornings, just after our dance, the Church hosts an event where housed and unhoused folks come together to eat and chat.

Then there is the more-than-human realms. Numerous Animals live here. The preschoolers have a sign posted where they report seeing ants and worms. I’m sure the rats and rabbits scurry between bushes. As in most places, the House Sparrow alights.

We cannot forget the soil and stone that support our bodies. Cambridge was shaped by receding glaciers. Twenty-five thousand years ago, it left behind glacial till, sediments ground up by ice. Buried deep below is the bedrock, Cambridge Argillite, with quartz layers, which is 570-580 million years old.

All this History and more is simultaneously present as we dance together. As we enter this space, as we move together, I would like to humbly acknowledge that our dance lives in a long, beautiful, painful, dynamic context. It is my hope that our presence is to the benefit of all beings.

To you, dear dancers, may this new temple floor serve your lives and everyone that depends on you.