Photo by Joel Höglund.

This is what I’m feeling when I look like this:

The body, in all it’s moving, breathing, fiddling: steadily anchored in the here.

The spirit, the holy electrical currents within: only ever existing in the now.

The soul, the fickle link between the two: constantly moving. The purpose of the soul is to link, to jump between or deeply dive into the experiences mediated by the body and the spirit, to be the thread that however loosely or tightly stitches together the world in its versions in me and other creatures; in trees and in turtles and rocks.

This train of thought is part of (com)post-humanism. This is what I am stitching together with the help of people like Bornemark, Akomolafe, Barad, Haraway, Harari, Coelho, Tsing and so many others.

Let me tell you about how I fall into place and how I embody compost-humanist philosophy, alchemy, or spirituality when I dance.

My favorite dances are the slow ones and the close ones: blues, slow drag, lately also tango and kizomba. I don’t care much for the footwork. I like to be close: chest to chest and heart to heart.

There is a space that opens in dance, as in all relationships: it is when there is no longer a separate “I” and “you”, but a clear “we”. Something I could not have alone. I’ve felt it in conversations and games of badminton and while riding my bike and in every breath and interaction imaginable, but it is in dance that this space appears as most tangible to me. Here, I dive deep.

It is the point of balance that I could not keep on my own. Nor you. It is when we lean in for support, it is felt through the points of contact: the hands, the chests, my fingers lightly on another’s back, maybe the tip of my ear against theirs. It may seem like these places are tight overlaps, but it is here where, in reality, vast valleys open and where the space of “we” is born.

And I fall into them: the valleys. The people.

I lean in and tip over and suddenly, there is only air. There is only space and I am falling, and this fall is forever deep into their muscles and tissues and bones, their blood and their breath which becomes mine.

The other opens up to me and lets me into their cosmos, the vastness that is them and at the same time, they step over the threshold into the vastness that is me.

My soul ties a knot around the perceptions from the here and now within me as it bungy jumps over into the other body and meshes itself with the other soul.

Sometimes it is nice and fun and sweet, and sometimes, rarely, I feel like the world falls away around us or maybe this is the real world, and everything up until this point was made up and unimportant. These times I feel bonded with the other on a deeper level and I remember each of these dances.

I still don’t know exactly what makes it good, when it’s really good. My current thinking is that if the stars align and if life brings you deep connections and sensations like this, it does so on it’s own whim and in between, I get to savor the connections I’ve had and felt by gracefully accepting the lack.

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(This story told in pictures.)