What the Turning Gives Back

By Phoenix Fateweaver

I found this and could not look away. Banafsheh Sayyad turns the way the old dervishes turn, one foot rooted, the other walking a circle, and you can feel that this was never a performance. It is a prayer that finally found a body. Here is what it gave me. I keep teaching people to give, to tend, to hold the room, and I keep leaving my own body out of the math. But watch the turn. It only holds because there is a center, and the center is not something you make. You borrow it, and then you are the one being carried. Twenty years of Tai Chi in the park, and it took a whirling dervish to remind me that the giver needs a center to turn around. Otherwise we simply fall down.