A Thing That Happened/Why I'm Here

This afternoon I was walking down the sidewalk in Plovdiv, weaving around to avoid slow-moving babas (Bulgarian grandmothers), unsupervised toddlers on tricycles, and teenagers puffing cigarette smoke into the air, when a very tiny, rather spritely woman in her mid-60's appeared from behind a car and gasped at the sight of me.

She clutched her hand to her mouth and exclaimed that my hair was the most beautiful she'd ever seen, so beautiful that it had startled her. Judging by her reaction, you would have thought the tuft of bright purple curls on my head was actually a glowing halo and I an angel come down to earth.

I blushed, thanked her for the compliment, and, my Bulgarian being what it is after nearly eight years of disuse, apologized for the fact that I could only understand about half of what she was saying.

We walked together for a few blocks, chatting in Bulgarian and the little bit of English she knew. She asked me questions and I answered that I’d lived in the country years ago, but was just passing through this time. I said that I was a writer. She got very excited at that and said that she was a writer too. She began rapidly explaining that she wrote about "poetry and nature and people coming together and how we're all made up of the same body parts." At this point, it must have been clear from the look on my face that I was confused because she switched subjects from writing to dance.

She was also a dance instructor, she added. She said the name of the dance many times, but nothing in my brain made a connection, in any language, to anything I understood. I shook my head and shrugged and then she began to shake her hips. She raised her arms right there on the busy sidewalk to demonstrate what she meant. She explained (I think) that it was a dance of, "life and health and love and bodies and spirits," and something about a man in the early 1900’s and the Seven Rila Lakes, which is a popular natural landmark here in Bulgaria.

Now, I realize that last description makes this woman sound a little unhinged, but that’s not the case. I couldn’t detect in her demeanor any foreign substances, nor any disconnect from reality. All I could see was joy as she stood there gyrating on the sidewalk then looking around at the people walking past and covering her smile sheepishly behind her hand. I couldn’t help but smile along with her.

The woman then opened a folder she’d been carrying and gave me a small flier with the address of her studio where she apparently taught this "live, love, nature, body" dance each Saturday at 4:00pm. We shook hands. She said that we had surely met for a reason and that she would be so happy to see me again. Then she apologized and raced off with surprising speed to a dentist appointment.

When I got back to my apartment a few minutes later, I typed the name of the dance printed on her flier into Google. After reading a few results that came up, both in Bulgarian and English, I feel that I still understand about as much as I originally gleaned from my brief encounter with my Manic Pixie Dream Baba.

Here's what I know: It’s a dance/exercise that draws on "life and health, nature and poetry, the spiritual and the intellectual." It was started by an old bearded guy and in the summer there’s a big festival at the Seven Rila Lakes.

This is what it looks like:

Dance1.jpg

And also this:

Dance4.jpg

And fuckin’ check this out:

PANEURHYTHMY-a-rila-19.8.2013-1024x574.png

I suppose the reason I’m writing a whole novel about this brief encounter on the street is because: I have to go to this woman's dance class. I mean, RIGHT?!

I know it's not going to be held at the top of a mountain with thousands of people dressed in white, as if the Polyphonic Spree suddenly became a communicable disease and spread to the general population, but surely it could be a weird and interesting experience. And isn't that why I'm here?! 

I know that I quit my office job a month and a half ago to have a memorable world adventure, but truthfully, I am extremely averse to risk. I am a person who can make huge life changes and then sit alone in my AirBNB watching old episodes of Mad Men on Bulgarian Netflix instead of interacting with this new exciting world in which I find myself. I'm good at grand gestures, but I'm not good at the general day-to-day.

In truth, this trip has been difficult. And lonely. I've been too much in my head, just like I always am in real life. So, I'm writing in the hope that this Saturday each of you, my beloved friends and family, will ask me, “How did that crazy dance class go?” and I can have an actual real-life answer to give to you, because that's why I'm here. And not just "here" on this travel adventure, but "here" on Planet Earth. 

I'm here to explore weird new things, dig into spiritual experience, meet people I'm inexplicably drawn to, feed the fire burning in my soul. I'm here to engage, not just observe. It's probably not the whole answer, but it's something rather than nothing, and I'm tired of doing nothing.