Cover image: Graffiti mural in Panier district of Marseilles, photo by Pina Piccolo.
I’m at Esalen, doing a writing workshop, and
in the morning I get up at 7, leaving my visiting daughter,
so I can go to a class called “ecstatic dance,” and because
I can’t remember where the room called Huxley is
I ask a man standing in front of the office and
he looks at me and holds out his arm, so I take it
even though I am horrified at physical contact
with strangers, and we go walking down the stairs
to the path that leads around the dining hall, and I’m
thinking, “Oh, Jesus Christ,” and I say, “I think
I’m late for this class,” and he says, “Well, you are,
but time is relative, didn’t you know?” And I say,
“Well yes, I’ve heard that, but I notice that other people
seem to be paying a lot of attention to it,” and then,
because I’m uncomfortable walking arm in arm
with this guy I don’t even know I say, “Who are you?”
and he says, “Oh, I ask myself that every day in meditation
class,” and then, thank God, we are at Huxley, which I now
remember, of course, because I’d been there when I was here
years ago, and when I go in, the room is semidark and
everyone’s already there, and loud New Age music
is playing, the kind I don’t really like, but it’s okay,
I know, to be an older, slightly overweight woman
at Esalen making a complete fool of herself, and isn’t that
the point of being here, to not care what other people think
of you, and just do what you want? and then the leader
tells us to do various things: move our shoulders, walk
around, pick a partner, which of course I don’t do,
dancing alone as if I hadn’t heard him, until
a cute young guy comes over and dances with me
for a while, and then he dances away, making me wonder
if I should try to sit in on the abandonment workshop,
and all the time the music is getting faster and louder
and I move around the room, trying to be ecstatic,
while wondering if I should have brought my ear plugs
and whether dancing barefoot like this is going to
reactivate my plantar fasciitis, and people are doing
leaps and jumps in the center of the room, and thin
young women are thrashing their arms and legs
and doing the hair flip and lying down on the floor
and rolling around, and after a while I don’t become ecstatic
but instead really, really sad, because I’m alive and dancing
in this beautiful, silly place, and my daughter is leaving
this morning and I wish she would look me up to say good-bye,
so I keep looking at the people who keep peering
in the window from outside on the deck, and several times
I see someone I think looks like Caitlin, and then I see
someone I’m sure is her, so I go over to the door and
open it and say, “Hi, honey!” and then I see
it’s not Caitlin at all but a pretty woman in her late forties
or early fifties, with short dark hair, and I say, “Oh,
you’re not my honey,” and she says, “No, but I could be,”
and I say to myself, “Hmmmmm,” and I close the door
and go back to trying to be ecstatic, and I dance some more
and I go through all my moves and I develop some
entirely new ones, which aren’t half bad, and though
I don’t choose to go out in the middle of the floor when we form
a circle at the end and people take turns going into the center
by ones and twos and stomping and jumping and flailing
all their body parts around as if they’d gone completely mad,
and though I never become ecstatic—that is, my spirit
never leaves my body and stands outside it—I do finally become
pretty damn happy after all, the hair on the back of my neck wet,
my arms and legs tired, my body suddenly wanting breakfast,
and so I leave and go in to stand in line for oatmeal
with nuts and blueberries and yogurt, and a cup of tea.
Carolyn Miller lives in a Romeo flat on the Powell/Hyde cable car line in San Francisco, where she writes, paints, and works as a freelance editor. Her books of poetry are After Cocteau and Light, Moving, both from Sixteen Rivers Press; Route 66 and Its Sorrows from Terrapin Books; and four limited-edition letterpress chapbooks from Protean Press. Random Universe,her fourth collection, is forthcoming from Sixteen Rivers Press in 2026.
