Last week it was already seven years ago that Gabrielle Roth passed away…
The woman I never met is still with me every day…
Reading her book Maps to Ecstacy was my very first acquaintance with 5Rhythms, which was a life changing experience; her words a revelation, a coming home, her vision an appeal and a challenge…
Reading that book and taking in her words were my first steps to becoming aware of the necessity to smoke the peace pipe with my past, to retrieve my authenticity and to bring into the world what I have to bring.
From the moment I started dancing I tried to meet her; I applied for several workshops where she was supposed to teach. I never succeeded. I missed her four times. The last time was with Slow Dancing in Chaos in New York, her ‘retirement workshop’. We danced intense and slow in utter chaos; she was dying while we danced. That workshop felt the closest I could ever be to her.
Quite unexpectly she came even closer; at the end of the teacher training at SLC two years later, the first training Jonathan led in stead of his mum, we went up into the mountains… Snowbird … on top of these mountains, surrounded by all brandnew teachers, Jonathan scattered Gabrielle’s ashes; at that very moment she turned the wind 180 degrees and showered us. The woman I never met showered us with her ashes…
The woman I never met… I meet her every day…
She backs me up every day; in my dance, in my work, in my everyday life… Her simple map of five rhythms -flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness- really grabbed me, totally, fully, utterly, completely… so deep, so vast the landscape of each rhythm, billions of miles of unexplored wilderness, ocean deep energies moving in waves… so much to explore and to discover… to learn and to unfold, to trust and to follow… her words, her vision, her power and her energy back me up…
Gabrielle passed away and never left… the woman I never met…
