My Tango Diaries

Sometimes my mind goes down such useless roads. When things are going badly, it seems so easy to get lost in thorny tangles of what if I had? What if they had? What if I never? Maybe I would have finished college. Maybe I wouldn't live my life in pieces at a time. Maybe I would look further ahead than the end of the month. Maybe I wouldn't feel so raw so often. Maybe. But if the bad things hadn't happened . . . If better things had. If my route had changed . . . and my life changed . . . I wouldn't have met my husband . . . or his family that became my family . . . I wouldn't know the people I know who care so much for me and for whom I care so deeply. and tango . . . my life, all the ugliness and beauty, pain and elation, brought me to tango. So I've got to shake this off - this useless interrogation of the past. La vida es una milonga y hay que saberla bailar, Life is a milonga, you gotta dance to how it goes . . . So let's just dance Let your body tell m...

(from morguefile.com ) El duende has settled around my shoulders again, and it won't be shrugged off it seems. Almost a year ago I tried to explain to a friend what all this "duende" talk is about. A year later no easier to articulate. It's not a something , but the space between somethings . It's the emptiness that makes the non-emptiness so cherished. I wrote then how it was something I no longer sought out in tango. In the beginning of my tango journey, even before I was dancing, the duende in the music felt like some kind of romantic lure. It doesn't feel that way anymore. I don't really try to avoid it, because that's just not how it works. It comes when it comes, in the music, in a dance, in a breath. When I try to ignore it, it just loiters around until I notice it - or can't help noticing it. It's in the places, in slivers of space, where dark meets light. In contrasts and sharp edges. In that place you know suddenly quite clearly, th...