Die if necessary, but never kill.

Like when you pick up the phone to call Zoe and she is already there on the other end of the line, we are both studying dances of Africa. Lenya's instructor is from Tanzania and he wants to help us to become friends with the ground. This is sometimes hard for Lenya because of my ballet background, but it feels so good to be expressing the joy and confusion of my soul in body movement. This is crucial to the human experience. My gentleman friend joins me for these classes and he is the only boy student. Now why on Earth is that? The other evening, my gentleman friend asked Robert, our dance instructor, how he was feeling. Robert answered very honestly that he finds teaching difficult because there is just too much of African experience that his students in the US do not understand. Sometimes, to watch us doing these dances that mean so much to him is not uplifting. We told him that it is an honor for us that he shares this gift with us, but I realized that the only real way to show what an honor it is is to acknowledge that I do not fully understand but to try as hard as I can anyway, and to dance with a certain freedom and respect.
In Moldova, Lenya took a lover who was an Ethnobotanist. She was being funded by the government of Peru to learn the medicinal secrets of the Amazon. It was a chancy endeavor for her, after all, the motto at the Bureau of Indigenous Relations is "Die if necessary, but never kill." My friend discovered that medicinal knowledge is passed only from one generation's shaman to the next. Thousands of acres of the Amazon are destroyed every second for the production of newspapers, catalogs, and toilet tissue. Young people are leaving their communities and there may be no one left to whom this ancient information can be passed on. Still, many shamans would rather take their secrets to the grave than share them with the unworthy. The knowledge is sacred, and must not be misused.
Robert is sharing something very special with us. There are elements of the history of African dance that are shared by all of humanity because so much of human history developed there. African music has most likely influenced every type of music that exists throughout North and South America. So these are some of the connections that I can fairly make. But there are other things that I do not understand because of differences of modern history, race, nationality, food, war, and money. I do not understand these things from an African perspective because I have been on the end of things that blindly benefits from the Differences. And yet he shares these dances with me. The only thanks he expects is that I will do my best to truly express myself in the language he teaches.