The First Step of the Timedancers
On leaving, remembering, and the ancient choreography that moves through us
This is the first entry in Wayfind, a series exploring orientation, memory, and the soul’s choreography through time.
At some point, we all have been someone from somewhere else. This might have happened because we were on vacation or studying abroad and, of course, we were guests. Then there are those who wander, some with purpose—others who move along ancient trade routes in order to stitch together wonders the world has never before seen. Or perhaps something horrible happened to me, my home, my family, my income, and it was necessary in a half-sober, squishy-eyed dash to flee somewhere unknown. Maybe, more cruelly, you are in your home but because you don’t look like everyone else in the town, you were “someone from somewhere else.”
Then there is the silent swirl of time that makes us all strangers in our own home: our bodies.
For as long as we can remember, we have been timedancers. In dreams, in the eyes of a stranger, across murdered ground and resting universe—through clock, compass and wheel—we spin. At other times we seem to twist time right back. In some moments, we whirl together.
In our journeys across the earth, we have come to account for crossings. Some care more for beginnings, some for departure and others for their finding. As the number of witnesses of this wayfaring has grown, so too have our ways of keeping track of where we have been, where we are, and where we might want to go.
Some map hope, and others wanting—a hunger with no shore.
The ruins of borders, however, teach few throughout the ages. Our celestial orb, our continents, our homelands, our houses and our bodies are moving. Their edges, so fiercely protected, can never, ever be immortalized.
We are not just held by the space we take up on the earth, but our time upon it. The will we bring to the dirt, shamrock, sea and eagle—to the arms of our love—is our dance.
For some timedancers, we glimpse only bits and snatches of ghosts. Sometimes it is a whisper from the lift of our fallen, or simply an apparition of the stuck. Somehow, it seems, our will becomes our energy and that becomes our destiny, and that can be felt throughout time and space.
In every dance of life I have ever delivered from those who have transitioned out of their bodies—every parent who wanted to apologize to their children, every child who wanted to comfort their parent, every spouse who wanted to say “I’m still here”—I was only ever able to do so when I dropped into my heart.1
The mind opens, the heart falls… and time opens. This connection, as a former mentor of mine would say, “is your birthright.”2
A fool tries to hold power; a dancer flows through time to the tick-tock of a beating heart. The clock can stop, but the compass always points.
It seems, however, in our choreography most have forgotten leaving; they prefer to stay. The warp and weft of fate brings collision, drifting and devouring stillness. We all push and pull the floor that shakes and breaks with the wilderness, but in all its horror, if we struggle to hold the ground we silence our hearts, losing their breath, stilling the mountains.
In that lonely place, we risk becoming those who care not for dances.
We can become a timetaker mining for miracles.
It has taken so very much time to learn to take the next step we are about to take without falling—so many gentle rhythmic taps from mothers, carryings from fathers, so many diving flights from our wise ones.
For a timetaker, our next careful leap is not a holding of hands across the world, a march through survival, or even a simple kiss—it is a meal. It is a lonely dance with others dancing alone at the same time into their own sinking pools.
It is an end to the brilliant miracle of billions of human souls and countless beings growing, moving, dying and returning.
The fundamental wrong of the timetaker is not the taking of something from itself, for it already was itself and always will be, but that its timedance was stolen from all of us. We’re wired to connect, and your favorite ballerina, your favorite writer, your lover—your children—may never come to be.
The harrowing message of manifestation teaching is not that we don’t get the things we think we want, but that we have settled for those fleeting things instead of the whole world itself. We belong to the universe, and it to us. This cannot be stolen, but your time in your fleeting frame with other fleeting frames absolutely can be disappeared. How many have never come to be because we stopped loving?
The timetaker steals from themselves first.
A hollowed heart has no future, present, or past.
I created timedancers because somehow, not entirely clear to me, I remember. As scientists observe, my brain lights up with memories, but the memories themselves live in the weaving of time, not just the firing of synapses. In my days as a gypsy boy from Ohio, the Appalachian mountains and Georgia, in the city of mirrors, someone experimented on me with needles. In the ensuing vision, I remembered space.
I recalled primordial shapes, worlds being built, arrows in flight, and hearts looking out to sea.
In the cornucopia of my timethreads (identities), the last I would unravel, after decades of artistic and academic study, was my Romani “gypsy” identity.
I come from a people who remember leaving, arriving, and who we met. I am Romungró. For centuries we have been known as “gypsies,” a name given to us by the English who believed we had come from Egypt. Over the last fifty years, many of us—Romungró, Vlach, Kaale, Xoraxane, Gitano and others—have agreed on sharing a more accurate name that comes from our own language: Roma.
“We have many names, and we are all of them,” says the film Proud Roma, inspired in part by the Romanichal lineage of Charlie Chaplin—“we have never started any wars.”3
In a world of nations, a decentralized society of people who are settled, displaced, trapped, risen and nomadic can be hard to understand, and often impossible to study for a system determined to trap the world in the nets of timetakers.
Being a people set a-course a thousand years ago unravels the cadastral—the strict mapping of land still used today to measure, divide, and extract.
I look down the road and see others of my blood traveling, as our crafted anthem Gelem Gelem sings:
I went, I went on long roads.
I met happy Roma.
But then the dark ones came. They were not dark at all, but pale and fair.
We have been the dark ones—of Kali—descending into ancient timekeeping.
Whether it is choreography or the soul pulling at the incandescent ribbons weaving through time, you are dancing. I’d like to help you learn your dance. To confirm that yes, it’s there. The bits and snatches of timelessness you feel are real, and a call further inside and beyond.
I invite you to enter the repertoire of the Timedancers.
If something in this piece reminded you of your own crossings or your own sense of time — I’d love to hear.
I am a trained, formerly working psychic medium in Lily Dale, NY and Arthur Findlay College, Stansted, England. I come from a lineage of generations of Romani fortune tellers, embodied Romani technologists. My Irish, Polish and Czech catholic ancestry also hold me so beautifully in this dance.
Mavis Pittilla gave me this gift.
See Proud Roma.