
Take me in your arms as the fiddles are playing and waltz me around the floor.
I came upon this ornament in a Thrift shop. I just had to buy it. It reminded me how much I love dancing.

Let me dream for a while …
Dancing is such a fun thing to do. But … I remember those scary times when I had to waltz smoothly, gliding across the floor .. and how nervous I felt with a new partner.

… in the warmth of your smile, so I won’t feel alone anymore.
Did you ever waltz? Were you holding on too tightly? Did you stumble over their toes?

Maybe we’ll win or maybe we’ll lose, playing the game of romance.
0r were you sure your partner was thinking of other things … other mice … other tails? We all carry our stories inside us and sometimes, just a little ornament can take us back to those times.
I heard Ed Stivender, a famous US storyteller, tell stories at the National Storytelling Festival in Tennesse last October. Ed told whimsical, funny stories, spontaneous tales, even biblical tales, and sang and played harmonica as he went along. He led the “Fringe” festival in the Main street at 5 pm on the Saturday.
In a interview earlier that day, I had listened to Ed in an interview as he reflected on his experiences as a storyteller. He talked about his cardinal rule – ” Give the audience a break from the realities of the world … their worries, their fears” and he also described what the consequences were for him, when he once broke that rule.
His perspective on a storyteller’s relationship with their audience was compelling.
He believes story is the dance floor … for the dance of the imagination between audience and teller: the whole event can be an occasion of Grace.

But we’ll never find out what Love’s all about- if we don’t join in the dance!
My dancing mice reminds me of Ed the storyteller and of storytelling itself.
You might have noticed they’ve had their tails replaced. Nothing’s perfect. When I found them, they had no tails … how could they keep their balance without their tails? So you can see I innovated, and made them new tales.
I think they like them. They’re good enough.
[Photo captions are lyrics from a favourite song, The Maybe Waltz, written by Anne Infante]
All photos and text by Meg Philp
Stories Twigs … ! by Meg Philp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
First published 2014. Updated 20 March 2016 <a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/dance/”>Dance</a>