Every Step You Take Read Free

with an innate courage and dignity. She had often talked about how her elders on the reservation had taught her to “walk in beauty and in harmony,” and I knew she had a grand scheme for how life—whether on or off the reservation—should be led by all of us. And now this amazingly intense and vibrant woman was fading, beaten down by rounds and rounds of chemotherapy and all its nasty side effects.
    I was grateful that my retirement allowed me to spend more time with Mom, but I found that the more I saw her the more I dreaded losing her. Over the months, another potential loss began to haunt me. My mother had always been the bookkeeper and historian in our family. I was afraid that if she died there would be much—about my parents and grandparents and their families, about my own early childhood, about my mother’s Navajo heritage and my father’s life in Puerto Rico—that would go to the grave with her. I had promised Mom that I would try to remember what she had told me about our heritage, and do my best to pass it along. But what if I wanted to learn more about my past at some point? Who would I turn to?
    Recognizing how much I didn’t know about my parents’ backgrounds and my own early years brought me face-to-face with an even more alarming question: Did I even know my own life, the one I had supposedly lived for the past thirty years here in New York? Luis and I had begun to talk about getting married someday, and maybe even having a family. If I ever had children of my own, would I be able to tell them about this life I had lived, what I had done and what I had learned from it? Or had I danced right over three decades of precious time, pouring everything into the stories I was creating onstage and ignoring the overall arc of how everything, onstage and offstage, fits together? This raised another troubling question, especially for someone facing the challenge of inventing a whole new life: Can you figure out where you are going if you have never paused to consider where you came from or where you have been?
    I had been so determined to channel all my energies forward into a productive future after retiring—yet now I found myself possessed by a curiosity about my past. I kept thinking about the months and months that had piled up into years and years, during which my only focus had been a near maniacal pursuit of the art of dance. Balanchine’s famous quote about ballet came to mind: “The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.” Could I apply his comment on dance to life in general? Could I keep moving through the present and planning for the future, and at the same time be able to rewind the tape and sift through my past, looking for any information and insights that might be embedded in all those days and weeks and months and years during which I had just floated through life—happily adrift in a universe that was all about dancing, dancing, dancing?
    For a long time I wrestled with these questions, wondering if I had the courage and stamina and honesty—not to mention intellectual depth—to actually harvest anything from a more probing look at my life. But on the sad day in March 2008 when my brave mother finally lost her battle with cancer and died, something shifted inside me. I didn’t recognize the change instantly, but over the next few weeks it became obvious that I had been asking myself certain questions for long enough. The time had come to try to find some answers.

C HAPTER T WO
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The Sleeping Beauty
    Every day the world turns upside down for someone who is sitting on top of it .
    â€”E LLEN G ILCHRIST , I N THE L AND OF D REAMY D REAMS
    I am three years old, and I am dancing with my mother. I am three, and she is immortal—as big and beautiful and bright as the sun in the sky. We are dressed in special dancing clothes that she has made for us. I have little beaded moccasins and a headband