Cosmic Mind Blowing Shit…and Tango

               I have a nice desk here in Fargo. It is very conducive to writing. There is a window in front of me and I can watch the wind blow against the trees and the clouds roll across the sky. It is a good situation in which to ponder the larger concepts of life.......and how they relate to tango:-)

               Last month, Candace B. Pert died. I read her obituary in the New York Times. She was the scientist who discovered the opiate receptor which is the place where endorphins are bound in the brain. Basically, she revealed the physical connection between emotions and the brain. It was a tremendous breakthrough for real science.

               I mention her because she is an important figure in something I’ve been studying called the Law of Attraction. If you want to meet charlatans and crazy people, this is the field for you. I believe, however, that there is a grain of truth to this theory, so I pursue it in spite of the company it keeps. 

               Maybe I'm a crazy charlatan, too;-)

               The Law of Attraction simply states that like attracts like. If you think good thoughts, good things will happen and vice versa.

               It travels in the same circles as homeopathic medicine which suggests that like cures like. This is the premise of my latest book, Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure. If you are sick, a homeopathic remedy will use a similar poison to the one that made you sick. I was uncomfortable being near people and I cured my discomfort by dancing tango, which put me in close physical contact with many people.

               I discovered tango long before I ever heard of the Law of Attraction. However, since my days as a whitewater river guide living in rural towns at the headwaters of several beautiful mountain streams, I ran into quite a few people whose interests intersected this field of study.

               Over the course of time, I was exposed to more disciples of this quasi-scientific principle as well as to homeopathy.

               My sister-in-law introduced me to Edgar Cayce, a great proponent of the Law of Attraction and a renowned prophet of the 1930s and 1940s. He lived in Virginia Beach where he prescribed cures and predictions through the mail. 

               The river guides in North Carolina educated me on the many types of medicinal plants that could be found in the forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains and then sold to homeopathic practitioners.

               In Durango, Colorado, a very special woman asked me to watch a movie called What the #$*! Do We Know!? It attempts to prove the Law of Attraction but there are many leaps of faith that must be made in order to accept their claims as facts, such as the one made by a Japanese artist that beautiful pictures of snowflakes were caused by happy emotions.

               Durango, and much of the American Southwest, is filled with students of this philosophy as well as homeopathy. It goes well with yoga and, surprisingly, with tango.

               Like religious preachers, the faithful proselytize and ask me to accept their teachings using dichotomous facts such as this: microwaves are bad because radiation is bad and, therefore, eating food that has been microwaved is bad for you.

               As a technician in the cellular phone industry, I have a solid understanding of microwaves and I don’t see a connection between food that is heated by them and my health. If I was being inundated by microwaves, that would be a different story.

               When I ask how I can measure the validity of their statements, they scowl at me and wander off.  I don’t want to hurt their feelings but it seems like a logical question to ask.

               Fargo is the philosophical opposite of Durango. Here they drink beer in 22 ounce buckets, eat their meats breaded and deep-fried, (called fleischkuekle) and the farmers pound the ground with chemicals to produce as much corn as possible. With one hand they push the government away and the other they hold out for ethanol subsidies.

               Candace B. Pert was a real scientist who did not hesitate to think outside the box. She was not afraid to ask why the placebo effect worked when most other scientists ignored its existence. How could the body heal itself with a fake remedy? She gave an audience to the people who studied the Law of Attraction and other fringe science concepts such as intuition, déjà vu and love.

               Since I’ve been dancing tango, a horrible monster that was inside of me steadily shrank until it disappeared. I’m not sure what it was but it was always there, gnawing away at my innards. An examination of over 250 of my blog posts on the subject of tango, helped me to see that the dance was indeed a homeopathic remedy for what ailed me: a fear of intimacy.

               I was sick but I didn’t know it in my brain; my heart was aware that there was a problem and it led me to tango. I knew it was the right thing to do, intuitively, and I was cured.

               The tango embrace is full of fringe science phenomena. The acts of leading and following can be nearly impossible for some people to grasp, yet others can do it right away, almost instinctively.(Instinct, there’s another topic for fringe science to study.) Some people are so good at bringing me into the tango embrace that I feel as if they’ve connected with me telepathically.

               Making the tango connection is an acquired skill but it could easily be a subject of fringe science. With practice, almost anybody can do it. I guess it’s like hypnotism and it requires the ability to become relaxed. My partner relaxes because I am relaxed and she miraculously becomes susceptible to subtle suggestions of weight changes and directions of movement.

               I am always fascinated by how well a great tango instructor has mastered the art of making the tango connection. They don’t look at people, they look into people, grab them by the soul and lead them into movements they never thought they could do.

               I’ve heard people say they are drawn to this dance because of the music. It is my belief that many people who take up tango have been hurt deeply. To describe a milonga as a homeopathic healing session is all too easy since tango music is so full of stories of pain and the people who dance to it are often hurting inside.

               Here is something else that fascinates me about tango music: even though the words of most tango songs are in another language, we can sense the meaning of the melody and we find solace in words we do not even understand.  

               When I am successful at making the tango connection and my partner is anxious, she becomes calm. A happy woman will have the same effect on me when I am uncomfortable.

               I’ve seen this many times at milongas, where a happy person will dance with different people around the room throughout the course of the night and light them up like candles. One happy person can change the mood of an entire crowd and, unfortunately, one depressed person can share their depression with the whole gathering.

               As I look out the window, I notice that the wind has died down and the clouds have disappeared. Looking at the clear, bright blue sky makes me feel good. I wonder if the Universe did that just for me, just to make me happy. I’ll never know for certain but I’m sure glad it did!