My first blog had this for a title and someone asked me what it meant. Stars don’t dance, do they? Well, if you stay very still and look up on a clear night sky and you squint just enough while tilting your heard just so to the right, I believe you will see the stars dance right before your eyes.

Okay, maybe not. It’s actually the movement of the gases on the surface of those distant giants that make them look like they’re dancing. Or twinkling even.

But no, the source and inspiration of my blog title is a little poem by Edward Estlin Cummings. I first heard his poetry read between verses of a song and it stuck with me. Later I found a book which contained some of his poetry and I started reading. He is one strange dude! But brilliantly insightful. One of the poems was this:

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you’re young, whatever life you wear

it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man’s
flesh put space on; and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies, the foetal grave
called progress, and negation’s dead undoom.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

I cannot quite explain what this means to me, but it is important on a very intimate level. When I read this, out loud, it gives me hope. And that is what matters.