This is a lesson-demonstration of how a communal harvest dance at Lúnasa, a bend of wild Irish willow and the somatic memory of a father’s tin whistle helped me build destiny instead of inheriting fate.

It’s available in two parts:

Part I: Timespinning (Salley Ring)

Photographic demonstration of how I reconnected to an ancestral lineage of basket weaving through community, craft and somatic awareness of time. You can scroll down view it here or download and view the zine:

Timespinning Sally Belt

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Part II: Craft & Somatic Memory

Written documentation of how timespinning—the process of recovering broken traditions—works and a guide to exploring it in your own practice.

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Part I: Timespinning (Salley Ring)

Before I sang Down by the Salley Gardens in my last recital in high school, someone gave me a photo they found of my father

He was killed four years earlier by a drunk driver in a motorcycle accident

If you listen.

Thank you to Daire Spillane, Maria Kerin, the North Clare Dance Creamery, Michael Walsh, Sinead Kerin, Jackie Askew and, of course, the Sallies of Clare.

Part II: Craft & Somatic Memory

“Oh, you’ll be alright,” Daire said to the quivering tree as she reached out to cut the willow wands from its branches.

I was hesitating to make the slice and floundering in the briars, and this would not do.

“We’re going to make a dance with you,” she assured the salley, famous for its resilience.

Suddenly I’m back in the briars with my mother, father and sister in the ditch of the motorway near our house harvesting blackberries, blueberries and raspberries. Every year we made enormous batches of jarred jams, including with strawberries from the Mormon fields leftover from when they had settled in Ohio before being forced to move on to Nevada.

Like many Roma and Sinti, baskets and wreaths were important in our home as both function and decoration. The wreaths and baskets my mother decorated are still sacred to me. Gypsies have long been known for basket weaving, but the actual weaving of plants into something that can be used was one of the traditions my family stopped practicing some time ago. This was not a great tragedy, especially as we had so many other traditions to keep busy with.

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We keep hearing embodied teachers, psychologists and healers telling us to down-regulate. Come home to the body. Settle. Meanwhile, dancers and lineage carriers demonstrate the power of community and the importance of respect and ritual with the land.

But what if home is under attack? What if the body you’ve trained so carefully still does things it doesn’t know it shouldn’t be doing? And what if, right now, there is no community to return to? What if what is really needed is movement towards a way out?

I am not suggesting that these questions point to some sort of personal failure, or that any of us need more retreats to process things. I’m saying that most somatic and embodied modalities available teach people how to live in a world that is safer than the one we are in. I am saying most communal and land-based practices are in fact specific to those places and those people—and in many cases are closed practices and at best we were only guests when we visit them.

The signs of teachings falling short for well-meaning teachers, healers and beginners are everywhere. You see the burnout on peoples faces. You have seen—many times at this point—the fallout when someone finds out something that healed them wasn’t meant for them to keep. Or you might know the experience of laying down in comfortable clothes, feeling the singing bowls wash over you and the promise that a little more self-awareness and regulation will bring safety when in fact your body is collecting different data. Your body feels danger while wellness says to settle.

How then do we embody in a world that won’t admit it’s at war?

As someone raised within a tradition built for survival and finding ways out of impossible situations, I know this struggle from the inside, and from much further back than my own life. I’m a Bashaldo Gypsy, raised with a legacy of five-hundred years of American Gypsy culture—a dancer, harper and researcher with a PhD in impact-driven dance. My family knows all about being told that we are safe while in fact, our homes, culture and lives are under constant attack that is invisible to outsiders.

What my people built inside this crack—as Roma and Sinti people have for thousands of years—is a movement technology for staying mobile and at rest at the same time. This is not hyper-vigilance, which will burn the nervous system down and lock up the fascia and lymphs. This isn’t down-regulation or relaxation either, which—I am going to borrow from my mother here—is like leaving your ass open in the breeze. Sure, it’s liberating and good to know, but it’s an incomplete instruction when you’re facing hardship or danger whether it’s perceived or real.

What I am sharing with you in Timedancer Meditations is a distillation through rigorous research that came to me when I opened to the Blackness of the Atlantic ocean and the lives of sailors.¹ They led me home to my own culture and identity—that which I had thought was cursed. During my PhD at the University of Limerick, I confirmed this impact-driven knowledge was carried by Roma and Sinti people and adapted around the world, including in many percussive dance styles.² The methods behind the forms are what I offer to you—to gadje (non-Roma).

While many Roma and Sinti communities remain closed, my people have always taught how to read through the roads of time, how to dance alone on stage while still finding community in that and made songs to mourn the innocence of being human in an inhuman world. We taught people how to survive. Through our ingenuity we helped teach the world to navigate: the trained capacity to perceive danger accurately, move in relation to it and keep dancing through the fullness of being alive.

I’m not saying that you need to stay traumatized. I’m not saying that polyvagal people are wrong—although this theory has recently been disproven—or that poetic embodied teachers are lying to you. Landing in the body and understanding what a healthy balanced, regulated body is for you is wonderful tech. But for many of us it’s only half a curriculum.

Human rights law teaches us that everyone has a right to a safe home, but what happens when the ground of that home is shaking, or has fallen away entirely? That’s the half my tradition are experts at moving through, and the half of the curriculum that has saved my life many times. This is the magic that has allowed me to survive, thrive when I can and stand in social responsibility to others, even during this last year when disaster took my life in New York City away from me. This is choreography that welcomes calmness but does not depend upon it to cross an ocean onto safer ground.

I’m inviting you to consider that life is full of impact, and we could even say it is led by it. Collisions great and small are how we come to know the world and ourselves better, or perhaps at all.

If you’re feeling pretty hopeless, that’s a sign of readiness. If things haven’t worked out, that’s a meaningful opening. If you’ve considered giving up the fight, whether it’s in rage, terror, self-pity or catastrophic grief, I invite you to be still for a moment. And then let that be the beginning of a creative journey to understand who you really are.

A Manifesto for Timedancing

For as long as we can remember, we have been timedancers. In dreams, in the eyes of a stranger, across murdered ground and rested 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. These edges—our names, identities and boundaries—are so fiercely protected, but they 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 beloved—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.

As a medium, in every dance of life I have ever delivered from those who have transitioned out of their bodies (the dead)—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. The ego lets go, the mind releases, the heart falls…and time opens. This connection is what I mean by your birthright. It can never be taken away, but you can be convinced to refuse it. As Frantz Fanon so thoroughly observed, colonization is not just on land, over resources or our bodies, but in the mind when it tricks us to identify with those who do not have our best intentions at heart.

Occupations are not just externally imposed though. In our human condition we long for security and we can easily create choreographies that forget leaving, returning and change; we prefer to stay. We want to defend our identities, borders and walls. And still, the warp and weft of fate brings collision, drifting and devouring stillness. We can push and pull the floor that shakes and breaks with the wilderness, but if we spend our lives struggling to hold ground we risk silencing our hearts, losing breath, stilling mountains.

In that lonely place, we become those who care not for dances. We can truly lose our way and become a timetaker mining for other people’s miracles. It has taken so very much time to learn to take the next step we are about to take as a species 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 harrowing message hidden in manifestation teaching is not that we don’t get the things we think we want, but that we have settled for those fleeting things we were told we needed instead of being part of the whole world itself. We have settled for the occupation of our souls by others who have decided to settle their own ambitions there instead of the realms of possibility living in your fascia, your clairvoyance and your creative spirit waiting to be revealed.

But truly, 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.

We belong to the universe, and it to us. But we can be convinced to drown our time in addiction, sorrow, hate and apathy. How many ideas, things or even people have never come to be because we stopped loving? How much have you walked away from because someone else decided there wasn’t the time for it? What wounds do we protect as our real spiritual practice that we dress up with incense, prayer and the “work”?

Whether it is choreography in a nightclub or the soul pulling at the incandescent ribbons weaving through time, you are dancing. And you are not just dancing in a space, you and your intentions are moving through time itself.

Let me be clear: the strongest force, and in most cases the only force, that will live on when you die is love. This is neither good or bad news I suppose, but the truth remains that when you are gone—and on the off chance someone in your family goes for a reading because they would like to connect with you, or more simply, they are washing the dishes or fixing a car and just want to reach out through the ether to say hello—it is not your career, your money, your fame or even your reputation that will make that connection happen. It is, and always has been, love.

All information and advice that may appear within that reading, that call from the soul, is only available because it comes through and is from the heart itself. We will get to the mechanics of how that works later, and how surprising, vast and endless it can be. For now, I hope you consider that in your spiritual life there is always a place for devotion—that is, love as a practice over time.

I’d like to help you learn your dance. To confirm that yes, it’s there. And don’t take my word on these teachings of love. This journey is also about your experience and the evidence you come to know. Just start with the bits and snatches of timelessness you feel and know that they are real, and a call further inside and beyond.