Today I had my first lesson in salsa dancing. I have a fairly terrible sense of balance, hardly any muscular flexibility, and not much physical coordination, so dancing doesn’t exactly come naturally to me. But I’ve been finding that I enjoy it more and more, and now I feel like getting good at it.

What I think is behind it, though—what I think I am really trying to get good at—is living willingly in my own body. These days (and in this part of the world, primarily) we are obsessively deliberative about our spirituality. We need to be able to think through it, to classify and diagram it. We’ve realized the importance of empirical thought with such intensity that we’ve partly forgotten the importance of the intuitive regions of our lives.

I think I’ve become used to reaching precariously out of the physical world when trying to be spiritual; dragging my body along behind like a forgotten appendage—and then cramming myself imperfectly, lopsidedly back into my physical frame afterwards. I feel as though I go through days sometimes merely tolerating my physicalness.

But I don’t believe that it can work that way, at least not while we still have bodies to work with. You can’t be spiritual that way, any more than you can be happy just “tolerating” a family member you live with. If you don’t make something beautiful and good of what you have, it will turn destructive. There’s no middle ground.

So dance lessons are one facet of my attempt at a physical spirituality—my search for a way of being not half animal and half spirit, but one hundred percent of each.