Salsa as Spirituality
Measuring time by Thursdays, I feel each week pass — slowly, quickly painfully, painlessly. Sometimes whole weeks pass and the only way I can tell is because it is Thursday again —“salsa Thursdays” — the best night of the week. The girls at the law pgr hub know not to expect me in on Friday mornings because I will have spent Thursday evening in the city center dancing.
Class begins at 7 pm — we are in “Improvers A” now — and for an hour we learn how to exhibila and di-le-que-no. Our teacher, Olivia, (we love her) makes us switch partners and I love passing along the different people, feeling how each person dances differently: some hold the beat, some sway their hips, some shuffle their feet. After class the salsa girlies and I (Eli, Manon, whoever else we pick up), grab a pint at a pub next door and then around 9 pm we make our way back to Arta where slowly the room fills up with people whose faces have begun to be familiar. By the second song, a man asks me to dance, the song starts, the beat goes 1,2,3… 5,6,7 and as I remember to move my hips the best I can, time circles back in on itself and it is just Thursday. It is just salsa, same as last week.
Walking up to my first salsa class I had the feeling that maybe I should turn around and go home. It was late Janurary, I remember it was my last “first” of Glasgow — I had had my first supervisor meeting, my first french class, my first law class, my first run-club. But salsa, having come a few weeks in, was the last of these side-quests that I had set up for myself as a way of surviving this move to a new city (in a foreign country), and I remember thinking, walking up toward the building in the dark Janurary evening, “this could be the worst hour of my life”. The only thing that kept me going was knowing I never had to go back if it really was as bad as I was feeling it might be.
Something about salsa feels vulnerable at first. Or, I suppose, it is more like something about learning something new feels vulnerable at first and I will be honest, in these first weeks in Glasgow (even now), I was only learning new things. I was only at the beginners stage of everything. I entered law with no background, I took a french class too hard, I was at the very beginning of a 3-year project, and then, on this first salsa Thursday, I was walking into a latin dance class with only a few semi-drunken nights dancing in Costa Rica under my belt and I remember a tired feeling.
A, “I cannot keep being the beginner at everything”.
As I debated turning around, I kept walking and standing outside — the first girl I talked to — was Eli.
Three months later, I look back to that first moment and I think it must’ve been God — or something — who introduced us, because after that first salsa night, Eli, me, and the third salsa girl — Manon — began our journey together of pure single-20s-energy. In the first 5 minutes of salsa I met these two girls and later we found out that we’d all gone to St. Andrews, and strangely enough, Manon and I had a mutual friend.
Quick side story: this mutual friend is Mary Tyrrell — a girl I met in Yellowstone when I was 19 and who I walked 500 miles on the Colorado Trail with right before she headed to do her masters in St. Andrews in 2021 — 2 years before me. On Mary’s first weekend in St. Andrews, which was a few weeks after Mary and I had finished walking the 500-mile Colorado Trail together in 2021, she met a guy named Archie who she is still with now, a story I heard back in 2022. Later, Mary tells me that she met Archie, actually , at MANON’s HOUSE — this girl I met at salsa in Glasgow!!
That first night after our first salsa class, we went upstairs and danced at the salsa social — that time when they put on the music and you can . Crazy behavior in retrospect, we had no idea how to dance at all and yet we did.
Many Thursday’s have passed since that first Thursday, and it is funny the way Thursdays change, all while staying the same. This past Thursday when we arrived, Eli and I walked in and walked around the room, knowing every 2-3 people. I chat with Olivia, our salsa teacher and she tells me about how she met her now-husband at this very salsa class. I walk over to Fiona and Elena — the two 40 year old girls we met a few weekends ago at their first-ever social — and we chat about the salsa ball the week before. Later, I walk up to Jack, who just started the beginners class, and we go back and forth talking about who we want to dance with next.
Recently I had my first ending in Glasgow — a short-term flirtation with a long build-up but a short-lived real life and I was, admittedly, a bit shaken up. Last Thursday, dancing at salsa, I could feel that strange sensation in my body. I was a little bit sad it had ended — or even sad that it started at all because that person had real-good friend potential — but I was also shaken up because with this ending came the realization that Glasgow, unlike St. Andrews, unlike Nature Hostel, unlike 2 months in Grand Rapids, is going to be a place of both beginnings and endings. It is going to be of real-life. It is going to be a place where life moves through me, moves past me, moves over me, moves in me, and I won’t be leaving anytime soon. It is going to be a place of memories living in every street corner. Of loves and different kinds of lives and eras coming and going.
This scares me, this feeling of settling in, because I forgot that even in the settling, there is still change. It has been years of living in liminal spaces where I knew nothing was permanent. And, of course, nothing is permanent now. It never is. But it is more permanent — or maybe, it just feels like I have less control over the ways in which things are impermanent. Because in St. Andrews, I knew I was gone in August. In Grand Rapids, I knew I would be gone soon.
I have the feeling, now, of my body still flying forward from the momentum of a too-fast-car. Perhaps this first ending was the hitting of the pavement, the initial impact of a change of pace, the first bounce before I get up and start walking.
Life in liminal spaces was far too fast and far too hard for me. I am too sensitive. But now the challenge is learning how to live in a grounded place, a grounded life.
Luckily, I have salsa Thursdays, a weekly reminder that even when I am not moving, even when my life is not changing every 3-6 months in profoundly dramatic ways, every Thursday still feels a little different. Life still moves and yet.. Thursdays always come back around. The salsa beat is still 123….
