I have always loved this post by Joanna Young called Won’t You Join The Dance? On Purposeful Questions and Nonsense Poems. In it she quoted a section from The Lobster Quadrille in Alice & Wonderland:
‘Will you walk a little faster?’ said a whiting to a snail,
‘There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are dancing on the shingle – will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?’
When I was thinking of a prompt for our first Less Ordinary Creativity Circle, I instantly thought of this quote. All that remains to be seen is if you choose to ‘join the dance’ 
As I outlined in the previous post launching the creativity circle, you can respond in whichever way inspires you and you can either share in the comments or you can share a link instead. I’ll be having a go as well, so please do be brave and join in! The dance floor is all yours 
I absolutely love this prompt. As someone who’s been passionate about dance all my life (and still dreams of becoming a professional dancer), I instantly knew I had something perfect for this prompt… and may be adding a few more before the week is out (if that’s okay!).
I wrote this piece over a year ago, after just beginning to take ballet classes again – I had stopped dancing for several years while I was at university after a car accident, so in a sense I was just “joining the dance” once again. It’s perhaps not one of my very best pieces of writing, but it’s definitely one of the pieces that mean the most to me.
(Here’s where I get all nervous…) The piece can be found here: http://nextdance.com/blog/a-love-of-dance.html
Allison Day´s last blog ..An Interview with Casson Trenor
Oh what a perfect contribution to get us started, Allison!
I love how you’ve structured the post by giving updates on your progress, and I also love just how applicable your experience is to so many getting back to some form of creative expression, having left it for a period of time, for one reason or another. Some of us may not have picked up a crayon since we were a child. Some of us may not have written a story since our schooldays. Some of us stopped our dancing, our painting, our creating a long time ago. And it will be scary giving ourselves permission to take it back up again. What your experience shows, Allison, is that it’s so incredibly rewarding that it’s worth pushing through the fear.
Thank you so much for being the first contributor to the creativity circle!
Amy
xx
woo! inspiration for a little poem. I’m always annoyed that i think of cool bits of poetic lines but can never really string together a whole piece of work, except for now! huzzah! a finished piece of work for you all:
Dammit Pen!
A pox on you one ‘hybrid gel grip,’
I damn thee from clicker to tip.
I wish you’d allow for flowing prose,
but all I scribe is messy dross.
The key to my writing god only knows
but myself, alas, I’m at a loss.
Dammit Pen! you’ve done it again
ruining my creative process.
I’ve had enough of your inky charms,
so I’m going back to typing.
(actually I much prefer writing with pen and paper, sorry guys i’ll try and damn my computer another day!)
curiously, i didn’t write ‘one’ in the first line when i jotted this down on paper first, and i don’t conciously remember typing it either, but i really like how it fits into the first line. oddness…
Paddy Hare´s last blog ..Periferite: @Tiger_Face tweetdeck is dead easy, tis a bit like msn but without all the irritations and unreliability
your picture made me dance and thus while viewing her, I was overfilled just with one desire – My best wishes to you for the wonderful post, the unforgettable dance.
Wow – what a great poem, Paddy. Expresses so beautifully that frustration that is familiar to us all when we sit down to create and find the channel blocked. I look forward to reading a lot more of your poetry! Oh, and it’s funny when our creativity takes over and surprises us by adding extra words, images, rhythms, rhymes that weren’t there when we started, isn’t it?
Thanks for the lovely supportive comment, Tomas!
Amy
xx
I have been told I have two left feet but when I look down, I don’t see what they mean. I do admire wonderful dancers. They have such grace in movement. At the Lowell Folk Festival this past summer, a couple got up to dance to one of the groups and were moving so well, in and out of the crowd, it was like he had radar or one of those new auto alert systems so he knew where he could go without skipping a beat.
I tried to capture all that in a sherku here. It is so short, you don’t need to follow the link other than to view their picture.
The walk was crowded, the
Music too good to pass up
His touch led her along
Steve Sherlock´s last blog ..slow start
Amy – Thank you. I do hope that piece can be inspirational to others who may have hesitations about returning to passions or even just hobbies that they once enjoyed, but that may have fallen by the wayside.
Steve – So simple, and yet those few words capture the essence of dance so perfectly. Beautiful words.
Allison Day´s last blog ..An Interview with Casson Trenor
Amy, I love that invitation, it works on so many levels…
I look forward to seeing where my muse takes me on this one
Paddy, thanks for the encouragement to let the pen go where it will, even if the pattern isn’t immediately apparent
Steve, I really like that sherku, it could be a description for a lifelong love affair as well as a dance, don’t you think?
Now I’m off to read Allison’s piece…
Joanna Young´s last blog ..Some Words that Count
@Allison, crafting sherku is a writing exercise and I am always wondering if I have lost the essence by condensing. Thanks to your comment and Joanna’s I have kept it in this one.
@Joanna, yes, the dance is a great metaphor for a successful relationship. While he lead, she needed to respond and he needed to be aware of her as well as the surroundings. It is a give and take relationship to be successful.
Steve Sherlock´s last blog ..Two left feet
Hi Amy, thanks once again for the invitation to join you on the dance floor. I’ve written something on a site I’ve created for ‘my own’ writing. Although I have shared some personal pieces including poetry on Confident Writing, it’s not the natural home for it and I wanted somewhere a bit more quiet and private where I could post a different sort of writing. It’s still good to be able to share it though, and this circle seems a good place to start. Your invitation prompted me not just to write a piece but to tidy up the site so I could in fact welcome a visitor or two. Thanks
Here’s my piece: Dancing Lessons http://writingwalks.com/dancing-lessons/
Joanna Young´s last blog ..Coaching Questions from the Season: the Essence of Fall