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| KATE GRIGG/SPECIAL TO THE PACKET & TIMES Miriam Goldberger is developing a therapeutic dance program for those with chronic pain or Parkinson's disease. Gentle Moves dance classes begin Sept. 20 at St. James' Anglican Church in Orillia. |
She can't explain why she loves it. Dance is so much a part of Miriam Goldberger, has been since age four. It would be like trying to put into words how it feels to have an arm or a leg. Easier to explain their absence. And dance has never been absent from Miriam's life. Even when she found herself too sedentary while writing a book (Taming Wildflowers), it was Miriam's physical self that stopped dancing, grew arthritic and sluggish, never her spirit.
Miriam's spirit is naturally strong. Enhanced in childhood by the people around her, especially the women. Her mother, a speech pathologist, who went back to school in the 1950s to get her master's degree. Miriam's grandmother, politically active, an accountant at a time when women stayed home or worked at acceptable jobs, nursing or teaching.
Miriam's love for her grandmother extended to the elderly in general. She felt an affinity with them, ran dance classes, dreamed of creating an arts centre for older people. Perhaps it's their spirit that attracts her, the spirit that has carried them through the years and matured into something fine and enduring, particularly poignant as it nears its end, at least its time in a human vessel.
Miriam used to make up stories to tell in dance. Headed into the city on Saturdays (New York City; Miriam was raised in New Jersey) to take in the theatre, the ballet, the symphony, where other stories were told. It was more than her own spirit Miriam wanted to express. It was something bigger, something more inclusive she pursued.
Why else would she leave her job as a sound-effects editor in Los Angeles (Miriam's first husband worked in the film industry), a job Miriam found too technical, too male-dominated, physically confining? Why else, when Universal sent her husband to Toronto (1980), did Miriam return to the things she prized, the spirit of women, the spirit of dance, the spirit of life?
All of it somehow weaving together: her degree in dance and dance history, her interest in childbirth and midwifery, her involvement with fitness and dance classes for women in the midst of bearing children. All of it growing, one thing feeding another, Miriam's spirit enlivening everything she touched, and everything she touched enriching her spirit.
Until Miriam and her second husband, Paul, moved out of the city to live where things grew literally, to Schomberg (1986), taking on a derelict farmhouse (previously inhabited by a motorcycle gang). "What the heck," Miriam thought, knowing a house could be cared for and nurtured, that it could grow into a home. As her interest in growing vegetables and flowers grew into Canada's first pick-your-own flowers farm. And that in turn grew into the Wildflower Farm located outside Orillia (and now exclusively online).
Because people want something alive around them, even when their thumbs aren't green, when they have no time to garden. They need the spark of life that so fascinates Miriam each time it springs from a tiny seed. The same spark that is inside every person but sometimes gets buried or grows weary, in need of replenishment.
As Miriam's spirit needed restoring after she lost her parents, when, six years ago, her mother died. She felt the need to mourn, to go back to where everything began, back to her roots, back to dance, back to school in Boston to get a master's degree in dance therapy. She had to go back in order to start out again, to make something grow again.
And what Miriam is growing are therapeutic dance programs, including Dance for Parkinson's (Miriam trained through the National Ballet School of Canada). Because music and movement have a way of getting past neurological logjams, have a way of lifting depression, of keeping things fluid, of freeing people, building strength and confidence. Because dance can reduce the need for medication and painkillers, can bring people together, let them forget their troubles and reconnect to their earliest selves, when movement, not words, was the primary language.
It's the kind of therapeutic program Miriam would like to bring to all kinds of people. People with dementia and people with cancer, people in long-term care, people with disabilities. "The sky's the limit," Miriam says. That's how far her spirit soars.
So, anyone with Parkinson's, anyone with chronic pain is invited to attend Miriam's What Dance Can Do 10-week pilot program beginning Sept. 20 at St. James' Anglican Church in Orillia. Anyone, male or female, of any age (caregivers, too), can come to the Gentle Moves class, and feel the warmth of Miriam's welcome, feel the spirit that moves her, and follow her into the dance.
Miriam will be on hand at Saturday's Parkinson SuperWalk to share information about the Gentle Moves pilot program. The SuperWalk begins at Emmanuel Baptist Church, 300 Coldwater Rd. W., with a 10:30 a.m. check-in, followed by the walk at 11:30 a.m. Information about the Gentle Moves dance program is also available by emailing miriam@wildflowerfarm.com or whatdancecando@gmail.com.
http://www.orilliapacket.com/2016/09/08/a-blossoming-spirit
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