This book is juicy, honest, and provocative. It will maybe not convince you immediately to throw off your shirt and literally dance naked (then again, maybe it will), but it will draw you ever so much closer to opening up to who you (really) are….and to who you have always known yourself to be. I rarely read fiction but I picked this book up and could not, literally, put it down. On page 53, one sentence blazed out at me as if the words printed on the page were typeset in pure, shining gold:
“I never did what I wanted to do.”
I stopped reading, heart caught in my throat, and took out a purple pen and underlined that sentence. Then I read it again and circled it. Then I read it a third time and added wild exclamation points all around it.
This book is about daring, about jumping out, facing forward, standing up, not backing down. This book is about stripping expectations of others and rising proud in your vulnerable, exposed self…til you are the gorgeous human being that you and God intended yourself to be all along.
Well, maybe the author didn’t mean for it to be about God, but all I could hear, reading it through, was the voice of God shouting my name, whispering to me, steady anchoring me to one powerful, undeniable thought: Dare to be naked in your life, whatever that means and whatever that takes.
I remember being at a self-development course one year in a city where bougainvillea bloom riotously and over-ripe mangoes fall on the ground nearly every day, free for the taking. I was searching for myself and I found Her one night at the course, when they dared me to take a risk, push myself beyond my own boundaries. I was dancing with some other women in a room of mostly young, mostly fit, mostly attractive people. Suddenly, I took off my shirt and my bra and I danced, top of me naked, in front of them. This was not easy (I am, after all, neither young nor fit, though I do feel attractive in my own right) but it would have been harder not to do it. That’s how strong the urgent voice within me shouted. I needed to be seen, wanted to be heard, and made a way for that to happen.
This book reminds me of the courage of that South Florida night.
And it reminds me that, every single day, I get to choose to dance or not dance, naked or clothed, my way to the strong, glorious experience of living life to its…er, my…fullest.
In Other Words... 