I saw Interstellar today, the movie about wanting to leave the earth to go to the stars. Twenty years ago when my poet friend Penny was dying, I wrote a poem that included the lines I long to leave, I grieve to stay. Penny looked at me like I was crazy, and said the lines back with the words switched around, I long to stay, I grieve to leave. But we couldn’t trade our longings, and she was the one who left. Now the movie makes realize that in the intervening decades, I have changed my view. I no longer long to leave. I love where I am. I relish the gifts of the earth plane, where I learn how desire and longing transform.

The Interstellar film, after pretending the earth has turned on us instead of the other way around, imagines our species abandoning the planet. It attempts to depict love as a force that can transcend space and time, but it falls short because it does not imagine love wide enough, does not imagine a love that includes all beings, including the earth herself. In the movie, ‘the stars’ are reduced to another place to colonize. I remember a different version of the stars, in a poem Penny wrote before she became ill.

She wrote it for her dancer friend Dan, who was dying of AIDS, a poem about dancing from star to star. It appears in her posthumous collection, A Fierce Desire by Penny Pritzl. She couldn’t know that when she herself would enter hospice, she would be given the same room that Dan had. When I would visit her, I felt her poem pulsing in the very air of the room. To stretch our view of earth cradled within ‘the stars’, I offer us, Light Leads You Dancing 

Light Leads You Dancing

for Dan

I’m afraid

of all this pain, all this crying, this dying.

Pray with me.

I will pray with you, Dan.

Dream deep.

I pray you leap and land on a star.

Remember

the love of your life, remember

how it feels.

Do not be afraid.

I can see you dancing.

The universe knows you.

The universe shimmers, beckons.

Look! Here comes the spirit

of your love

to be with you.

Look where we are…

One star glitters in a cobalt sky.

You can walk to it, or fly.

Stand in the beam of light

with the spirit of your love

as if you are on a dance floor

in the center of the universe.

Planets and stars whirl everywhere—

paths of light, leading

from brightness to brightness.

Such a sparkling in the dark!

Distant music – Irish pipes

low drums, bells, marimbas,

conch shells, bird calls

the roll of the ocean, sweet voices

of a young boys’ choir.

Your face, the face of you love

shimmers, glitters like a galaxy

lit by a dream of light

from the star where you stand.

Hold hands. Be very still.

Sway to the sound,

your feet know the steps.

You dip and twirl and swirl,

melt together in the light.

Splashes of color

everywhere

magenta, burtnt orange, flaming yellow

blue            intense, deep and alive as eyes

moving through whatever space separates

you from me, he from she

taking the time to be present.

Do not be afraid now,

the universe beckons.

Light leads you dancing

from star to star.

You dance across the sky,

touch planets            red, blue, purple

You have never been so light, so free, so loved.

All is music

motion

all the universe is dancing.

Penny Pritzl c. 1990