Dancing crutches at sunset: a symbolic image of disability, freedom, rhythm, and inner movement.
There are desires that belong to the body, and others that seem to rise from somewhere deeper. For me, dancing has always belonged to the second kind. I have lived most of my life with crutches, yet somewhere inside me there has always been a movement that no physical limitation could completely silence.
This is part of my story: a reflection on disability, beauty, movement, culture, and the strange freedom that begins when we stop believing that dance belongs only to the feet.
Disability and the Desire to Dance
What does it mean to dream of dancing when standing itself can be difficult? What does movement mean when every step must be negotiated through balance, effort, concentration, and pain?
For many people, dance begins in the feet. My life taught me otherwise. Sometimes dance begins in deprivation. Sometimes it begins in the ache of wanting what the body cannot easily perform. And sometimes the longing itself becomes a form of movement.
I have always been fascinated by dance, not merely as spectacle, but as a language of freedom. Dance is one of the purest forms of surrender to rhythm. It is what happens when music enters the body and the body answers without explanation.
When the Body Says No but the Soul Keeps Moving
There are moments when I watch a dancer, or even a tree swaying in the wind, and feel something inside me moving in response. That response is real. It is not less real because it does not become a conventional performance.
Over time, I came to understand something important: I do not have to dance with my feet in order to dance. Sometimes I dance with my eyes. Sometimes with music. Sometimes with memory. Sometimes with imagination. And sometimes I dance by sitting completely still while something within me moves far beyond the visible limits of the body.
I don’t dance with my feet. I dance with my eyes when I watch a tree sway in the wind.
Crutches as Rhythm: Turning a Symbol of Disability into Art
A crutch is usually seen as a medical object, a sign of weakness, dependence, or limitation. But objects change when human experience gives them new meaning.
My crutches have accompanied me for decades. They have touched pavements, rooms, roads, stairs, stages, stones, and thresholds. They have made sound wherever I moved.
Tap. Step. Tap. Step.
There is rhythm in that sound.
What if the crutch is not merely evidence of what the body lacks? What if it can also become percussion? What if the object associated with limitation can carry tempo, memory, resilience, and even grace?
That is why the image of two crutches dancing alone moves me so deeply. It transforms an object normally associated with physical restriction into a symbol of motion. It suggests that what supports us can also participate in our art.
Zorba, Dance, and the Freedom Beyond Words
One of the figures who has long remained in my imagination is Zorba. What fascinates me about him is not simply the dance itself, but the philosophy inside the dance.
When words fail, Zorba moves. When existence becomes too heavy for explanation, he gives the burden to the body. His dance is not decoration. It is language.
That idea has stayed with me. What would I say if my body possessed such freedom? What grief would I release? What joy would I confess? What would happen if movement could speak where language becomes insufficient?
Perhaps this is one reason dance has remained so powerful in my imagination. It represents freedom from explanation.
The Waltz and the Dream of Balance
The waltz fascinates me for another reason. Its beauty depends on balance, trust, and continuous movement. Two bodies turn together as if gravity itself has become gentle.
For someone whose relationship with balance has always been complicated, there is something almost miraculous in that image.
The dancers lean, turn, approach, retreat, and somehow remain within the same rhythm. Perhaps every human relationship contains a hidden waltz. We spend much of our lives trying not to fall, and often something or someone helps us remain upright.
Sometimes another person supports us. Sometimes music does. Sometimes a pair of crutches does.
Balance is not always the absence of weakness. Sometimes balance is what we create together with the things that support us.
Sufi Whirling and the Paradox of Movement
Sufi whirling offers another image that has deeply attracted me. The body turns repeatedly, yet the purpose of this turning is not merely physical movement. The external rotation points toward an inner center.
The dancer moves intensely in order to approach a kind of stillness.
This paradox helped me understand that stillness and movement are not necessarily opposites. A person sitting quietly may be travelling enormous distances inwardly.
A body that appears motionless may contain memory, longing, prayer, revolt, rhythm, and entire galaxies of imagination.
Perhaps I have spent much of my life making such invisible journeys.
Music, Pythagoras, and the Harmony of the Universe
Long before modern science described the universe through waves, vibration, and frequency, ancient thinkers imagined existence itself as a form of harmony.
The Pythagoreans saw mathematical relationships beneath musical intervals and imagined a cosmos governed by order and proportion. Orphic traditions also connected music, poetry, mystery, death, and spiritual transformation.
Whether we understand these ideas literally or poetically, they offer a powerful possibility: perhaps rhythm does not begin in us. Perhaps we enter a universe that is already moving.
Planets turn. Seasons return. Waves rise and fall. The heart contracts and releases. We breathe in and breathe out. Existence itself seems unable to remain completely still.
If that is true, then dance may be more than an artistic activity performed by certain bodies. It may be one way of recognizing that we already belong to motion.
The Invisible Dance: Movement Beyond the Body
Much of life with disability is lived under the pressure of visibility. People notice what the body cannot do. They notice the aid, the slowness, the interruption, the difference.
But there is another life that remains hidden from the eye: the inward life, where memory, imagination, music, desire, and spiritual rebellion continue their work.
A person sitting silently may be moving through whole galaxies within. A body that appears still may contain songs without sound and choreographies no one else can witness.
This is the dance I know intimately: the invisible dance.
It is not false. It is not compensation. It is not a lesser substitute for movement. It is another form of human experience.
Disability, Beauty, and the Right to Artistic Expression
One of the harshest effects of disability stigma is that it can reduce a human being to function.
Can you walk? Can you work? Can you climb the stairs? Can you manage this task or that one?
These questions may be necessary in practical life, but they are not enough to describe a person.
Human beings do not live by function alone. We also need beauty, imagination, tenderness, desire, music, play, and even useless dreams.
The right to beauty should not depend on physical ability. Neither should the right to artistic expression.
A disabled person should not have to prove physical competence before being allowed to imagine themselves as graceful, sensual, artistic, or free.
The desire to dance does not need to be justified by whether the body can reproduce conventional choreography.
The desire itself is part of being human.
Imagination as a Quiet Form of Resistance
Resistance is often imagined as something loud: a protest, a slogan, a raised voice, a confrontation.
But resistance can also happen inside the imagination.
Sometimes refusing the narrow identity assigned to you is itself an act of rebellion. A disabled person imagining themselves as graceful can be resistance. A person sitting in a chair while allowing music to carry them beyond that chair can be resistance.
A man leaning on two crutches and imagining himself dancing among the stars can be resistance.
Not because imagination removes physical barriers. It does not. I have no interest in pretending otherwise.
But imagination prevents the barrier from becoming the complete definition of the person who encounters it.
There is a profound difference between saying, “My body has limits,” and saying, “My limits are all that I am.”
I accept the first.
I reject the second.
Art, Technology, and the Tools We Use
Much of my artistic life has involved transforming limitation into form. Poetry turns silence into language. Music turns emotion into vibration. Technology can turn an idea that once remained trapped in imagination into something audible or visible.
Crutches turn an unstable body into a moving one.
None of these tools define the person who uses them.
They extend possibility.
This is also how I think about artificial intelligence in my creative work. I use it as a tool, just as I use language, sound, recording technology, and other forms of assistance. The tool is not the artist. The intention, memory, longing, and ethical responsibility remain human.
Art does not require a perfect body. It requires attention. It requires imagination. It requires the courage to transform experience into meaning.
Dancing Between Two Impossibilities
I still live between two impossibilities.
One says: “You cannot.”
The other says: “You should not even want to.”
Yet something within me continues to answer both:
But I do.
I do want beauty. I do want movement. I do want to feel the world not only as burden, but as music. I do want to believe that even a pair of crutches can become part of a choreography of hope.
So I continue to dance in the ways available to me: through poetry, music, memory, imagination, stillness, and the rhythm of two crutches touching the earth.
Perhaps the deepest dance is not the movement everyone can see.
Perhaps it is the movement that survives when everything around us insists that we should remain still.
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