The Dance of My Life ...by Michael Coyne

My father had a heart attack while lying in my arms, he told me to reach for the stars…
So I found myself waking up in foreign countries and watched as our sun set from 12,000 feet high.
I fell in love and married an angel and have been with her nearly every moment since.

I almost died in a raging river of white water. I saw a volcano explode near a crowded Mexican City and an avalanche of snow rush down a mountainside in an icy desert of desolation.
I watched as lightening danced across an endless Canadian sky. I learned to swim, skate, ride a bicycle and a motorcycle, I learned to drive a sports car and an 18-wheeled tractor-trailer unit. I once flew a plane over an ex-girlfriends house.

I saw an American Bald Eagle stretch its wings and yawn, shortly after, I watched as a section of glacier collapsed into an Alaskan inlet, and how this startled a small seal sitting on a nearby iceberg.
I bottle fed a baby tiger that was curled up in my arms and held it steady as it got grumpy and tried to scratch my eyes out.

I have been behind bars and I have driven a police car. I bungee jumped, sky dove, climbed a frozen waterfall, and set out into a northern sea in a small narrow boat.
I walked against 100 mile per hour winds and struggled to breathe: Weeks later, a hungry wild bird ate crackers out of my hand, high on this very ridge.

I slept in a cave and on the side of a cliff, while standing at attention during the day, and all night long, while exposed to a pouring rain.
I drove a tank across a desert and faced my fears whenever they arose. I killed the most beautiful bird I ever saw with my bare hands, and it took me 15 years to cry over this.

I rode a horse in the Jungle and herded cattle in a Savannah. I bugged a bug and kissed a fish on the lips in an underwater cavern.
I danced at the end of a rainbow and touched an 8-foot Caribbean Reef Shark with an ungloved hand, from his gills, to the tip of his tail.
Crocodiles have surrounded me in South America and a boa constrictor was wrapped playfully around my neck for a photograph in Thailand.

I have been shot at, sliced with a knife; maced in my face and beaten unconscious, all within 20 miles of the house my mother raised me.

I climbed an unclimbed peak and named it Hope.

I smelled flowers and chocolate on a daily basis. I got on television numerous times and made the front page of my cities local newspaper.

I fished for Piranha and was the first to wake board a remote tributary of the Amazon River. Then I set the Guinness Book of World Records for the most useless luge endeavor down a steep 18,000-foot mountainside.

I watched stars as they fell from the sky over the world’s highest navigable lake and feared being taken hostage by a group of Bolivians afraid of their Government’s cruelty.

I drank wine and beer and tequila and once got so drunk I fell down.

I sat in the cockpit of a 747 jet as it flew over the Arctic Circle and played Santa Claus to the children of an Eskimo village there.

I ate gourmet food daily and rappelled face first down a 1000-foot cliff. I lifted heavy weights with the single obsession of growing big muscles all over my body; I then looked in the mirror at my success and thought I looked too skinny.

I watched a guilty man get set free and an innocent soul imprisoned. I watched a baby be born addicted to Cocaine at 2 AM in an inner city housing development, and I danced all night, every chance I could, to loud electronic trance music.

I touched silk and leather, diamonds and dirt, and have burned my flesh by accident, on more than one occasion.
I have always done my best to live everyday sensually and never to separate love from sex, and thus be comfortable with nudity and every other nuance of what it means to be human.

I saw the turn of the century and watched as a wall came down. I flew to Asia with the U.S. Marines in the name of peace. I saw two buildings collapse in the name of hatred.
I lost my spirit and found it again; it was right where it has always been, in my heart.

I found the meaning to my life became enlightened and now see how life and self are the same, and how you and I have always been one, despite meaningless evidence pointing to the contrary. I found out how love may not be what is always real, but it is what we wish were true in the deepest place in our minds, and that its what our minds wish to feel that becomes true, when we finally let it be.

With love, Michael