I’ve been considering why the title of this weekend’s event strikes me so profoundly. There’s a central question embedded in the title: is it alchemy that is vibrant, dynamic, and moving; or is this a discovery of the alchemy inside motion itself?

The original practice of alchemy involved metals and liquids, tubes and fire. A pulling apart of the physical world to better understand its component parts. The thought was, by understanding the elements of the physical world, we might better understand the nature and will of the divine. With the Enlightenment, and Europe’s change in values from the spiritual and mystical to the concrete and rational, what was once alchemy evolved into the modern science of Chemistry.

As part of that transition, the alchemical process became solely material — the transmutation of lead into gold — and something central was lost: the inner work of personal transformation; lead and gold not as concrete metals but as metaphors for spiritual understanding and elevated states of being.

I’m not saying that alchemy wasn’t about the transmutation of metals and that it only exists as a metaphor for spiritual growth, I’m saying that it was both of those things at the same time.

Alchemy is not just the transformation of one thing to another, it is the process of refinement, of purification: the process of turning lead into gold, whether it’s a spiritual metaphor or otherwise, is a reference to the purification and elevation of both the inner and outer world.

Medieval alchemists, mystics really, didn’t separate the body from the spirit. They saw an interwoven connection between not just these two ends of a supposed binary but between all things. The planets, music, math, humanity, divinity, earthly elements, spiritual forces, and on and on and on. They saw all of reality as a tapestry woven together with a golden thread that pierces every aspect of our world, binding it all together.

Back to the title of this weekend’s event — perhaps the meaning of Alchemy In Motion is dual in nature: a reference to the wide ranging possibilities of what alchemy might mean, both in terms of spiritual and physical transformation, and also an invitation to turn our bodies into vessels for such change. This ritual of ecstatic dance is an opening of our senses to the complete nature of reality, potentially making clearer to us that the body and spirit aren’t so far apart.

As Gabrielle Roth has said:

Energy moves in waves.

Waves move in patterns.

Patterns move in rhythms.

A human being is just that

energy, waves, patterns, rhythms.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

Or as, the alchemists say: as above, so below. And perhaps for us today: as below, so above.