"She's just dancing..."

"She can run beside the stream through the forest
The wind will lift her hair
She can almost see the moon and the waterfall
The music takes her there

She can be wild in the summertime
She does not feel these walls
She can give in, look up, take a deep breath
And step into the falls

She's just dancing
She's just dancing,
understand
She's just dancing,
Dancing to the band…"

I was sitting here in front of the keyboard waiting to know what to write about this morning and this song started to float through my heart reminding me…thank you God. 

Oh yes, and thank you, David (Wilcox) for yet another amazing cut off the "Home Again" CD…do CD's have cuts?  No, I think CDs have tracks and albums have cuts…ahh…thank goodness for internal time bridging.

Okay…for the last few weekends we've sat on bleachers or in crispy late September grass at a number of soccer fields scattered around St. Louis County watching the Christ Prince of Peace Purple Panthers play heart-racing soccer.   These are the athletes we cheer, scream and practically squeeze our water bottle to the point of popping for.  These are our girls.  Our amazing ten and eleven year old football stars (we have an Aussie head coach).

We have watched this same group (with a few adjustments and additions over the years) go from a five year old Kindergarten soccer team who couldn't remember which goal was theirs (well, at least my five year old daughter couldn't – often scoring for the other team) to a real team of young athletes we see improve with every practice.  Most of the girls didn't participate in first through third grades (including our daughters) only resuming their play last year, but they are a cohesive team and we are a team of very supportive and proud parents.

What struck me this week, like a thunderbolt, is how soccer has given many of the girls the playing field for more than just…play.  One of our twins was acknowledged two weeks ago by one of the coaches with a phone call late at night.  He wanted us to know that she had expressed great care for an opponent who was down extending a hand, helping her up, and assuring her that she was fine. 

Girls who have been seen as "bossy" in the past are being talked about around our dinner table as smart.  Our daughter even remarked at practice the other day that one of these girls was really good at deciding who to pass to.  And that another was helpful in seeing where other people need to be from her vantage point on the field and giving them clear direction.  The very same skills that may have appeared as bossy in one arena and had become a general label stuck to their forehead, had been peeled away on the soccer field and thrown away.  Now these girls are seen as good strategists, leaders…smart.

Girls who were considered shy are finding that although they may be quiet on the playground, their feet are loud on the soccer field.  Girls who may have been labeled as small and "dainty" are fast and quick to weave in and out of a bunched up group of opponents dislodging a ball and sending it downfield to another teammate. 

"Girlie-girls" (a term that is nigh to a fifth grade slur) are proving they have what it takes to head-butt a ball, take an unintended hip-check with barely a flinch, and spread that nasty black grease under their eyes to cut down on the sun glare from perspiring cheeks.

Soccer affords our girls the opportunity to look at each other and themselves through different eyes.  Eyes that are eager to find the best in one another, because by expecting and encouraging the best in each other they all do better…and the team wins…sometimes on the scoreboard, but always in the ways that really matter.  They are scoring kindness, forgiveness, persistence, patience, unselfishness points at every practice and every game.

And as a mom, I am thrilled each Saturday.  From where I sit I get to watch my daughters do something they really love.  The other day I was watching one of them on the field and I had the sense that I was watching a creature in its natural habitat.  As a young woman I had the privilege of watching sporting breeds in tall grass work a field during competitive trials.  The dogs would get out into the grass and you could see that they were happy.  Dogs that spent most of their time curled up on cut-loop carpet in the living room were flushing and pointing and working the field one section at a time as strategically as my grandmother used to work a crossword puzzle.

When I saw our daughter on the soccer field, running like a deer, cutting as quickly as a mustang on a high country meadow, her ponytail flying behind her in the hot wind of an Indian summer day, it brought tears to my eyes.  She was doing what she loved and she was perfectly suited to it.  It was a perfect moment for me as her mom.  Watching her brought tears to my eyes. 

I know she is not isolating her abilities to the soccer field.  In fact I have seen her express a new confidence since the soccer season started.  She is applying some of the new-found inner strengths and strategies that she has discovered through soccer…persistence, discipline, approaching a problem from different angles before "giving up the ball"…to her homework.

There are so many soccer fields out there…community service, the arts, social activism…for each of us to discover new ways of looking at ourselves and finding treasures in the depths of ourselves that we haven't yet plumbed. 

Thanks Coach Steven and Chris, Ridley and…now Helen!!  For showing me what can happen when a soccer field becomes a sea of midnight velvet on which the facets of our daughters as diamonds, rubies, sapphires…and purple panthers…sparkle and shine in new ways

"…that our daughters may be as corner stones,
polished after the similitude of a palace"
– Psalms

"She's just dancing
She's just dancing,
understand
She's just dancing,
Dancing to the band…"

Gratefully,
Kate