THE FAT BALLERINA

She wasn't a ballerina, of course. Fat, yes; ballerina, no. A ballerina is the top female dancer of a professional company, top of her craft, dancing all the major rôles in all the major cities: Gisèle, Aurora, Juliette, Odette, that sort of thing. Paris Stockholm London. No, she just did ballet. Lots of it, mind: five lessons a week and practice at home every morning as dawn rose. She performed in the odd children's show: the Queen of Hearts, Cinderella's Ugly Stepmother, that kind of thing. When the show called for someone taller or more substantial than the leading sixteen-year-old, someone to play a parent figure believably, or just plain someone ugly who could do comedy and look, well - big. And one day she met a man and he didn't notice her (because she was fat) but they became jolly good chums (because she was nice and vitally alive and fun to be around) and, inevitably, they fell in love, she developed self-confidence, she lost weight dramatically and discovered that under all the lard she was actually beautiful after all, so she started using make-up seriously and they got married and lived happily ever after. Of course. But all that is merely the detail: what really matters is how she lost all that weight - or why, or what catalysed it. Because of course, she had always carried that possibility within her, and she had hitherto always ignored the knowledge of that possibility. So why did she do it now, and why not before? That is the crux of it, and of course you want to know so that you could do it the same way and get thin and beautiful and married and happy too, don't you? But it doesn't work that way, like with Christ - you know, he said be perfect even as I am perfect, and they all thought he meant follow the sandal, in other words, be celibate and fast in the desert and wander round telling the world to love each other, and, ideally, walk on water. But what if he meant more - ask questions of the learned cliques (and the dumb ones) even when it pissed them off? Study under wise and knowledgeable scholars from far-off lands and different apparent religions? Break the law if common sense and need appeared to indicate that it would be best? Live according to one's own very different truth, even to the point of seemingly opposing most of the truths everyone thought most important? Allow one's own power to resonate through one from one's own centre, find one's own path - and then put up with all those crowds of lazy or desperate seekers trying to grab the secret and the power off you and repeat it themselves without the hard and harrowing parts? Four-step Christianity was there right at the start, wasn't it? To be continued