The Message of the Double Dorje
Copenhagen, September 21, 1987
Two days earlier, as we were leaving the concert in Rotterdam behind, about to walk out of the dressing room and begin the journey home – or, in Bob´s case, to a gig the next night in Hanover – he gave me the tour schedule and said to meet him in two days in Copenhagen at the hotel. I had already agreed, though it had taken some convincing, and promised I’d be there. I wasn’t sure what my role was, though he’d said, “You´re my dance teacher now,” with a big smile when I´d told him I had a job teaching dance I didn´t want to lose. But there was something else at work here, and it didn´t have a name. It had made itself known in the stillness between us after I´d asked him if he remembered being Shakespeare, something I had not intended to say out loud. In that stillness, a portal that opened, uniting the past and the future like opening a window uniting the inside and outside into one body of air. That shared state of awareness was complete in itself, but how it related to my role on the tour was a mystery, and my eyes and ears were hungry for clues.
His concert in Copenhagen was to start at nine, and I landed at three. I was anxious to get to the hotel, relax, talk to him (and make sure I wasn´t dreaming), and see if he wanted to do some pre-show movement like we´d done in Rotterdam. But as I was whisking my way through the airport, a strange-looking bronze pendant in a gift shop caught my eye and pulled me in. When I saw it a tiny bell rang in me which at first I thought was my Danish ancestors´ blood responding to some mystical Viking code in the design. It was, of course, a reproduction, from the collection of bronze-age jewelry found by the archaeological department of the Museum of Copenhagen in a Viking grave, from centuries before Christ. The equilateral cross had nothing to do with the crucifixion. I had one somewhat similar, but it was from Tibet, a Buddhist symbol called a double dorje. How did these two cultures, worlds apart, arrive at the same symbol? When I held it in my hand, I knew it was a message for me, but it took a while to decipher it.
