Essence

I am eleven years old when I first feel the sense of freedom that comes from the rhythm of techno moving through my body.

It is a vivid memory, and yet an imaginary one.

I remember the darkness after the sun had set, fairy lights strung from the wooden bar roof like fireflies marching in a row. Blue, yellow, purple, violet fireflies, radiating their color across the sand and my bare child feet. Around me, chatter, the 4/4 bass kick, the sound of Berlin in summer. The Spree moving slowly past in its own music, toward the television tower blinking in the night. A river being itself.

It was there, between light and shadow, close enough to the speakers to be absorbed fully by the vibration, that I danced.

Sometimes when I return to this memory, there is a full moon. Sometimes other people are dancing too. My mother. Sometimes the adults sit in the beach chairs, drinking, talking the way we talk now. But the most imprinted memory is me, alone, drifting in my own world, touching the beat in a way that made me feel alive.

I already had my wild curls back then, twirling in and around my face the same way they still do today when I fall into that trance. When I dance, I am in my body, connected to the rawest version of who I am.

That night, for the first time, someone told me I danced beautifully. They said it to my mother, who kept a watchful eye on me while she talked with friends. That someone, whose name and face have faded, invited us to a party a few weeks later on the Island of Youth, a small island in the middle of the river, and another childhood place.

What stayed was not the event itself, but the realization that an energy inside me had reached someone else, and opened up a new possibility.

It would not be the last time.

There is a difference between dancing alone in the kitchen or under the star-dotted sky on a walk and dancing in a space with people; both are needed to alter consciousness.

Dancing by myself calms my nervous system. It helps me feel and move through emotion, a kind of meditation. My body floats in a threshold between space and time.

Dancing to techno with a crowd does something different to the brain. At twenty-five, heartbroken and lost, I danced like stepping into a room full of golden light. It brought me back to life.

It is the exposure of that self in relationship to others. Existing together as real versions, no one hiding, no one pretending. The repetitive, hypnotic pulse moves us into time with each other; synchronizing our brainwaves until the self and other become one whole.

As the individual self dissolves into the collective, I remember, I begin to remember myself.

It is the only space where we are with other people but do not have to navigate social cues. Judgment, expectations and performance do not exist — you are held by the lights, the rhythm, the connection — vulnerable and protected at the same time. Techno is a universal language without lyrics. It is free of cultural instruction and identity. You belong without trying to fit in.

Part of what matters is simply knowing such spaces exist.

Oststrand was such a place, because of how it brought together a mix of people. The beach bar emerged in 1993 as an artificial stretch of sand on the Spree, beside the East Side Gallery, what remains of the Wall. It belonged to a Berlin that no longer exists.

Returning to that moment, I called up my mother because she was there.

I had been reflecting on an idea from the regenerative educator Carol Sanford: that each of us carries an essence, an essential uniqueness that is not our skill, personality, or purpose, but the thing that makes us irreducibly ourselves.

She asked, "What is a childhood story that still speaks to you today?"

This is the memory that came to mind.

My mother remembers that evening as vividly as I do. She had carried her own pieces of the memory, had been asking friends from that time, “Do you remember those sand dunes along the Spree?” She could not recall the name, and nobody she asked could locate it, as the sand had long been replaced by grey concrete.

“I used to sit on these dunes with my headphones, listening to music,” she said.

Our conversation became a puzzle, returning her to the place she remembered but could no longer detail, and, in return, completing what had initially emerged in me from that story.

The fractured images, sometimes me dancing alone, sometimes the adults dancing too, had often felt like imagination filling the gaps, the full moon probably still is. Somehow, I had assumed I had also invented the part where other people danced. But my mother remembered. I had been dancing alone, just me, in the sand. And then my energy filled the space; more and more people stood up from their chairs and started dancing too. Something that became possible not through words or invitation, not through telling, but by creating an atmosphere: my dancing had moved someone else, literally.

Like the river, I was simply being myself, and like blue, yellow, purple, violet fireflies, I brought a place to life.

I hope something in these letters moves inside you, even for a moment. Thank you for your attention and your time. It is a gift to be connected through words.

With love, Zaza