of holidays and that vague sense of melancholy

so, there's nothing bad happening here, well except for my step-father having a back fracture and being in a ton of pain and my mother who has a series of illnesses trying to care for him while my husband and I are trying to be helpful by cooking and cleaning and such...
and I feel melancholy and wonder why...hmmm...I remember this from my last visit in September too.  It's all under the surface, everyone putting on a good front and all that.  I'm also scared shitless about an MRI coming up but not telling anyone especially my parents as I don't want to add to their burdens, so lucky you who read my blog...here it is.
Also the anniversary of my cat dying on Dec. 28 and my father dying on Jan. 7 coming up and all that makes me feel light-headed...plus the feeling I should stay here and take care of my parents but knowing they won't ask etc.  Probably should have gotten to an AA meeting yesterday but did not and friends coming around soon so little chance of that today.  And then sometimes I wonder if it's all just a selfish desire to change my feelings and perhaps this feeling of melancholy just needs to be accepted.
on the good news front, someone is interested in working on one of my texts for the theatre, who like isn't me, so that will be interesting if it happens.  Also in a part of the world I've never had any dealings with on the West Coast so that is also interesting...
dealing also with feelings of Sheer Exhaustion also coming on now...somehow feeling overwhelmed with both sadness and tiredness so I think it's time to take a nap before enforced socializing takes place.
I hope you and yours are having a good holiday time and if not, remember, this too shall pass.
From the land of moose and snow,
be well.

a peaceful day

a note to mark a peaceful day.  one in which after meditation I realized for a variety of reasons, I'm actually an OK person and that underneath all of my obsessions and worries usually lies a germ or mountain of self-hatred.  Somehow that is beginning - just for today - to dissipate and for that I am profoundly grateful.  I am taking better care of myself and enjoying the peacefulness of a rural part of the country in the snow.  I am even enjoying being home for the holidays, which in and of itself feels like a miracle.  No sense of self-surrender or exhaustive need to hold boundaries but instead just a sense of peace.
had weird dreams last night and glad to have woken up from them.  the other day a dream of someone walking out of a video projection and the projection staying on them somehow or was it the other way around?  In any case, something quite interesting.
there are ducks on the pond swimming and on ice.  there is peace for today and for that I am grateful.  these are the joys of living so simple...
blessings to all for the holidays and New Year.  I wish you all the peaceful knowledge that you are OK.  This may sound kind of lame but for me it's a revelation.

on the train again...

hey everyone,

so I'm on a train again.  feeling quite drained and going between feeling that's OK and then thinking it's weird and distressing.  have some big medical tests upcoming so I'm somewhat frightened.  On the other hand it's been a bitch of a year, I've been traveling a lot and now going up to my parents' house where my stepfather has just come back from the hospital with a back fracture.  In other words, an Al Anon forest fire.  Also sad about some recent misfires in what I had hoped would be a nice reunion.  Am still not clear about whether to continue this blog or not or go anonymous purely but for now I'm still here.

And yes for anyone who wonders about the exhaustion thing, I will be getting checked again for anaemia, thyroid etc. am scared I will end up with chronic fatigue like my mother has but hoping not.  Something about the whole physical business I find scary.  Also I find when others judge me in any way, or I feel I'm being judged, I get scared.  I think this is a hold over from childhood stuff.   Where to be judged was to be punished.

listening earlier to Gertrude Stein talking about her work and I loved how she rebuffed the 'it's incomprehensible' criticism by basically saying, no, it's not.  And the way she answered, with such wit and ability to turn around the question to her advantage, I envy that.  Just had a meeting with someone about a possible show and find myself sometimes so inarticulate or somehow thinking I have to have an answer for every question or assuming if someone asks if I will have a so and so or such and such person I need to have that person already lined up.

By now, by now, by now I think I should be Over this...sigh.

It's snowing outside...first time I've seen snow here.  Where I live now that usually does not have snow has been deluged.

Well my friends I wish I had something more interesting to say but fear not...except that I'm angry that my country of origin wants to assassinate a guy who is the messenger (Wikileaks) rather than examine itself and am happy that my adopted country is filled with angry people right now who are protesting a lot.

I am praying for my sense of health and well-being to return and for some answers about where I should focus my energies...and if there is some retreat I should go on or something along those lines for that to be shown to me...and at the very least some serenity and not a freak out and fighting whatever needs to be healed.  I am I can say fighting a feeling of doom - that no matter what I do ever something bad happens or that because I feel I'm through the grieving for my father therefore now someone else will have to die or I will be sick or something.  A Job complex in short.

I'm writing a lot about Job these days.  

OK, getting close to end of train journey so will wrap this up.

Please send me healing energies if you believe in such things.

love and blessings for the winter solstice

a quick hello

Hi, have been very busy with various projects so haven't had time to write.  The good news they are mostly creative, the bad news is there are too many of them.
Saw students perform last night and that was gratifying, lots of people RSVPing for a new showing of work I'm involved with and that too is gratifying.
As for the deeper emotional territory, I can't go into that right now for a variety of reasons, but as my last post was what it was, I wanted to write something to update it.  Sometimes I find in creative work a way to work through stuff that no other more 'direct' work does.
FYI, I may also shut down this blog soon, as I'm having second thoughts about it.  If that happens, I will write a farewell post.  But for those of you who have done so, thanks for listening/reading non-judgmentally.

Sad Mad Not Glad

Maybe it's Tuesdays and post-therapy don't know but very sad...also a new friend the other week told me about her still-birth and that was very sad.  I'm mad at God, Goddess, It, Whatever...have feelings whether rational or not of being 'punished' and sick of hearing people saying to me in dulcet tones 'you've had a bad few years haven't you?' as if this is some revelation.  No one means it that way, it's meant to be sympathy but because of the twisted space I can get into it feels shameful when I hear it.

Reading Job recently, no joke, Book of Job, to wrap my soul around this stuff and it's helpful actually, in that weird Old Testament kind of way...and then someone reminded me tonight at an AA meeting of a prayer I repeated that I had heard which is 'It is.  Thank you.'  And that helped.

But still I'm mad, really mad, because for all of my yammering on about allowing for a Higher Power's will etc. in the end I'm pissed off that I'm in peri-menopause and don't have a child and I feel insanely guilty for not having done artificial stuff and also for not wanting to jump into adoption, which Everyone mentions.  And it just makes me feel guilty.

My therapist would tell you this is all Good news because I'm Feeling it and I think Fuck You Bitch, I don't want to Fucking Feel it!  Even if I know it's good for me, etc., etc...Fuck Off!  And I feel this Rage these days when I do yoga, which is hilarious and true and means I'm closer to my body and then I feel this Need to Express my Rage and don't know how the Fuck to do that and feel I'm supposed to Liberate Myself by running down a road Screaming and feel too self-conscious to do That so feel ashamed and there I am on my therapist's fucking carpet, well the room in the Building Where Therapy Happens, staring at it, feeling about 3, wanting to be taken care of, wanting to disappear, wanting something Anything to take these feelings away and as per usual I am Stone Cold Sober...

and Nothing is going to take the fucking feelings away...like ever apparently.

I'm reading, by the way, not a cheery book but a fucking great one which I can't believe I haven't read before called The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and all I can say is if you haven't read it, read it.  It's a gift from God - the good one, the one I don't Fucking Hate right now...

AAAAiiiiiEEEEE
etc.

I'm writing again, that's the good news, not just here but in two other places...a probable stage text and another thing about my ex-husband and me called 'The God Thing' - anyone who knows that story will understand the title.  If you don't, wait for the book (she said hopefully) - it will come out anonymously and will be called 'The God Thing'...if I ever Fucking finish it...The names will be changed to protect the guilty and innocent all of whom could be harmed....

I am So Angry...I'll bet that comes as a huge surprise to y'all.  I know this is all Good for Me, but honestly I feel like a lost 4 year old and it's scary, sad and scary and sad.  I have to remember I have an adult present and writing this blog is somehow so weirdly healing...I don't even understand why and like who cares...it's working right at this moment as I'm writing this.

Those of you who read this I wish I could explain to you how much that means, though I have a feeling putting this out there no matter what is the point.

I pray to the Powers that Be, that my anger can send a flame through the darkness and that I will be able to let it go but also let it be...that I don't do extra damage by demonizing myself for these feelings and that I find a way to make peace with it all, not in some fake pseudo-spiritual way but in a real way...not to let anyone off the hook who actually harmed me or who has harmed others but so I can stop feeling all this rage, which at this point, let's face it, is only hurting me.  And if the price of that is letting the motherfuckers off the hook then so be it, but there better be a Damn good reason.

Signing off, in rage and solidarity with Whomever...

Still teary but better

Hi everyone,
Just wanted to quickly write and say I'm not in the excruciatingly horrendous place I was when I wrote the last post.  I'm still quite emotional and have since found out that being menopausal or peri-menopausal means that hormones are all over the shop and depression is part of it...I'm also light-headed a lot which is hard, too.  Went to doctor and will have MRI and will see if my fall last April is the culprit here or what.  I find not knowing what's going on with me physically very scary.  I'm also proud of myself for going to doctors and insisting on care, even if I then kind of back down and soft-pedal it...it's weird.
Was in therapy today and overwhelmed with the amount of times I said/say "I don't know" and a lot of times as an evasion...it's kind of depressing.
I'm exhausted now because I taught today early, was suddenly being peer-reviewed without notice and then to therapy then to an AA meeting so I'm on my last legs...
I'm grateful for having written the last blog and gotten some response and even before that could feel a response somehow...someone said to me this is 'outwarding' rather than the 'inwarding' of journalling and I think that's true...it's a burst of hope into the universe...perhaps someone somewhere will hear me or perhaps even more important, perhaps I will hear me through attempting to communicate outward or something...
Also was amazed when I asked my husband if something was really wrong with me if he'd come back from his long trip away and he said yes.  It made me cry with gratitude.  Does that sound sad to you?  It might unless like me no one ever left anywhere for you ever when you were growing up and spent days you were sick on a sofa at home while everyone was at work or were left with a psycho babysitter so your mother and step father could pursue their careers, etc...Then that moment means a lot.
I looked at him yesterday and realized - oh my God, he is my family.  He is.  This was a revelation.
Grateful for that.
So, now to bed before I fall over onto the keyboard...
Oh no, wait I lied...just a moment to say how exciting it was to watch a group of students today, again first generation to university, etc., doing a short performance including little pieces of text, whispering to individual audience members, leaving us with little shards of text written on paper like gifts, intimacy, cutting up, different levels of address and speaking into a mirror, using the whole space, being brave, brave, brave...makes me cry when this happens, so gorgeous...
ok now...for real, over and out...

Loneliness...

OK, so I didn't expect to be awake this late tonight and certainly didn't expect to be writing in the blog again so soon, but woke up or didn't sleep because feeling crampy from procedure and freaking out about if something went wrong and uterus perforated and that brought back the whole surgery I had in 2006 to be able to get pregnant in the first place and the nightmare of that recovery, which was followed by the miracle of pregnancy which was followed by the trauma of a miscarriage the day after my wedding...another surgery followed and no more pregnancies and now I'm too old for that to happen most likely and that whole train, along with my husband being away just made me cry and cry and cry...and I have to be up early tomorrow morning and I don't want to be awake and I don't want to be typing this but I can't think of who to call or should say the one person I felt I could call was not in and so here I am typing into the void into a place I don't know if anyone reads, well I know a couple people do but where I'm feeling increasingly lonely because no one comments on the blog even if I get back channel comments, and I know that sounds pathetic, etc...
So that's the state I'm in here at 1:45am my time.  Nice, huh?
I just feel lonely and sad, sad, sad that I don't have a baby and probably won't and don't have any family here where I live now at all and my husband is away a lot and I just feel lonely, lonely, lonely.  When at the hairdresser today the woman cleaning my hair asked if my family lived here and I said no and she had assumed I had brothers and sisters, which I don't and her whole family lives here, 6 brothers and sisters on one road and I almost burst out crying.  I feel so incredibly alone.
I have amazing friends here and everything but no one I feel I can call late at night when I feel like this, and I had those friends where I used to live and maybe even do here but I don't know who they are and I feel too remote from my friends now in my old home city to call them in this state and I know I can't call my husband in this state because phones and him don't work so well and so I just feel alone and lonely and this is a boring, boring post consequently.
Sorry for that, but felt this was my best chance of not ignoring this feeling or just crying my eyes out alone in bed.  Maybe a blog is the weirdest place to do this, I don't know...we'll see.
Heard an interview with Mike Leigh about his newest film and the woman acting in it about how loneliness is the most taboo thing, you can talk about anything else but this...so of course here it is on this blog.  Wish in a lot of ways I never told anyone about the blog because it's fucking embarrassing along with being excruciating, and I feel so ashamed...
I guess my only hope here is that I am not in fact alone and that others feel this, have felt this or at least can empathize.  I hear in that statement an anger, the anger of a child demanding parental love and that's even more embarrassing.
So here it is folks, me uncut, grieving, sad...sad, sad....
please send prayers if you believe in that sort of thing because I could use them.

All is well

So had the procedure mentioned in last post and all is well.  Just regular old hormone imbalance but nothing worse.  That's a relief.  Now I have to figure out whether to continue dealing with some other stuff or not.  Feeling massively relieved today though.

So the challenge if I choose to accept it for the rest of the day is: can she rest?  You know like not even be on here writing on the blog kind of rest.  Pray for me that I can as I need it.

And much gratitude to a very good friend who came along with me.  What a relief to have someone sitting there so when I'm having the deer in the headlights response to anything a doctor is telling me my friend has the wherewithal to record it on her phone.  Phew and wow.  I am having a hard time these days connecting with gratitude so wanting to write it anyway.

Hard time but good to seeing a friend with a child yesterday, it's always tricky territory and hearing stories of other friends having a hard time conceiving and all the happy, sad, scary, joy-filled stories.

Spent this past weekend videotaping leaves for a show and it was gorgeous.  Also the sense of power with a video camera is kind of amazing.  I've always been such a Luddite so this is big news for She who is Slow with technology.  Loving it.  It feels like a kind of 'writing'...

OK, feeling woozy so going off the computer now but wanted you to know I am OK.  Hope all are well.

Emerging from the Busy-ness Black hole

Hi there,
For anyone who actually reads this, I am sorry for such a long time between posts.  It has been a very full time recently, not all bad, some very good but the kind of thing where there's no time to keep up a blog.

I have been working a lot, teaching and such and also working with my artistic process.  Until today my husband has been home, which has been great but also means I have less time to myself.  I have found out he will be gone for three months next year and had a number of responses to that from sad to feeling quite OK about having time to myself, so like usual, a mixed bag.  My big discovery was though that when I allowed myself the sadness and didn’t judge it, it lifted enough so I could see the good side.  Whenever I judge feelings as bad or unworthy or scary or whatever, they get stuck and I can’t move past them.

I’ve also had to face recently and much to my horror how many resentments I actually still hold.  I think of myself as being so rigorous, etc. but then I see they really can pile up, the resentments and I see more and more how I feel I will be run over and turned to mush if I don’t keep them.  For someone who has been in recovery for ages this is quite humbling.  But it also makes sense.

I am also aware now of some people reading this blog so find myself somewhat more shy because of that.  Don’t know what to do about it but just saying it outloud and hoping that will be helpful.

I have a medical exam coming up on Tuesday and am somewhat terrified of that.  It’ll probably be fine but its gynecological and involves instruments and some level of pain so not fun.  Also a bit afraid of what they might find, though probably it’s just a fibroid, already known and some polyps.  The fun of being female just never stops.  Also I am having longer and more sustained hot flashes – already! – and I find this kind of sad, though I also have this other weird reaction – especially in winter – of oh good I’m not always so cold.  A kind of pride at being one of those people who can wear t-shirts in the cold.  Perhaps I should go into construction or start wearing short skirts to nightclubs in the middle of a snow storm.  Whaddya think?

Oh, I’ve had this horrendous realization recently that I do the thing I’ve always judged other people so harshly for, which is steer clear sometimes of people that I feel others may have a negative opinion of…not in the larger social sense but in the micro-sense.  So in other words: person A I’ve decided I respect and like a lot and they have a negative feeling about person B, who I know somewhat and perhaps have a neutral or positive feeling towards.  I then find myself subtly moving away from person B in response to the opinion of person A…etc.  Isn’t that horrendous?  It makes me feel very ashamed so I’m writing about it here as a way of kind of admitting ‘the exact nature of my wrongs’ as Step 5 says.  This same movement can happen within myself, too.  Say Person A thinks x emotion or kind of art or whatever is good and y emotion or kind of art is bad…again, I can ever so subtly watch my feelings shift about this stuff.  Again, horrendous!  Shameful!

And all based on: fear.  Fear that I am not worthy, not trust-worthy, can’t trust myself or my own opinions, feelings, etc.  Again, this seems So basic and like something I should be ‘over’ by now.  And if you knew me and what I do, you’d think: what? No! but it’s true, I know it is.  I think it’s why I’m so picky about friends or anyone I get close to because I know how influenced I may be by them.  And the even weirder thing is: if I feel something strongly in me and defend it, I feel as if I am ‘being defensive’ – so it’s hard to feel where to stand.

Now having said all this, I must add that I don’t do any of this as much as I used to do, and seeing it is a start to letting it go and probably means I already have begun to let it go…in fact haven’t really done this stuff in a while, but it makes me see why I resent it So much if I see anyone else doing this kind of thing.  And I know I’m capable of back-sliding at any time, especially when feeling afraid.

Other things I resent: people who I perceive are more successful than me, people who have things I want and don’t have (sometimes materially but often other stuff too, more intangible), people who don’t like me, people who ignore my artistic work, people who look down on me because I’m from another country, not being heard properly, not being acknowledged, being disrespected, the Tories, the Tea Party, the Democrats, Republicans, Labor, etc...

And what I am doing about all that is this: praying for all these people, daily and over and over again even though it makes me nauseous.  Why?  To be free of it.  I am sick of being a slave to my resentments.  I am sick of being afraid of letting them go.  I’m sick of feeling hypervigilant and like a boxer who always has to be ready to lash out.

Even in this crazy fucking global capitalist horror show, I don’t want to be kept in a box of eternal anger.  Not because it’s ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or even unjustified but because I want to be free of it.  If I can choose it OK but if it’s a knee-jerk reaction that is eating me alive, no, it’s not OK.

I am beginning with some positive work I am doing that is too hard to describe in words but has to do with connecting with some inner delicate place that I am allowing to emerge and involves play, I am finding some part of me that is not up for grabs and doesn’t have to do with stupid social status games and the like mentioned earler, that part of me that lived inside a nuclear bunker until I could allow her out.  Amazingly, she is still there.  She would have had to go into hiding pretty much from the gate, so I am amazed she exist and she is connected to something so much larger and in her I see the universe and it’s extraordinary…

And as I connect more with her, the other shell stuff falls away and I can ‘name it and shame it’ and begin to let it go.  And that protection I discovered in the shamanic healing is also helpful here because I know that is real too.  Because the fact is in the past I was attacked and attacked badly, so I cannot feel safe if I don’t feel there is any recourse to protection…

Now time to sign off and make calls to people who I have been neglecting in my mad schedule.

Would love to hear from any of you if you have any comments.  

Delights and miracles!

Hi everyone, so sorry for anyone who is actually reading this that I’m not posting more often but now that I’m home and teaching, etc. it’s harder to find time to write.  However, I imagine everyone else has busy lives so doubt you are waiting with baited breath for my every word, alas…

But, here’s the good news – there’s a new delight and lightness in my life.  It’s from many things but includes work I’m doing with my therapist and contacting a part of me that somehow stayed clear of all the bullshit when I was growing up, she’s quite young but lovely and loving and I’m setting aside time to play with her and it’s a delight.  I don’t know if I ever thought I’d use that word but there it is: delight.  Joyful, sometimes makes me cry too.

Speaking of which, in a class I was teaching, a woman came in and was doing something called Playback Theater, which is a way that actors recreate stories from audience member’s lives.  One of the students told a story of seeing his father for the first time when he was five and living in Nigeria and then again at 10 when his father got the family to London.  It was simple but quite extraordinary in its detail and loveliness (and sadness and pain and unexpected joy at the end), and the other students who were not yet trained in this type of theater did a good job portraying it.  At the end the ‘conductor’ asked what he thought and he was crying.  She was able to have him say he was OK even though crying, and it was all quite moving.  However, I was concerned for the student as I was afraid he might feel too exposed.  But then the second miracle of the day happened, right afterwards, a bunch of the other male students came up to him and were touching him and hugging him and making sure he was OK.  You have to realize when I write this that this is in a deprived area of the city, the kids are multi-cultural and none wealthy and that most of the men I’m talking about are straight, to understand what I saw and how unexpected in a good way it all was.  Female students were also very sympathetic, but that I kind of expect.  So, I realized he was in good hands and all was well.

I think it was the night before the miners were being rescued in Chile which also made me happy.  So there is a general lightness I am feeling and an amazement.  It reminds me of a time back when I was in college and directed The Serpent, which was a play by Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and it opened up my whole world – it was all about newness and the first time and the Garden of Eden and its destruction and something about it just opened me and it feels like that now again, but it’s my whole life, not just a play.  I wonder how this will play out in my work, don’t know yet.  But it’s so exciting to feel this again.  I never thought I would and certainly not at 47.  It’s amazing.

And then person after person I know comes up to me and says: you look great, you look so much calmer and happier.  It just keeps happening over and over.  So I am grateful for that and that is that.

I could go into a rant here about the government here and cutting education and how crazy they are, but I’m sure there are many who will do the same, are doing the same, have done the same and I doubt I will add anything particularly penetrating to that debate other than to say if folks start taking to the street, you’ll see me there cause the kids I’m teaching now no way are they there without a subsidized system and they deserve to be there and I hope we as a whole social body will fight for them and that they will fight for themselves as well.  The happy-clappy ruling class pseudo-hippie empowerment talk is nauseating and I hope we can all get off our collective i-pods and onto the street.

And for me, if I’m on the street, these days, I’ll be dancing. A happy warrior.

"Achieved small and uncreative things today"

This was the last amazing line of an email from a friend of mine recently who had had a sad day in response to something the day before and somehow it just seemed kind of gorgeous so I'm sharing it with you all (with her permission).

It is reminiscent of that moment after crying when all you can do is put on the kettle for tea or wash the dishes.  Somehow these things are OK after that, simple kind of lovely, definitely comforting.

I haven't written because upon my return I was suddenly given two university modules to teach and have been reeling with preparations and teaching.  Had a kind of scary therapy session in the middle of one such day because I was So tired that I was clutching the chair.  She asked me, the therapist, if I could like to lie down, No, no I said...realizing slowly how vulnerable I feel when tired and how my response to tiredness of that order is to Do More.  Terrifying memories of being with the crazy babysitter that held me hostage and realizing: I Can't Go to Sleep.  And this is still there, along with whatever body memories of sexual abuse.  Must remain vigilant at All Times.  Truly scary.

And as usual when saying it, letting it out, it somehow diminished a bit.  But here I am staring at her staring at me realizing I am Still stuck there after all these years, stuck in that room with that crazy woman and before that with a delusional and sick man, That room, it's horrifying.  And so like No wonder I have 'abandonment issues' which when stated that way sounds So lame...but yet, even though I sleep way better when I'm alone than when I'm with anyone else, I still fear being alone, even Though in my childhood, alone was one of the best options.

It's this thing, it's this...I keep Waiting for the Perfect Parent. STILL!  I am incredulous about this.  I am 47 for godsake.  47!  How the fuck did That happen?

OK, so OK, so OK...

This is where I am.

And I am looking the motherfucker right in the face, I am, and that is Something.  It might not be Everything.  But it is Something.  I feel this will move.  I do feel it will.  I do.  I never have before.  Let us pray it is so, that it will move.

And then as for My Life, I have begun teaching and in the first week I enjoyed it, especially that the group looks like the city I live in (diverse racially and culturally), and these are working class kids or poorer than that and they are studying theatre, which is moving beyond belief as none of them have been given the easy ride ticket through life, that much is Crystal clear.

And then now today, the kind of blmph feeling arrives of: oh, you're just a teacher now.  Even though I did a lab, even though I have work published, even though, etc...the 'teacher' mark is a hard one to shake, as some sign of failure of not-quite-there-ness and as my husband has received a wonderful grant and is going off to be a Real Artist, I sit around worrying about being Just a Teacher...never mind I haven't had even the slightest ability to write a grant proposal in the last months due to grieving, never mind that...I'm not a Real Artist because I'm teaching two university modules.

Christ on a stick.

I mean really...

But OK, so like it's crazy I know that...but still, but still, but still...I do fear losing my way, not giving myself the time I need to create, getting so caught up in students' needs (which I do So Quickly) that I lose sight of my own work, etc. etc...and yet I the fact is I don't Need to do it this way and I can do both and I do need the money...

On the good news side, the lab we did this week was amazing and there's some new exciting work coming out of it that has to do with sacred and with celebrity, two big topics of ours that have now merged into something quite interesting...the acid test is always the second lab...was it a fluke or are we onto something, we'll see.

Oh and the woman I'm teaching with on one of the modules is kind of great, perhaps a new friend, definitely an ally and that seems like a gift.  One of those gifts that comes along synchronistically when you're doing the right thing (note to self: it is actually conceivable that you are doing the right thing and these little narratives you make up wherein you are a loser no matter What you do may in fact be like wrong...shock horror)...

I am also applying for a residency that would give me time to work on a huge writing project that I don't know if I could accomplish any other way than stuck out in the woods in a studio 2 miles from the Atlantic...so if you believe in this kind of thing, please pray for me.  I could really use the break, for so many reasons, not only the writing project but also the affirmation of my work, of my writing of all the time I have spent for decades creating stuff...it'd be nice.

And before I sound too churlish a note of gratitude For the teaching work which will pay the bills for a few months and in this economy that is saying something, and for the university where I am teaching that actually pays a living wage and does not exploit their VLs...this, for those of you who don't do this kind of work, is rare.

And since I'm asking for prayers, let's add one of my students, who is 37 a 'mature student' who was born and bred in one of the most deprived areas in this city and still lives there with her 15 1/2 year old son.  She told me and I know she is right "It's a long way to fly [to get out of there]."  Helicopters over head at night a son who is afraid to be outside and she wants to be a teacher and get her son and herself out of there.  A prayer for her too.  She said to me as we were traveling in to the university, "You are living my bliss.  It makes me so happy to see that and gives me hope."  Damn, what can I say to that?  Here's to this student, that she can find what she's looking for and make that flight.

And here's to me realizing that I alone can't save her, because every fibre of my being wants to rescue her from everything and of course I can't and of course I want to and of course it's not up to me but of course I think it is...

Welcome to why for me teaching is so damn hard...

Except of course when I'm just teaching and we're grooving and it's all going beautifully and then it's a gift and fun and something else, something so special.  Seeing students in different parts of a room remembering something from their childhoods for an exercise, looking so gorgeous all engaged and so still.  Watching them have fun with an exercise I've invented and getting it...pennies dropping, aha moments, etc.  That's incredible shit.

Maybe this is the deal: it's about creating those moments...whether in my work, in my teaching, writing, life, in meetings, whatever...allowing myself and others to have the 'aha' moments, the prison breaks, the sudden extraordinary awareness...or as a hero of mine Joseph Chaikin once wrote (and I still have on my bulletin board all these years later): "To express the extreme joy of being alive in any given moment is practically impossible - and really worth trying."

Amen.

refrigerators, landlords and the Whole Thing

Hi everyone,
just for anyone who's been following and enjoying the Saga of the Refrigerator...yes, Virginia, we do now have a refrigerator but Not without drama-rama of landlord saying one place couldn't deliver and then another could and then freaking out (him that is, not me!) when I offered to help and then freaking out again when it got delivered as they forgot to call him so by the time he came over it was in place and he got angry at me for the fact it was in place as he had to take it back down to change the door...because of course I should know that right???  I kept telling him he wasn't angry at me but at the delivery people and his response to that was to say loudly that of course it wasn't my problem so please stop talking to him (for the record, I wasn't talking to him as I was in another room trying to get a module guide prepared for innocent undergrads) and then returning to say: you know what really upsets me is that the gas was left on when you were gone!  (This he had told me already and involved the time I was away and so Bill had left it on, but Bill was not there, so it was my fault, even though it wasn't)....
So Anyway, with my history especially, this was crazy making - I did raise my voice, louder than I ever do except when completely furious and said "You have to stop blaming me for things that are not my fault.  I will not accept this."  And this led him to continue to talk to himself as if I was talking to him, etc...
Anyway, I just finally ignored him, continued my work and he changed the door, etc...when he Finally left, I had a non-working refrigerator (which needed to 'settle' for 24 hours even tho the delivery people said 4 hours, my landlord would have Freaked Out if I turned it on before 24 hours, so I just thought, dear God, I can't stand it anymore, I'll wait 24 hours in case he decides to come in later and Check)...
So now today, it is working and it is tiny, which is a bummer except for the one good bit is I can now reach the freezer without a step-ladder, to get whatever teeny tiny thing we might put in there...etc.

Other than that...I suddenly was asked to teach two university courses and am now scrambling to get everything ready for that and my orientation tomorrow, and I feel not surprisingly like it's my first day at school...since it, well, is...this is a place I haven't taught before so it's exciting for that reason plus the fact I have designed one module and one I am teaching has been designed and I will have to read so much for that one I'll basically get a free class except I'm teaching it.

Grounding back in meetings, too, and saw a great friend yesterday and was able to make her dinner, which always feels good to do.  My husband is away and will be back tomorrow, so my jet lag has settled back in and I'm getting up later, etc.  I do this anyway when left to my own devices, but with teaching I need to get up earlier, so so so...

And now my mother just called and I had an OK conversation with her - but she went into the long Saga of the Stepson and the Ex-Wife and their two sons and I have a hard time listening because she talks about a dysfunctional active alcoholic family dynamic like it's something that is 'just so sad' while actually being judgmental and when of course she was the 'crazy woman' when I was growing up and has no self-awareness of that at all when talking about 'them' and 'that sad situation' which in the end is somewhat crazy-making for me.

What is it I wonder - you start getting better, healthier, lighter and then the stink bugs of the universe start coming after you...hmmmmm....

So this is clearly the Venting Blog tonight folks...sorry if it's tedious.  But then again I have to keep remembering this is for my healing in the end and only if it is that can it possibly be of use to anyone else...speaking of which a person in my meeting was speaking about absolutely horrendous abuse from her childhood and I remember when she first came around the meetings and she was Angry and luckily for her she Knew it and she would rant and rave and I thought...hmmm...this chick has a chance, she's being honest...and now, a few years later, she's on her way to some sanity and serenity and she's still amazingly dynamic and gorgeous and great but she's not so tortured and damn if that isn't a miracle, especially with her background which involved systematic abuse.  It is so inspiring this AA thing, I just can't even explain how many miracles I get to witness on like an almost daily basis.  Blessed, blessed, blessed, I am...yes for all the psychic stink bugs - I am one of the lucky ones, and I know it.  And that's a blessing too.

So now what I should do with all this gratitude in this moment is stop blogging and start reading the material I need to teach on Tuesday so I can be free to be 'oriented' tomorrow.  Oh, during a strike in public transport too!  Hooray!

Oh that reminds me, before I go do what I should, one more rant: the Conservative Government here is Hellbent on Destroying Everything...it's incredible.  I mean they may be changing some things that need to be changed, but as I am from the US where there are checks and balances, watching this freight train of Total Change coming my way (and it does look from my angle like the lights of the oncoming train and Not the light at the end of the tunnel...) wow, it's scary.  I know in the larger cosmic scheme of things, all is well and whatnot, but down here on the ground, yikes!

More will be revealed....and it might not be pretty....but then again, who knows?  Weird things happen all the time and perhaps the law of unintended consequences might bend into the light this time.  That would be amazing, but wasn't I just talking about miracles before?  Maybe the final the big one the miracle of miracles Will occur and people will Wake the Fuck Up to what is going on with global capitalism...but there I go again...dreaming...

be well, my friends and sweet dreams...

OK so this is home - wild + miracles!

So, I've discovered by coming home to where I live that while it doesn't always feel like home, it is home.  So when jet lagged and on the bus back from the train station and I see the regular fake homeless guy outside the run down-still-disputed-and-not-yet-renovated-boarded-up-cinema-that-may-become-a-Brazilian-church, I think OK yeah, I know this place.  (By the way, the fake homeless guy is fake because his skin is clear and washed, his clothes are clean and he just does not have the conviction or desperation of the real homeless, like the ones in the U.S., who have leathery skin, a haunted, hungry look and usually smell incredibly bad because they actually don't have a shower option.  Also my adopted country has an incredibly liberal housing policies and you have to basically be beyond caring to not have at least hostel accommodation and basic benefits.  Plus the two fake homeless guys in the area also have pink mobile phones and share a sad looking dog and hat.  Seriously.)

Home itself was a bit rockier, with a refrigerator gone (one will be here on Saturday - finally!) and stuff a bit askew as my husband has been traveling too.  Had a good cry the next morning after many hours of sleep and so landing, landing gradually here.  Home is where you can cry your eyes out maybe?

Also going to my AA meeting where I have been going for years and seeing people I haven't seen for 3 weeks who actually missed me, and knowing, just knowing I was in the right place.  Then seeing a friend with terminal cancer in the meeting and her sadness, holding her through some of it, her being scared of results of tests that day, then the joy at getting her text that part of the cancer cleared - actually just Went Away!  Which is amazing, amazing, amazing...we have all been praying for her, keeping in touch and supporting how we can.  She has stayed incredibly strong, been reaching out for help while supporting her son and husband through all this as they support her.  And she's only 2 years sober...it is truly inspiring and gives me so much hope.  And I get to know all this and be a part of all this because I've been going to the same meeting for Years and gotten to know a lot of people there.  This is a miracle too.

Then the scary bit today: back to the therapist - yikes!  The Really Good Therapist who just doesn't let me get away with Anything...scary, scary...and amazing.  And realizing how deep my abandonment issues go and how much work there still is to do and hoping I have both the time and money to keep up the work because I can finally see light at the end of the proverbial tunnel on this stuff but know there's still some mining operations left to do and some tricky maneuvers...so, we'll see but today I'm thinking, I will commit to 6 more months and see this thing through.  So sick of stopping just short of the mark and thinking, oh, it's OK, I can get the rest of this On My Own...etc.

Yesterday got on the wrong bus home being more jet lagged than I thought but no harm done, just a little more walking.

Start teaching some classes next week and need to prepare for that, also do some rewrites after letting the reading settle and keep track of dates for this and that...but want to keep my creative work at the forefront, it's been getting swamped in the endless swamp of 'admin' lately and this needs to shift.  I'm weirdly looking forward to the teaching as I want to make it fun and have decided I will learn stuff too.  Don't want it to be paint by numbers but a creative adventure of its own.  I am told the students are engaged and engaging, so this is great news.  That always makes it a pleasure.

So here's to creativity and service, wild rides and finding home...happy October!

Where is Home? - the Expat Lament

I'm packing now and sad to be doing so.  Glad I will see my husband and friends in my adopted city soon but sad to be leaving the one place that feels like home...actually, there are two places now, but this is one of them.  Another is an obscure little island in Scotland.

The reading went well and I wish I could work that momentum, stay here and see the project forward but instead must do the wrenching leaving thing again...and back to what resembles something like real life after a long flight.  To a place that because of my accent will probably never feel like home, even if there are people there who are very, very dear to me and I know if I left that city, I would miss it too.  This is what happens.  Seven years in another country and you can't shake that place either.  I think if I moved back here, where for seven years every time I've visited I've been on holiday, I would miss the other place and vice-versa.  There is no re-do or undoing of experience.  It's so strange that way.

I cried last night because of the stress now over of the reading, because I felt lonely afterwards without having my husband around to celebrate or just to play backgammon with and chill out or talk about what happened and all that.  So I am a person torn by many competing demands and ideas and goals and desires.  Or I could say it this way: I have a full life that spans continents and I am lucky for that.  And both are true.

I should finish packing now, typing this is a way to delay that last step and go back to where I am a 'permanent resident.'  but is it home?  Especially if the refrigerator isn't working?

We'll see...maybe the refrigerator will be working and maybe I'll feel like I'm home.  Life continues to surprise me.  What will be unique is that my husband will be there when I get home and that hasn't happened in a long time since we both travel so much, he more than me.  A home-coming therefore will happen, and for this I am grateful...

But still I feel sad...comings and goings for someone who was forced to move so many times when I was young and usually each move was to someplace worse...well, it's hard.  So probably packing and a nap will be a good thing.

Next blog will happen where I live and not in transit most likely.  Hmmmmm.

fear of exposure

Hi there folks.  Tomorrow my work gets exposed, which feels like I'm getting exposed.  Had a long rehearsal today and was scared and happy and scared again as I had to confront a more traditional approach to work I have developed over time into a far more experimental approach.  People were game and there was willingness to see how it worked but a certain limitation in terms of understanding what 'it' and 'works' might mean.  I'm playing around with some recognizable conventions so there is a temptation to read the whole thing within that frame, but it simply can't be read that way without delimiting it.  On the other hand, it's a draft of a piece and so it does most likely need more work and right now I can't see what is mine to change and what is stuff that needs to change in the approach.

This is the great experiment in working with a director who is Not Me.  Scary, scary, scary.  And probably good, I guess.  Jury's out and I'm sorry if I'm boring anyone who may be following this blog with this story but at least you know this part ends tomorrow.  I also know I can take on someone else's POV, especially if it's critical of me, so the combo of the 'normal theatre' onslaught plus knowing people Of Stature will be at the reading, etc., etc. makes me nervous that I will cave and suddenly start trying to make the play Look More Normal...which is ridiculous of course since I couldn't do that if I wanted to...but still.

OK, so I need to go to sleep now as much work awaits in the morning including buying stuff for reception and hopefully getting up early enough for a much-needed AA meeting to ground me in the greater reality: it's just a reading!!!!

But still, because I believe in this kind of thing, if around 3pm Eastern Time you find yourself thinking of me and this event, please send along a kind thought or prayer or whatever works for you.  Because I can use it.  I can use the energy I feel from you already.

Love and good wishes....from my heart to yours.

Lost My Address Book!

Eeeek!  I got back to where I'm staying and can't find my address book that I have prided myself on keeping All These Years - well over 10 years...I used it on the train and must have let it slip out of my purse somehow and I am mortified.  That plus finding out from my husband that our refrigerator isn't working even though I'm not even there is making me feel out of control.  But the address book makes me sad.

I'm landing back in a place I love but no one is here.  Feeling lonely and sad.  Imagine in about an hour I will feel happy to have some space.  Right now feel all turned around.  Please say a prayer for my address book, it is a little piece of history and it is gone.

Maybe it means I'm supposed to let some of that history go, in fact I'm sure that's what it means if it means anything.  My ex-husband's old details are still in there, in fact I got it soon after we split and still put him in as my emergency contact...since updated but crossed out from when it was.

Maybe it's time to let him go?  Whaddya think?  Meanwhile, if you know me, know that I don't have your number or address anymore and please send it!

Is it sad to be writing this on a blog?  I don't know but grateful to have the outlet...even if it means showing you I get lonely and sad, which fills me with shame....even though all the rest of humanity feels these things too...it's OK for y'all but for me???  NOOOOO.

OK, so yes, obviously yes...

love to whoever reads this and to all the rest of you, too.

“I’m On The Bus”

This is the newest great line of the 21^st Century said chirpily into cell (mobile) phones everywhere…so it it’s good enough for Everyone Else, it’s good enough for my blog.  As I am in fact ‘on the bus’ – waiting before leaving for another bus station in another North Eastern city. 

And here’s the miracle, my friends, I enjoyed visiting my parents (mother and step-father no. 3 – long story, if you don’t know it already, don’t stress even my long-term therapist can’t keep track of my family…You Are Not Alone…).  But at first, was hard, with my mother (aka from shamanistic healing session below ‘the spider’).  I could feel the sense of suffocation and was thinking, damn, damn, it didn’t stick, but then a mixture of reaching out to my friend who worked with me and then also beginning to speak finally.  Speak my truth as we used to say in some remote decade since gone and it sounds quaint now post-deconstruction, etc…’truth’ what dat?  Yeah, yeah yeah…I know all that I wrote a fucking PhD on that, but still…that’s what I did, so fuck ye who would be cleverer than thou…thank you.

OK, so enough griping.  The good stuff.  I could breathe, in situ.  In the ‘heart of the beast’ which of course shrunk the beast because of course at this stage in my life ‘the beast’ is no longer my actual mother but an image of her I have created and old habits, etc.  The miracle, which always works is that when my behaviour and outlook changes, miracle of miracles, others do too!  Or even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t have the same effect on me.

So I was able to look through old 70s photos with her, tell her I couldn’t hack in anymore when I mentioned something from my childhood, she would top it with a story from hers (old pattern: my childhood sucked, but hers really sucked, to the tune of no memories from ages 8-13, etc…).  And she heard me and I watched her stop herself from doing that after I said this.  Also she heard something I said about my relationship with my ex-husband she had never heard before (and believe me I had said it before) that gave her an insight into her relationship with my last  step-father (that’s the gay one…believe me, my one family could populate a Russian novel written by Oscar Wilde…oh that would be good wouldn’t it???).

One of the hardest things in dealing with my mother was her constant implied or overt justification for all of her current behavior due to the past, including towards me.  And while it’s still there, I see a shift and this is great.  And that’s because, most likely, there’s a massive shift in me…so the shamanistic healing work held even through this test, hurrah!

Also, I am very clear now that I made that little moss church on the rocks in Maine for the healing 40 years later.  I know this sounds hooey, but I know it’s true.  Time is not linear.  It just isn’t.  That is my experience.

I find the breathing difficulty coming back a little whilst writing this which is curious, maybe the fear, the fear of telling, of saying anything bad about my mother, which of course was so much a fear growing up I never even thought a bad thought about her – it was cut off at the pass…

Also the fear, especially because of her (as she called it) ‘aha moment’ about her last husband that I am subtly or not so subtly becoming, continuing to be her AA sponsor/therapist etc…I don’t want this role nor have signed up for it but as I grow and share stuff with her it affects her…good or bad?  Not so sure.  Leave that one up to the universe to sort out.

And now I’m on my way back to the Big City to have a public showing of some of my work.  Scared and excited in equal measure about that.  Did I mention yet I have no visible means of support?  I feel so weirdly free and that probably has something to do with Not Having a Job.  OK, so I have to do some work when I get back to my adopted Big City in The Old World, but I mean it’s not a real job…as a matter of fact at 47 I am proud to announce I have never had a real job.  Should I be proud of this?  Don’t know, but the artist part of me, i.e. the central part of my entire existence, is happy about this…however, the other part of me that knows I live in Anglo-Saxon cultures that simply do not acknowledge creative work as work is one of the reasons I feel this way.

I was able to discuss with my mother and stepfather the Big Writing Project, which I have embarked on – not this blog but something else, and that was good too.  Because they got it to a large degree and my mother surprised me by getting a particularly complex bit and explaining it to my stepfather.  Some of this blog may end up in that project, but not sure yet…so far leaving this as what it is – open, discussion-based not particularly ‘writerly’ – however, there’s a freedom here that may be useful too…not sure.

I think that large writing project, however, if it does get done and I sure as shit hope it does, may have to be published anonymously, though not sure about that either, as I want to work between fact and fiction in a certain way that publishing may be possible under my name.  This whole issue of exposure is such a huge one for me.  Growing up I had to be as invisible (except for certain accomplishments that were acceptable) as possible, certainly anything I actually felt or thought, which as mentioned above were so buried I didn’t even know what they were…So to even expose myself in this way – anonymously – seems like a huge risk but with my name, oy.  That’s not just about the anonymous program stuff, that’s about visibility and risking it.

The piece that is happening on Monday, the person directing it will not be taking the risks I usually do, but I told him that’s OK as I know I grew into all that and did not go barreling down the road I’m on now all at once.  I am curious too, very curious, to see how this will play out.  My work will be visible on a different level to a different kind of audience and that’s scary and exciting as I’ve already said.  Can it survive?  Will it be OK?  Is it OK to make people angry?  Scared?  Excited?  Laugh? 

All of that at once?

The trees are changing, leaves of bright yellow, orange and red…the dance of autumn perhaps my favorite time of year and one I usually miss in NE USA.  So grateful to see it now.

I’m meeting someone soon who I met online in a meeting, on her first day sober.  Never met her in person before.  That was a year and a half ago, we ‘met’ when I wrote about how scared I was, and I was terrified, whilst writing the draft of my PhD (in May and it was due in July).  I just shrieked in words much to the consternation of more orthodox AA folk who thought I Wasn’t Sharing the Message.  However, this woman, who was attending her first meeting, thanked me for my honesty and she is still sober today…which leads me to a new thought, which I shared in a meeting yesterday: Honesty is Service.

Any alcoholic worth their salt who walks into an AA meeting for the first time will have his/her ear pricked up and ready to hear bullshit and upon hearing bullshit will think: bullshit and walk out.  An alcoholic who hears the truth about his/her condition from another alcoholic – and this includes Feeling Everything and Total Fear, etc… will know she’s in the right place and maybe will stick around for me.  Happy clappy talk about being free and happy said through clenched teeth aint gonna cut it.  Not for a suffering alcoholic.  But that’s me and my opinion…having said that, there probably are people who walk into an AA meeting and need to hear happy clappy talk and that’s what keeps that person sober.  This is why it is So Good none of us, including me, runs the show…we’d ruin it with Our Big Ideas about What Everyone Needs… when we just don’t fucking know…

Thank you again God/dess for saving us from ourselves.

It’s lovely writing all this stuff to you, whoever you are who read this.  I know some of you and don’t know others and there’s something amazing about that.  Thank you for reading.  I think I will sign off now and post this.  Time to look at leaves and puffy clouds….

The Verdict

So, my verdict on the shamanic healing mentioned in second to last post, is that it has had a very good effect.  I feel calmer, stronger and somehow more protected, and so far it’s holding.  That is lovely.

I am on a train again, which seems to be my favorite place so far to write blog posts and it is blue blue blue outside and sunny, just perfect.  Going up to visit my mother and step-father and go through the ‘70’s box’ of photos and writing and such.  My mother called to say she just found a novella I hand wrote in 1980 (it was 1980 folks and I am So Old I went to school Before Computers…ahhhh, ooooohhh). 

We are now at a stop that reminds me of the past, a Northeastern small city my father used to live and where I visited him in the 1970s before he moved out West.  He brought me to science museums, which I loved and art galleries, which I did not love.  How I ended up in the arts instead of as a marine biologist who would learn how to talk to dolphins and thereby save the world (the original plan circa 1977) is beyond me.  I loved dinosaur bones, chemistry sets, chess and such.  I also loved Barbie Dolls and playing games with my best friend (recently rediscovered) that involved animals, domesticated and wild, abused or pampered by owners…and in which we fought over who would play the victim.  Pause there for a moment to allow that one in…hmmmm….

And so here I am in that small city, also the place I was supposed to go to college but instead chose another place, a weirder, smaller more idiosyncratic place to go to school, having had it with being the scholarship kid amongst the children of the rich and famous who would themselves become rich and famous (which for the record they have, except for the ones who have died prematurely of drug and alcohol overdoses and cancers…)…but of course the place I went also had its share of these folks and an inordinate amount of people who now rule Hollywood…I of course work in basements making experimental work, which is something you really should Only do if you have a trust fund, but do I?  No, just the attitude.  Fab.

OK, so the next small Northeastern city we are about to arrive at is where I was born, and we lived for a whopping 2 weeks before moving to a small town in another Northeastern state.  It has a poetic name and sometimes makes me feel special.  We are now moving past the requisite car junk yards that seem to live along with rivers, streams and abandoned warehouses near US railroad tracks.  And power lines and stations.  I was going to take the cheaper bus today but could not bear another bus ride so closely on the heels of another one, plus got my period today, which was a surprise as it’s on some kind of weird wheel of fortune peri-menopausal plan now…and I thought I was done, but No, it’s Baaaaaaaaaack.  Hmpf.

I have had in recent times some sad issues with fertility and do not have any children, the most gruesome scene was the miscarriage the day after the wedding.  That truly sucked.  Flushing down a bunch of blood, realizing it might be a fetus, scared shitless in another beautiful place we were visiting for our honeymoon.  Crying and crying and crying….that was after an operation to make it possible and etc., etc…and so now I thought, OK game over, period gone, let it go and now this.  I am, if I’m honest, sick of hope when it comes to fertility, the great guilt factory that it is for we the childless women…those who cannot Conceive.  Or have conceived and have had abortions and then Cannot conceive…and all that, all that, all that…anyone who has been around and around this fucking merrygoround knows of what I speak.  Thank God/dess I have some Amazing friends with whom I can speak about all this honestly, who have their own issues with it and experiences, and strength and hope and sadness and grief and joy and secret senses of relief that dare not speak its name and then the sadness again and Knowing there is something to being a biological parent that must transcend so much and connect you with so much and yet also Knowing that somehow I can do that even so in some small way, even if it’s not the same…but knowing, knowing, knowing I am connected, deeply to all living things and beginning to really feel this in my bones and the immense relief of it all knowing it’s not All About Me.  And Thank Christ for that!  Or Whoever…

There is a wildness to the US countryside even in the Northeast that is unlike anything in Europe, which has beautiful, amazing places, but you can feel how Long people have been there cultivating it.  Here, it feels no matter what it’s wild.  A BBC correspondent in the US said something very smart, he said: to understand America and Americans and their relationship to God, you need to understand that it’s a first world country with third world weather…and I laughed and knew he was right.  There were tornadoes recently in Queens for fucksake!  Tornadoes!  In the UK trains stop running when there are too many leaves on the line.  It’s just different.

Ah, and I finally figured out how to answer comments on the blog, so we can finally have something more like a discussion.  I’m really happy for comments to address any and all things brought up here or even new stuff.

As for something I don't want to talk about but probably should, I had a meeting with someone who is directing something of mine that will be shown publicly and it was good then hard then I realized he was kind of freaked out and then I got scared and then I had to figure out what was his fear and what was my own.  He is realizing now I believe how complex this thing is and how it's not a 'normal play' but still wants me to make it that for him, which of course I can't.  I also trust him to find something in it that is his, as I create things with maximum freedom for creators...However, I also had to admit I have my own fears - to myself - and allow him to have his - as I've been riding on train and doing my own thing I haven't felt so gripped by it and writing about it brings it closer in again, so will say only this now: his fear is his fear and I'm not in control of that.  My fear is my fear and I can work with that...I say now a prayer for healing of my codependency that I need not surrender to the fears of others nor pretend my own fear is someone else's nor project my own fear onto someone else.  And it's OK to care, even if it's scary...it's OK, it's OK, it's OK....

And as I said to a good friend earlier today, thank God he cares enough to be freaked out, that's a blessing.  Someone who's just going through the paces would not care that much.  Anyway, here's hoping  this is one of those constructive challenges rather than (figurative) train wrecks!  I believe it is, for the record, a constructive challenge, but my fear at the core of all this is: of course, of course I'm Just a Fraud and he Sees it...me and my 'so called experimental ideas' are rubbish, etc., etc....but now at least when this happens I bring up images of an internal warrior and a shield to protect me and realize that no matter how real seeming these voices are, they are not real, they are dumb cartoon animals with fake teeth and bad breath....old, old, old....

Which does not mean my stuff is perfect or I don't have anything to rewrite or to learn, but Does mean it's OK to trust 40 years plus of working in an art form and the ideas that have come from that... ya think?  yeah, probably....

And to anyone reading this who knows who I am and have worked wth me in the past or now, let me salute you for your bravery as I realize when I am suddenly in the world of the 'more normal' theatre how brave we are and especially how brave you all are...we take risks that are actual risks and that means something in this risk-averse, life-averse world...it does, it does, it does...

So I salute you and anyone else reading this who takes real risks...and as Robert Rauschenberg famously said: "You can take risk without risk."  Amen dear departed one, revered spiritual ancestor...Go with your gods....

And of course, just before posting this I get back an email from the director, which indicates he totally gets it...Me, of Little Faith!!!!

Design Change!

Hello,
As you have discovered if you are reading this, the design has shifted on the blog.  It was an attempt to be able to comment on the blog myself, but that did not succeed...however, I have decided blue is better than fake books.  Hmmm.  Also, disturbingly, am finding myself checking the stats on the blog for how many people are reading it, etc.  This is not good as it of course fuels all sorts of performance stuff but of course I can't decide 'not to care' either.  Not sure what to do about this right now.

Very tired after going back and forth to see a very good friend through a difficult weekend, which I will not discuss as that is her story...however, I also got to see my favorite thing in the world: crashing waves thanks to Hurricane Igor.  About to go and visit my parents on Tuesday, which will be interesting after the healing stuff done earlier regarding my mother (this step-father now is not part of the family bad times from the deep dark past...).  Also have a public event coming up after that which involves my work and beginning to feel The Fear about that and hoping it will dissipate when I remember once again that I am a human being deserving of oxygen on this earth and such-like...don't have to earn my right to be here, etc., etc....This all takes me a depressingly long time to figure out.

OK, off to bed now and apologies for relatively uninteresting post, just wanted to let you know design change was on purpose.  And to ask for any prayers, good thoughts and whatnot for putting my work into the public sphere.

Of Stink Bugs and Shamanism

As a pre-script to the below text written yesterday when I was riding the train, I want to add that the fears I discuss below are now completely gone and I feel amazingly good, strong and calm if a bit travel-sick…However, in honor of the spirit of this blog, as I’m trying to allow it to happen, I want the process I go through to be as raw as possible and not tied up in little: see what happened, how I solved it and so aren’t I cool type bows….However, it should also be noted yesterday there was a tornado out of nowhere apparently in a place where there are usually no tornadoes…

How do these two things you relate, you may well ask. Well in the state I was just in (literal that is though you could draw metaphorical conclusions too…), which is below the Mason-Dixon line and includes a lot of trees and heat, there are stinky bugs. These are bugs that apparently are imports from China that are not dangerous to humans, but eat crops, have no natural predators and when you try to kill them, they make a huge stink. They invade the house and look kinda creepy. We kill them by vacuuming them up which smells bad but is effective until the next lot shows up, the cockroaches of the south….

OK, so that was the bad part of seeing my oldest best friend in the world. On the flip side, she is a modern day shaman, which when I first heard this made me want to run screaming into the hills. My father, who died this year, fashioned himself to be a Toltec wizard and smoked a lot of pot, as did his partner, who said that’s how she connected with her ancestors (she is half-Native American) but to this outside (and enforced) observer seemed to do nothing more than add to her bi-polar disorder and recovery from other forms of addiction. My father had been aphasic from a stroke and apparently found a way to demand pot every day for years before the massive heart attack that killed him in January. His partner was afraid she had turned him to a pothead. I assured here that train had left the station years earlier, which relieved her no end. I was not sure if that was a good or bad thing but couldn’t stand watching her take the blame for Everything.

My father also worked for a self-styled New Age prophet type, who had spirit guides and the works, and the whole thing just frankly – especially uncut and when it involves websites, cassettes and expensive workshops - gave me the creeps.

But here was this friend of mine, who I was reconnecting with over 30 years later, believing in something like this stuff (thought a seemingly more grounded and less evangelical version), not trying to make me believe what she said and also grounded in 12-step recovery, which made me want to trust her. Eventually, after much discussion, I asked her to take me on one of her journeys, both expectant and scared shitless and skeptical…and hopeful.

My experience, which would be incredibly hard to describe in a blog, was quite powerful and gave me a sense of freedom from some old ghosts or ‘attachments’ as she called them. The people that came up were mostly abusers from the deep dark past and feeling where they had ‘attached’ to my body and expelling them was both scary and a huge relief. The sacred space I described for us was a place we shared in childhood, but one in which I had created a kind of church out of moss and lichen on top of ancient rock beneath old pine trees even before I met her, maybe, I thought afterward, in anticipation of this moment?

This is added on today: the images from this journey I’ve decided are important to share: large snakes coming out of my body from all orifices and digestive tracts – this was my first step-father who sexually abused me, a massive spider detached from the front of me with great effort and fear – this was the attachment of my mother who turned into a smaller spider and had to be shooed away many time. Other vaguer similar images to do with my father and sexual abuse and many ropes around me from the babysitter who thought I was evil, held me hostage and almost killed me. Cutting those ropes once and for all and having to shoo her away too, my friend seeing her like a cartoon witch from Bugs Bunny, which made us both laugh. Finding a shield to protect me after like blue energy and an internal warrior like Arjuna. This has shifted to dancing women inside and out, quite beautiful really. I’m saying all this because it happened and I believe I am beginning to feel a profound feeling of freedom and release. My friend predicts digestive issues may vanish, and before she said that I began to suspect the same thing. Will see…

And then, after all this when I woke up in the middle of the night, and probably because of my nascent fear of this kind of thing, I felt Total Fear. I am still now battling between believing this was one of the best things I ever did and fear about what it means. I have a highly developed if low-concept sense of a power greater than myself and this is sacred to me so the idea that anything could supplant that is terrifying to me. On the other hand, so is taking care of myself, for real and in some ways that’s what this offers, a way to do that. But because I allowed Someone Else to help guide me to this place (places I asked to go I must add), I fear it, like what if now I can be manipulated in horrible ways, etc.?

My instinct is that this fear is old patterning from my childhood as this friend does not give me a sense of creepiness even if she, like me, is imperfect. On the other hand, my fear is an old one: did I trust too much too quickly?

On the other other hand, when I was first in AA an Al-Anon I thought ‘what if this is a cult’? And the fear came in…but the revolving leadership and lack of money involved, etc., etc. let me go through this fear and reach the other side. This is trickier because it involves one other person and her belief system, some of which I totally get and some of which frankly I don’t. I know her motivation is loving and our connection is deep and heart-felt even after all these years - that I feel deeply, but some part of me remains fearful. On the other hand, I had amazing dreams, after I let myself sleep, and a lovely talk with my friend before I left.

One dream was of a watch with a tiny bird next to it that was smaller than the watch – time flies I wondered when I woke up…another of two young women being resuscitated back to life by two men, both of whom I knew and me feeling moved to tears because somehow I knew I had taught the men how to do that and these young women would live.

A large crow circled the train station where we waited for my train to take me back to the Big City from the rural areas…Please don’t run screaming when I tell you that I was told my ‘power animal’ is a crow and so was my father’s. My friend tells me crows speak between the spirit world and our world. I never know what to make of these ideas but I did feel: nice crow, cool. And a kind of connection.

Love love me do…you know I love you…I’ll always be true so ple-e-ease, love me do…

So, the question is: do I trust my best friend from childhood or inchoate fear, some of which feels like it might be coming from the very old ghosts we cut the chords with in the journey we did together?

I believe I will know the answer to this question as time goes on and have time to feel through the results of this incredibly powerful work. Do I feel more or less fearful in general? Does the idea of an ‘inner warrior’ and the experience of it - so strong last night - last? In other words, as I judged AA in the end, does it work? Yes. Good.

Speaking of which, walking into an AA meeting that looks like you walked into the Wrong Bar is such a trip. I walked into one such meeting with an African-American friend and as we opened the doors into the usual fluorescent-lit church basement I saw a sea of older white male faces that looked like they might still have a grudge against the North for the Civil War, I doubted my sanity. But as usual, the old ‘hillbilly’ (not my term but the locals own I hasten to add lest I seem horrifically un-PC God fucking forbid) who told his story sounded just like me, got sober a month after I did in 1987 and had an amazing sense of humor, grace plus lilting Southern accent. This was followed by an older black guy sharing back, who had few teeth but whose heart and brain were in tact, and another large man about the kind of raw pain that you only hear in AA meetings – and sometimes SIA (survivors of incest anonymous for you who are not the People of the Acronym) – but only in AA is the person definitely going through this pain without the anesthesia - and then there I am with a bunch of people (in my PC way I had defined not as hillbillies but as ‘old coots’ – so much better don’t you think??) who if I’d walked into their bar to have a drink (esp. with African American friend in tow) would have been, let us say charitably – rude, are embracing, loving, amazing and ask me to speak – the city slicker with the PBS accent. And then swarm around my friend and I afterward saying how great it was to hear us and chatting our common Recovery Language…which, yes, can be unbelievably cliché ridden, almost unbearably so, with the weird uncomfortable-if-you-have-a-fancy-education fact that the clichés are 99% of the time True.

So there I was a foreigner in most ways welcomed in every way and grateful once again to be part of a fellowship that is so embracing to everyone who stumbles (and usually the first entrance is a stumble if not an incredibly haughty attempt to slink into the back clinking rings and heels thinking I am not like these people, these people Are Losers….etc….whilst puking and/or shaking so much the coffee in styrofoam cup ends up on floor as you smile tightly at the person next to you hoping they won’t give you their fucking phone number and by the way why does everyone look so psychotically Happy???) in the door having tried everything on earth before this sorry church basement where you have the best (if not only) chance you’ll ever have to find a Power Greater than Yourself that can help you stop killing yourself.

But hey, we’re just a bunch of losers, so ignore me…

I’m on the train again whilst writing this and looking out the window seeing large bodies of water always makes me happy as where I live normally in a Foreign Country is land-locked and the only place that I feel entirely safe like ever is near large bodies of water and the occasional stupid church basement (not all as not all meetings are safe or seem safe). However, outside it’s raining and raining and raining…but from inside of a train, it feels safe except now we are driving by those horrendous industrial sites that do God Only Knows What that allows us to Eat Chemicals, Breathe Shit, Buy Crap and Feel ‘Good’ because ‘You Deserve It’….but once again I digress…

Oh and by the way, I can’t figure out how to comment on my own blog, as ‘Blogger’ is being really weird about that so please know I love reading your comments, they are moving to me and I hope this can be a safe space for anyone and everyone to allow in the dark to scare away the dark…or simply bring in sunshine if that’s where you are that day. I am pleased with the affirmation already received and hope these musings, in whatever form they take can be healing not only for me, but others as well…and once again, I am happy for you to use the comments section to share your own thoughts, feelings, demons, angels, ghosts, dreams and nightmares…as they all make us human…

Finally a Sufi poem, which moves me and relates to stink bugs, shaman and the whole human life thing in between:

This being human is a guest
house. Every morning
a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and attend them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture, still,
treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
- Rumi



Be well my Friends….

God help me....

God help me, I’ve started blogging.  Let me explain why as a member of the last of the analogue generations I am doing this, more to myself probably than anyone reading this, who presumably also blogs and says to blog as a verb, as I am, as we all do now as if this were something human beings have done for millennia when in fact it’s so recent and yet so ubiquitous that it takes on an eerie sense of inevitability when it is anything but….

So this preamble answers the question already, doesn’t it?  I can whitter on and on and on and for the rest of my writing that I do, that’s not necessarily a good thing.  It might not be a good thing here either, but in the world of ‘blogging’ no one can stop me, no one has to read me and like so there.

I am writing to experiment also with anonymity in public, not because I think I’m so important you can’t know who I am or that I am particularly mysterious but because I have a horrible tendency, already visible from the above writing to perform and I am hoping eventually I can stop and if I’m not performing, or at least performing a certain persona I usually associate with myself, perhaps I can find out about other parts of myself and the world in general that would not normally surface if I attached My Name to it.

So it’s a reality project really…a strange thing to embark on in a virtual world, I acknowledge and yet, and yet, and yet…perhaps this is what is on offer here.  Perhaps this is the good bit in that which I usually disparage especially when any of my friends try futily to get me onto that demon spawn: Facebook.  That place wherein everyone not only hands over the last shreds of their privacy but can ‘friend’ and ‘unfriend’ each other in an horrifying replication of junior highschool as if once was not Bad Enough….but I digress…

From what exactly do I digress?  See this is another thing about ‘blogging’ that intrigues me, there appears to be no need to stay on point or even have a point and for that I am grateful…and the anonymity thing, for me, is to stay on this track and hopefully avoid self-promotion but instead offer a service to myself and God/dess help you anyone else who is reading this of a life being examined, felt, shown and turned inside out in public-private.

Why?

This is the question that has stopped me from blogging for years.  And the only reason I have right now is that a friend of mine is doing her version of this and I admire her and her blog for it.  She has some specific stuff she’s working through but that doesn’t keep her from digressing, which seems as important as any other part of the desire ‘to blog’.

I will think of this as a fictional-factual place…something in between where reality may sneak in, as reality is of course both real, as in tangible and also about the multiple stories we tell ourselves without which we would never have come up with the word ‘reality’ in the first place.

Read recently in the NY Times I think about certain tribes of people that exist still with no sense of ‘solipsistic’ direction and instead speak of north south east and west and if they are referring to north, and it’s behind them, they will point to themselves, not to refer to themselves but to point north as if they are invisible or at least irrelevant to this idea somewhere else.  Can you imagine?  No, me neither, which is exactly why I hope those people don’t get wiped out to make more McDonald’s Happy Meals, though I imagine in this day and age that’s just too fucking much to ask.

Sigh.

Anyone who does know me will already know who I am by what I have just written above.  Hi there!  You’re right, it’s me!

I can’t point to myself as if I’m invisibile and mean ‘north’.  I blog now.  I blog therefore I am, etc.  God only knows how many people have written that last line, ah well…

Did I mention, I’m trying not to edit, so all my dumb ass ideas will come out too.  So any thought I have that I’m such a smarty pants will disappear as well.  This would be all for the best, as I imagine, if you have read this far, you will agree.

It’s any identity project/reality project…but the issue of identity is  as above so relative to the culture that it’s political and philosophical too, because it is, it all is, I still believe that after all these years of feminisim, post-feminism, post-post-post feminisim, etc..ad nauseum, the personal is political.  Because how could it not be?

It’s in the way you walk

It’s in the way you talk

The way you sing off key…..

You can’t take that away from me….

This is actually how I write stuff, plays mostly, so at any point this may turn into a stage text with voices and stuff

And then it may end up in a play, so like don’t use this shit without asking, OK?

I’m about to go see a friend of mine I haven’t seen in 34 years.  She was my best friend in grammar school and we lost each other in our teens and just found each other recently.  Does that happen without the internet?  I’m not so sure.  She lives in an unlikely place and I am on the train to that place.  I am returning to the scene of the crime.  Not to her place but intermediary points.  And she was there, she was the witness to my childhood, which was also the scene of many crimes.  More than any child should have to endure but that a depressing amount of children do.

You know the drill, alcoholism, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, the whole fun family of childhood horror, wherein as the child you decide the parents can’t be wrong (and in my case there were many parents) and so You are wrong.  This is not new, many have said it, many have experienced it.  It is mentioned here because it’s true, or as true as anything is true and the water I see next to me outside the train window is true or the fact that you who may be reading this are alive, alive enough to be reading words on a screen with a blinking cursor for company and me, your new anonymous friend.

Anonymous too because yes I am also a sober alcoholic and alanonic and all that too.  And we are supposed to remain anonymous, not that anyone does anymore, but as it’s in our traditions, I like to hew to it, because it keeps me out of the drama-rama pool, though sometimes I’d love to break that anonymity in public, I will tell you yes I would…

But, no.  23 years of life that exists thanks to belonging to an anonymous fellowship of people who make no money and have no leaders and give you your life, money and family back.  Not gonna mess with it.  And for any of you who think I’m in a cult, see above.  If it’s a cult, it’s a bad cult – no one makes money, no one is the leader and it gives you your life, your money and your family and friends back and the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.  I’ll stick with the crappy cult.

Are you with me?  Still?!  Wow, I’m so impressed if so, and you’re probably a friend either known or soon to be known.

Tell me tell me tell me tell me do about your life, the way you see things and if you can point through yourself to ‘north’.  There is so much more to heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophies….

Basta for now…here it goes into the virtual wilds….anyone out there????