January 2012

The Christmas decorations are boxed and put away. The comfort of home and family fully realized over the holiday in front of the fireplace and around the dinner table.

Now, the bright January sun announces the new year and with it comes yearning, curiosity, trepidation and an itch for adventure. With rapid fire successive thoughts I long to be on a boat, on the beach, in Tuscany, in Provence, in Hawaii, in New York, at the theatre, in a flat, seeing something, anything I haven't seen before - from Yosemite to Tibet, aboard a clipper ship or a train - wandering and letting the world seep into my being. I am a writer holed up in a loft, a cabaret singer at the Algonquin, a twenty-year-old actress schlepping off to an audition. I am a poet, a director off off Broadway, a memoirist on the New York Times Best Seller list. January stirs up a concoction of fantasy, regret, and possibility.

What dreams might still have a chance? What doubts, fears, and useless notions still stand in their way?
January is packed with questions and demands - hope and possibility. Contentment gives way to the restlessness. Restlessness to change.
January provides the opportunity for a new self image and the belief that identity is not fixed in cement. Change begins with thought.

Unlike summertime when laziness and sloth or'whelm my spirit, January's sunshine and brisk air ignite the spark of action. Creative energy surges through my veins and springtime looms prompting new life.
I'm not one to sit still, it's clear.
I need variety and challenge - new projects and endeavors.

January 2012 startled me awake.
In a month's time, I will turn the age my brother was when he died.
At fifty-three, I'm nowhere near ready to be done. And neither, I'm sure, was he.

What's left to do? What risks have I not yet taken? What lies have I believed that have prevented me from taking them?
What self-imposed rules do I need to break?
What new rules do I need to follow?

Rule #1: Try something different.

As the poet, David Whyte says:

START CLOSE IN

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people's questions,
don't let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another's voice
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don't follow
someone else's
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don't mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.

~ David Whyte ~
(River Flow)

Visible in the World

Selves-goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

My blogging has taken a hiatus lately, bowing to the powers of the muse. All of my creative energies of late have been channeled into my playwriting. This past week, I spent hours in solitude as I descended into memory and surrendered to the all consuming story that has been my artistic companion for over fifteen years.

How many ways are there to tell a story? If the past two weeks are any indication, I have found no fewer than six.

Six attempts at an opening of a story I want to get right.

A story that has moved from scrawling, raw journal entries, to memoir, to the form I know best. Drama.

Why it has taken me so long to get here is either a question for my therapist - or an admission that, as the poet, David Whyte says, is rooted in a writer's most terrifying question "what if I am not equal to the job?"

What if I can't do it? Then who would I be for having spent fifteen years wrestling with the story that has come to define me? At least in my own mind. This interior world, the carving out of who I am, is so closely connected to the process of writing this story that I stand now on the precipice of my very being. David Whyte describes this as making ourselves visible in the world.

For anyone who knows me, the notion that I am only now making myself visible in the world might come as a surprise. But that is what this feels like. It is a process of getting to the essence of who I am.

That I lived the story I am forging into art is fact. Indisputable.
Why I have had the need to transform it into anything, is mystery.

Over the past few weeks, I've come to ask myself if I haven't in some way been hiding behind this story. That by never finishing it, I have been able to hold on to something certain. In some ways, my grieving has been something to cling to maybe as security, and maybe as shield against the terrifying unknown. Maybe.

Or it could be as simple as this.
David Whyte, says in his poem, Coleman's Bed

Stay in this place until the current of the story is strong enough to float you out.

I've been in this place for over fifteen years. An alchemy of ideas deep within the realm of my imagination -

I come again, my brother, to find you.
I seek again to know you
I rise to the task of telling you.
My brother
My muse
whose life was silenced in a purple haze
like a siren call
urging me on
pushing me forward
to sing you

Maybe now the current really is strong enough.
Or maybe, I am.
But I want to get it right.

Because, brother, I love you.