Ferocity

“I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce” --Margaret Mead

“You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all that you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.”--Florida Scott Maxwell, playwright, women's suffragette, Jungian psychologist

I'm working in my acting class on ferocity. At first, it was incredibly uncomfortable to live in the fierce body. I felt myself lifting out of myself or "checking out" continually, letting the scenes meander and grow dull. Or, when the scene was over, I'd feel relieved and if my acting coach asked to try a bit of it again, it was as if my consciousness had left the building. Once he had to ask me three times to re-enter the scene.

Afraid of my own fierceness in my day to day life, and the damage it might do to others and then to myself through backlash or remorse, I've overcompensated by staying weak and moving into a default position of victim. Certainly, bad things have happened to me, but not everyone who experiences hard luck or betrayal responds with weakness. Some use these trials to strengthen themselves. Some fight back. I admire these people, even if it wasn't, I suppose, the woman I'd been raised into.

However, with practice, I'm starting to quite enjoy the physical experience of ferocity. I can scream and swear, go on the attack, but I can also stand up straight, with a fire running up through my body, grounded from a place down at the core of the Earth, and look at my scene partner or towards the audience while I'm listening and responding to the situation of the scene.

As Maxwell suggests above, the only response to fully accepting and owning the events of one's life, is fierceness. Not one person can live in the reality of existing in a human body without understanding that we are each survivors--from the violent entrance into the world from the comfort of our mothers' wombs, to the first time we understand our fathers aren't God, to our first heartbreak, our body, mind, emotions, and spirit are shaken down again and again. It is the animal in us that wants to continue even as our feeling beings are beaten up by a hard-edged world. The deer in us gallops on beyond our grief, the bird in us soars above the smallness of our problems, the turtle in us trudges forward in the face of health crisis. There's a solid center inside me that will not give up, that will not give in, that will muster and nurture ferocity, and mix it with the relief of stepping into even the hardness of reality and the joy of living on this small planet just another day.

Every day, I face the sun--an enormous fire and force--and I am not afraid.

Curiosity

"Curiosity doesn't matter any more. These days people don't want to be transported to emotional territories where they don't know how to react." --Hector Babenco, filmmaker

"Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will." --Alistair Cooke

I'm taking myself out of the driver's seat today. I'll start by not thinking what the next word or idea might be in this piece of writing. This might mean sitting in quiet for long stretches of time.

My mother said the new bakery in the Outer Sunset of San Francisco is hiring a baker. I am a baker. It's true I have a job, I have a decent job, one with health insurance. I have what some might call a grown up job. Sometimes people are impressed when I tell them what my job is.

When I wore my hair blonde, I felt like I was wearing an itchy sweater. I sort of feel that way with my job, like the season necessitates the discomfort and I'm waiting for summer. But it is summer.

There were times I worked as a baker and I always felt like a real person when I was asked what I did for a living and could answer, "I'm a baker." This is no offense to those who do what I currently do. They work hard and change people's lives. Some have told me, in the job I have now, that I have inspired them. I have no reason to doubt these individuals. I can see the truth in their postures. I've never inspired anyone as a baker.

However, when I'm a baker, two things happen: 1) I feel like going to work is like going to church & 2) I feel like I never put myself above or below anyone by claiming the title of baker.

I suppose this posting has nothing to do with curiosity.

It has to do everything with me having an attitude about what I am or am not supposed to do. What if I stopped categorizing everybody and everything and putting them on my complicated ladders in my mind. What If I bashed the ladders to the ground and put each splinter-piece into the sand, sticking straight up and there were hundreds of even-ish sticks in the sand and I wandered around them like some kind of obstacle course and I was so confused because I didn't know which of the stakes was mine for that time of my life. And, I was so confused that I realized, now, I'm right where I'm supposed to be, knowing nothing and living in wonder.

The Truth

“An honest man is always a child.”—Socrates

“Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.”—Emily Dickinson

Having recently been lied to, I’ve been working back over my history, to clean out any lies. Tonight, I went and told someone I’d lied to him and what the truth was.

If someone is in love with me, but I lie to that person about who I am, allow him to think something about me because I don’t fill in the blanks, he’s in love with a lie or a half-truth (one of the more devious forms of lies).

So, I told an ex-boyfriend tonight something I’d kept from him, so he’d know who he was with when he was with me.

There are some who say—even fine books that advise—not to tell, for instance, an unsuspecting spouse about affairs. I’ve always felt that sometimes my urge to tell the truth is to relieve myself of guilt rather than to do the right thing, so I really have to check my motives when I am honest. Am I purging because I want to be relieved of my guilt? Before I tell the truth, I need to think about my motives behind the confession for a little while.

There have been times in my life where I just open my mouths without thinking—I feel out the truth by saying whatever's in my mind out loud. But is what I am saying out loud a lasting truth, a real honest thing, one that will honor a relationship? If I tell someone, for example, “I never loved you,” is that something that could be backed up in a court of law? or is it me having a spell of doubt about my feelings for my partner, and wondering if I became involved on false pretenses. If I weather the storm, will it, like most of my thoughts, pass as a passing fancy?

If, when I told my partner I was grocery shopping, I was at the coffee shop enjoy the flirtations of a man who’d invited me to have coffee with him, and my partner continues to love me for who I am, does he even know who I am? Am I giving him a fair shake at living in reality?

I’m not going to live in secret any more from those who I've agreed a certain level of intimacy. And I’m going to do my best not to be a secret in someone else’s relationship, help fuel a bed of lies that acts like an intimate relationship.

Sometimes, when a child opens his or her mouth, he might say things that seem almost unkind. As adults, we hopefully have more facility with language and can maneuver the way we formulate our sentences, so that the truth can be a gift, not a dagger. If I tell you what I did that you didn’t know about me before, it is because I want to give you a chance to live in reality just a little more today, or to give you back your intuition. (What partner doesn’t, in some way, have a sense of when his or her loved one is being untrue?)

Living in fantasy or delusion is exhausting. The truth sets everyone free.

Heaven

This used to sound stupid to me, but I’m a child of God.

I’m feeling lousy about myself today—I don’t know why. I feel lower than low.

Today, I’m desperate to feel that childlike spirit I felt continually so recently.

Today, I feel stunned into a late adulthood, one in which people aren’t trustworthy. The worst thing is, I’ve woken up to the fact that many of the people in my life were never trustworthy. However, I’m unwilling to let the trusting child within me die. I’m grabbing onto the small light of the little Dawn that will not dim, no matter what happens to me, no matter what storms I weather, walk into. The winds have blown heartily, and yet, there’s a piece of me that will always shine.

Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. –Matthew 18

Today, I sat by a small quick creek peopled with small children and a couple with fishing poles in their hands. I walked down to a place on the bank where all the people were out of sight and I watched the water run over stones, and I watched the trees. I just looked at the trees and noticed the pieces of creek I could see through the branches. I picked up a giant pine cone and I wondered where it came from. On the path to the creek, there were many very small pine cones, miniature ones, and I remembered when I was young—maybe ten years old—and I’d stand in the center of these three deodar cedar trees that somehow landed in our front lawn in Southern California, and I made up songs on the spot and I sang them—and they were lousy, trite and repetitive. But they made me happy, and I was singing for no one, I was singing for God. And I watched the rose-shaped cones from the cedar tree fall from the tree and I collected them. And I did this later when I was a grown up and lived in far West Texas, in a small town called Marfa. I collected rose pine cones and I lined my windowsills with them and I filled vases with them. And I displayed them in a kind of grand thanks—and this is how I enter heaven.

Today, I write these words, and I write myself out of this temporary hell, and I write myself into the light, and I write myself into heaven.

Simplicity

“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.”--Frank Lloyd Wright

“Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.”--Ovid

Whether it's each of my footfalls as I jog the path around the creek or the paddle hitting the water as I row a kayak, or the pace at which I set these words down on the page, I'm determined to switch off the frenzy of the last three years and live in the quiet--to rest in the spaces between words, in the sound of my breath when I exercise, or--like today--in the long stretch of a stolen day that I've taken off work after even a few days of exciting but tiring travel.

Over the last three years, I've been working hard, doing tons, trying to make up for lost time after some health battles that preceded this period. Now, it's time to find a balance, to never be in a hurry, to have time to enjoy the things I used to enjoy--simple pleasures, like curling up with a book, cooking a nice meal, taking a nap. I want to live slow as molasses, and just as dense, so that every action counts, every spoonful's filled with flavor, weight, and nutrients.

My friend Erik used to take me to an giant abandoned molasses storage tank, the lid or roof no longer on it, and the church-like cylindrical space seemed to collect sunlight along with small pieces of trash/treasures. As I stood within it, or took steps across it, lines of poetry collected carefully like beautiful, delicate spider webs in my mind, and when I returned home, I'd try to remember them and write them in notebooks, or type them on my old manual typewriter. The tank tended to collect curious objects such as dolls' heads, a white ceramic piece stamped with initials and a year, a crumpled up brown lunch sack, showing off its shadow patterns in the light.

There's so much that goes unnoticed when I'm racing around, trying to do so many things, trying to please so many people--and I miss the way my heart pops when I see a short fat dandelion giving itself to the day or when I find a marble in the gutter to add to my found marble collection.

I think if I can count my breaths and keep trying to remember to go back to that task, that I will never fall in love with my eyes closed again and I'll never end up in the black hole of what-just-happened-heartbreak like I did a few weeks ago. That may be wishful thinking--and, it is, of course, beside the point. The point being that I'm missing everything that really matters. And I've been moving so fast that no one can see me, or really get to know me over a long cup of afternoon tea and molasses cake.

"Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future." ~Thich Nat Hahn

Sleep

"Sleep is the best meditation." --Dalai Lama

Saying yes to sleep, that deep peace. Goodnight.

Honesty & Daydreams

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark. ~Rabindranath Tagore

I just woke up from a nap and am crawling to the keyboard, a bit empty of hope and inspiration, but, like putting one foot in front of another, I'm setting one word in front of another, with the thought it may dawn by the end of this writing. I'm acting as if. My whole self craves to curl up in a bed with the blankets pulled over my head, to turn off the phone--and when I have this desire, I'm never quite sure when it's right to honor it and when it's better to play against it.

There are times one must say yes to grief, even if one doesn't know exactly what's being grieved. We live in a culture that says, "get over it," and "put on a happy face." Certainly, I can do that. I can grin and bear it. I can be useful. I can take contrary action. I use these tools all the time, every day. However, another tool I use is honesty. Where do I honestly stand now?

After writing two paragraphs, I can honestly say the bird in my heart is waking up. I'm no longer sitting in the darkness waiting for the song. The song begins, and it's a quiet song, with a beautiful melody, a voice of water, of a glass pipe.

I'm as honest as I can be with myself and with a trusted confidant throughout the day. The problem is, I've spent most of my life trying to figure out how to be who someone else wants me to be, so many times, I don't even know when I'm hungry or what I prefer for dinner. So, last night, when my acting teacher said, "afford yourself the luxury of knowing what you like and don't like," I realized I had my work cut out for me. My favorite color is clearly green, a medium color green, like a blouse I tried on this morning, like the wall in the spare bedroom. I can't stand it when the bedsheets are buckled or the blankets are askew. I go crazy when they aren't just so. If I don't put something in my stomach every three hours, I become incredibly cranky. I used to love cherries more than anything else in the world--I was known for my devotion to them, and I used to wait anxiously for their brief appearance in late spring and early summer. Now, for whatever reason, my love of them has waned. I don't hate them, but I can take them or leave them.

We worked last night in acting on revealing ourselves in auditions, in narratives and emotionally. The guest teacher, Sarah Kliban, used some questions from Marcel Proust's questionnaire as icebreakers when we each stood up in front of her. Here's some of my answers to the questions she asked throughout the night as well as some answers to questions I thought to ask myself:

A perfect date to me is a picnic on a blanket in the grass and a barefoot dance to music we sing to each other.

The quality I hate most about myself is I believe everything people tell me--I cannot understand that sometimes people speak without meaning what they say.

If I could live anywhere in the world, it would be Paris, where I would be a street performer and a children's book author.

My favorite journey happens every time I watch the movie, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." It's at the very end, when Wonka takes Charley and Grandpa Joe up in the Great Glass Elevator. It crashes through the glass roof and they look down at the small town identifying places. Then Wonka tells Charley he's giving him the factory. The movie ends with these beautiful lines,

"And Charly, don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted."

"What happened?"

"He lived happily ever after."

So, I'm living by Paris, playing upright bass on the streets and singing "No regrets" in French, with the love of my life beside me on piano. And I'm 30 years old, a baby in my belly kicking.

And even though this never happened, and never will happen, as I'm just shy of 45, I'm delighted to be a writer and actor, and to be able to make my living as a professional daydreamer, the hobby I loved most as a child which allows me to live every life I ever wanted to live (and even many I didn't) without having to close the door on other possibilities.

Back to honesty--I like my quiet simple life in the Central Valley, the ridiculous heat of the summer, the small creeks that weave their way through the center of town, the sounds of my footfalls as I run along them on the paved trails each morning, the silly little health club I belong to, mostly for the sauna and jacuzzi, and fielding phone calls to those I serve as confidant too, who tell me their fears and resentments, unravel their truths in words over the phone or over coffee each day.

Daydreams aren't lies, they're just little films I write and watch to keep myself entertained. However, untangling them from my honest hopes takes a certain amount of patience and determination.