Somewhere in a far away land
When I started this blog last year, my intention was to use it as a place to talk about things I'm interested in like art, digital culture, food, teaching, theater, wine, and philosophy. My plan, like many bloggers, was to keep it active by posting at least once or twice a week; for a long time that worked out just fine.
But.
Clearly.
I've been a bit of an absent parent to this website.
If anyone is reading...sorry for being absent. I'm going to try to be more active now that I'm starting to get settled in my new (old) home and at my new (old) job.
For most of the past two months I've either been on an airplane (I'm in one now), in meetings, or in a hotel room by myself. This wasn't exactly what I expected when I decided to come back, although I knew that I'd be traveling some and I expected that there would be a certain level of intensity based on the volume of changes happening all at once, both work and personal. Now that I'm living this new (old) life, though, I'm discovering all the things that I didn't anticipate and I'm trying to figure out how to be me again in my changed environment. I don't know if that sounds like a straight-forward, easy proposition but as it turns out, it isn't.
I've always embraced change and am generally pretty excited about the possibilities for renewal that come with an unexpected challenge. But lately I have been feeling a bit at sea and I need to find some strategies for getting the support I need at work so that I feel more able to adapt with a positive energy. And I need to set some boundaries so that I have more time for living. That was one of the points of this move, so I need to make it happen.Rather than ramble here in a self-pitying way, instead I'm going to post something I wrote back in 2004 when I was in Amsterdam. It was about a month after I turned 30 and I was living there as a student in the MA at DasArts. I had just met Brian a few months earlier and had left New York (and Brian) to live in Europe.
In the end, I came back because I wanted to pursue my relationship with Brian and because the program wasn't right for me. Something about the time I am in now feels like an echo of then: maybe it is the sense of change, uncertainty and reflection, all of which is exacerbated by my upcoming birthday (39th). I am edging past the half way point, I think. Something about now led me to go back and read all the emails I sent out during my time in Amsterdam (I saved them in a word file). In amongst them was this piece that I sent out with one of my updates to friends and families. For whatever reason it captures something I'm feeling now that I can't express in more explicit language. [Some of you might recognize the themes in this and some of the exact lines that have made their way into some of my later theater work]
At night, a long fog wipes over the field
Bringing moist, clean air
Bringing cover
Bringing deep sleep
And something like silence
Under the haze of night
Disappear Like a shade
Evaporate Into the air
Disintegrate
As fog, transform
Shift molecules and ascend
Listen to the echoing air and hear your name whispered back
What does it say?
In what language is it speaking ?
(I hear nothing from where I sit it is only silence air negative space silence air nothing not a thing)
Drift with the air
Down roads
By rivers
And make a road map for transcendence
Make a plan for erasing yourself:
Burn your birth certificate
De-magnetize your bank card
Peel your fingerprints away
Delete your memory
Forget your name
Fabricate your past
Walk through walls and fall through floors
We are wiped clean
Hidden
Marked by nothing
Footprints that dissolve
Handwriting in invisible ink
No one to see you
No where to hide
No credit cards to trace your path
No records
No wind where you walk
No one to notice you
No compass to chart your path
In the cracks and in between haze and light
Invisible like we will always be
