Autumn Makes Me Sing

"Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not, and never again will be; what is is change." -Edwin Way Teale

Autumn has always felt very enchanting to me. I die for all things pumpkin flavored, I love deep saturated colors like maroon and teal, and I never met a scarf I didn't like. As a child I loved taking walks with my mother and picking up acorns (I picked up 100 of them for a project in kindergarten) and big fallen leaves, though few of them actually change color in my hometown of Houston. The sun always seems to multiply in size and adopt a slightly more orange hue, as if to mirror the jack-o-lanterns grimacing on our stoops. And let's not forget the harvest moon, who knowingly glows over the winds of change and falling leaves. She makes her life out of change and she gently attempts to shed light for we who do not accept transition quite as gracefully.

Perhaps it is the new chill in the air, maybe it is the dichotomy of our surfeited pantries against the barren tree limbs, or it could be the ominous threat of the inevitable winter, but there is something uniquely nostalgic and tender about this season. We are faced with having to simultaneously accept ends and beginnings, whether or not we are ready.

How befitting that this is the season in which we celebrate Halloween! It makes perfect sense that this would be the season during which we would fear the return of dead spirits. Whether or not you believe in the afterlife, I'll bet you experience the ghosts of your memories in the fall. I find it both intriguing and wonderful that we come to terms with the heartache of change by adopting a new identity altogether. Theatre comes from ancient rituals that involve the worshipers becoming possessed by the spirits around them. Anyone who has been alone in an empty theatre knows how haunted it feels - the spirits of all the characters who have ever lived in that space are still there, waiting to be realized once again through the body of a performer. Ask your actor friends, and if they are anything like me then they will tell you that characters stay with them for a while after a show has closed. The autumn is like this on a larger scale. We are changing, like it or not, with the leaves and the winds and the earth - for better or worse is always yet to be seen.

Now all I want to do is watch Chocolat.

"Gold's father is dirt, yet it regards itself as noble."

So all my horoscopes lately keep talking about words and how now is a good time for me to amp up my verbal communications. The only thing is....I have to have something to say first!

In my yoga teacher training one of our teachers has a habit of asking us questions like "Is yoga a technique or a skill?" or "Are we becoming stronger or more powerful?" The first day we had him I felt intimidated by him, and jarred by the starkness of his questions and his penetrating stare which would relent only after one of us choked out an answer (which usually sounded more like a question). However, after four classes in a row with him I have become very fond of this pedagogical approach. Why? Because it forces us to put words to the ideas we felt we were drowning in. Also, because we felt lost, we were then able to feel found. This makes sense coming from a man who constantly discusses the idea of a "Language of Opposites." It also made me trust him because he led us somewhere very specific and concrete after what seemed like an eternity of trick questions and abstract concepts.

So that's an interesting way to live, no? And what an amazing amount of faith it takes! To be comfortable being lost, believing that one day you will arrive at a clearing in the woods, to have complete credence that someone is leading you, despite your ignorance as to where. Of course this cannot be the only principle by which one lives if they hope to accomplish certain goals, but in the times when I feel like I'm metaphorically running in circles while wearing heels and tripping over road blocks after I've already run the wrong way into a dangerous neighborhood in the middle of the night without my cellphone or any money....it's nice to think there's a pot of gold waiting somewhere (PS - I've noticed the pots of gold rarely tend to wait on the other side of something as lovely as a rainbow, but more like on the other side of a tight rope suspended over a pit of angry alligators).

My acting mentor often says "Invite disaster!" I'm not sure it needs an invitation, but like a good hostess, I will always be ready to entertain it.

Representation

So it is election time, which has me thinking a lot about how we choose to represent ourselves. If anybody has the job of representing more people than they possibly ever could, it has to be the leader of a nation.

President Obama won many of us over because we felt that he could represent more of us than his predecessors and competitors. This may be true, but of course there will always be those who feel that they are not being emblamatized well or even at all. Right now the Sikh community in America is urging President Obama to reconsider his decision to cancel a trip to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India. The president made his decision after questions were raised about how he would cover his head when entering the center. He has spent years trying to disassociate himself from being representative of Muslims and the mere thought of images circulating of him with his head covered was probably enough to give his advisors heart attacks. (Sikhs are not Muslim by the way, but rather practice a faith which draws from Hindu and Islamic beliefs)

Lying crumpled on a table, a piece of cloth has no meaning. But swaddle a baby in it, put a picnic on top of it, drape it over a piece of artwork, a bed, or a table, wrap it around your head...and suddenly the cloth takes on meaning. After performing any of these functions, the cloth is still the cloth. It is you that has changed. I think this is beautiful, but at the same time we have to be careful of situations like this. Why does a piece of cloth have the power to change a person's mind? Whatever power we give to an object, it still has the possibility of being nothing more than the piece of crumpled cloth.

Matters of state aside, we represent one another in very personal ways. Whether we mean to or not, we represent our families, our teachers, our mentors, our bosses, our hometowns, our choices; in fact, we ourselves are representations of every moment that has ever come before. I certainly know that I tear up any time one of my parents or mentors looks at me and tells me "I am so proud of you." They have done so much right by me, and it makes me extremely happy to know that they feel I am doing the same for them. In this way we represent one another.

I think I still have Genet on the brain.

Poor Lonely Blog

Dear Blog,

Again I have to apologize for neglecting you. This is so typically me - I get really excited about something...then it fizzles out. Blog, I started you because I felt that I wasn't using my mind enough, and you helped me stay opinionated and articulate. Thanks! It just turns out that over the past month or so I've had PLENTY going on to keep my mind busy.

I've been working on a project with a director I really love, and who also happens to be absolutely out of her mind. Her plan is to have 4 installments of "open rehearsals" throughout a year of her interpretation of Jean Genet's The Maids. I love Genet and love this play and have been helping her do research for a few months now. This 1st installment is turning out to be more of an art instillation than a theatre piece, and I love it. I'm having a hard time letting go though...I mean I know this is meant to be a rehearsal, and completely imperfect in nature, but the performer in me just hates that. I suppose I'll just have to stay in the moment with it. After the 4 installments she will either use our exploration to create a finished piece or she will use it as research for a staging of the complete text, or maybe she won't do anything with it at all. Who knows!

My lovely blog, I am also starting my yoga teacher training program this upcoming weekend, and I am VERY excited about it! I found out that the director of the program is actually from Port Washington, where I used to live, and that we share Lisa Bondy from Om Sweet Om as our most influential yoga teacher! She is also a performer and studied Suzuki and Viewpoints with the Siti Company for 3 years. It really is a small world!

I will have to be doing written assignments for my training, and I will try and put all of those assignments up here. I'll spare you any that I think are either poorly written or boring.

Talk to you later!
April

Unsex me here

I am fascinated by this article which I read the other morning. From reading it I learned that it is extremely common in Afghanistan for parents to dress their little girls as boys. They do this for any number of reasons - to increase social status, to have another family member who can work, to have help running errands. It is extremely interesting, educational, and comes with pictures! Everybody should read it.

In Afghanistan it is shameful and neighbors pity you if you have only daughters. It is also thought that women can control what gender their baby is going to be - thus putting the mothers in danger of abuse after giving birth to girls. It seems also that the women who have a history of dressing as boys in their youth are the women who are able to make large career steps. For instance, a female member of Parliament dressed as a boy until it was time for her to marry. She and her husband had their third daughter do the same. They asked her, "Do you want to bicycle and swim and do all the things boys do? Do you want to be like Daddy?" The little girl did not hesitate to say "Yes!"

I feel like I should be outright disgusted and outraged by the cross-dressing phenomen which seems to have swept Afghanistan, but I find it amazing. The origin of the tradition makes complete sense to me, but it is so far outside my world experience that I would never even think of it happening. My impression of women cross-dressing out of desperation is that it happens in fictional stories which deal with how "backwards" things were a long time ago. Think Mulan or the Shakespearean heroines Viola in The Twelfth Night or Rosalind in As You Like It. It would never occur to me that a woman today would have to dress as a man to acheive anything...gender is not something I consider when I contemplate my own successes or failures.

"Gratitude is the memory of the heart"

I love reading the news and knowing what is going on in the big wide world, but a lot of the time I find myself being very grateful that I'm me and not the people in whatever article I'm reading (however condescending that may sound). I'm not sure how to reconcile the joy of the world with all of the terrible tragedy that befalls some of us. There are so many victims of hatred: those abused by church figures, war victims, citizens wrongly imprisoned. Yogic philosophy would remind me that the light cannot exist without the darkness and that truly it is all one in the same anyway, but my undeveloped mind can't quite wrap itself around that just yet.

Today I find myself being extremely grateful for several things. Namely:

-Having had a happy childhood free of abuse, knowledge of war, hunger, and lonliness
-Having never been accused of a crime I did not commit (on a large or small scale)
-Having a life which allows me to be educated, joyous, and (relatively) calm
-Having a healthy body

Because their words had forked no lightning...

Dear Blog,

I must apologize for having neglected you the past couple weeks. Sometimes my thoughts get all jumbled up together and I have a hard time paying attention to any of them long enough to make sense of them. I then go into "survival mode" and just try and get through the operations of each day the best I can, without any energy or will to decompress at the end of it all.

Lyall is gone, it's always hard when he goes and it always kind of zaps a little energy from my soul and takes a bit of time to recover. Getting over that little bit of heartbreak kept me from you as well dear blog.

My mind has been blown by a lot of new philosophy lately, and its still marinating for the time being. A lot of it has to do with acceptance, judgment, and freedom.

I have recently begun babysitting one of my favorite human beings, Lucy Frances DesRochers (who at the tiny age of 2 already has her own blog chronicling her adventures and her artwork). She is a fantastic and unique child, but she has the very common childhood habit of abhorring the idea of taking a nap. The poor child screamed like someone was murdering her for 3 minutes before falling asleep the other day. I couldn't help but think, "If someone were begging me to go to sleep, I would have absolutely NO problem with it." And then I thought about it and realized, though the wailing is rather traumatizing to listen to, there is something so wonderful about the railing against missing a single second of consciousness, the need to rage rage against the dying of the light.

And what a powerful message that is. I know the poem by Dylan Thomas refers to death, but if we view every moment of life as its own being, the meaning of light changes. With every moment of consciousness we have the ability to sink into darkness, to allow our light to dwindle or extinguish. Do we actually get more tired with age, or do we just accept darkness more readily?

Choose light, choose life, choose consciousness. It's so simple, yet so hard to actually achieve. I guess the point is that we try though, right?

At any rate, Blog, I promise to not neglect you anymore. Seems like in the next few months I will have lots to think about and write about and I think you're worth sharing it with.

Yours,
April