Chop Wood, Carry Water

I now have a draft of a one-woman show. Tentatively titled 'Conversations with G-O-D' and partially inspired by my recent and ridiculously titled post, Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Woo Woo. It's 11:39 am on Saturday and I am more than a little stunned. I wrote the beginning of this piece while my body prepared to completely demolish itself in a migraine implosion experience. I wrote the middle of this piece in the wake of said migraine, feeling exhausted and a bit stupid. And I wrote the end of the piece this morning in a state of shock, almost unaware of what I was doing.

'Conversations with G-O-D' began as a silly, funny, snarky trip down memory lane about my weird experiences with religion from the Born Agains that lived across the street when I was six to my pot-smoking neo-Hindu hippy boyfriend in high school. At the end of the second writing session, however, the piece took a weird-ish turn and by weird-ish I mean non-autobiographical. I didn't quite know what to make of it. As the piece veered away from personal narrative, I was confused but I just let it happen, not knowing whether it would suck or be great. I let it sit yesterday as I gorged myself on Impressionism and Art Nouveau at the museum.

I read it this morning, fully prepared to junk the whole thing and I was stunned (STUNNED) to discover that it was solid work. So, I sat down with my tea and finished the piece.

I always know when I'm crying as I write that something big is going down.

Now, when I say I "finished" it, I mean I finished a draft. I came to an ending that felt good. If my last one-woman show was any indication, chances are I will put this thing on its feet in a studio and hate it. I will rewrite the ending. I will rethink the character. I will add nine more characters, multimedia pyrotechnics, a hand mixer, a feather boa and a talking monkey. I will cry a lot. I will consider breaking up with my boyfriend for his sake because who wants to be with someone who is about to make a complete ass of themselves on a stage in front of an audience and be shunned from the entire human race forever.

I will have the teeniest tiniest nervous breakdown, seek professional help, fire my therapist, rip all that extra crap out and be back where I started. I will look at the ending again. I will shape its corners and contours just slightly. One night while lying in bed, I will come up with an image that makes it clear, makes the ending and the beginning and all the stuff in the middle sing. And voila (as we French say) eeet eees feeeenished. No fuss. No muss.

So, we're a long way off.

But we have a draft. And I am stunned. And humble. And grateful. And I'm thinking about chopping wood and carrying water. How we have to do the work, but it's not the work that is the thing, it's the awareness that's the thing. And once you have the awareness, then the work is fun and can become illuminating.

I think I'm on to something with curiosity. Releasing expectations and arriving with curiosity. It gets your ego out of the way and it opens you to whatever is there. If you arrive with curiosity you will see what is really, truly there and you will not judge it. You will say, oh, this is interesting. You will not be attached to whether it does or doesn't work, because you were really just kind of passing through anyhow. You weren't dependent on this thing you made to be your identity or your worth in this world. That's ego.

Your ego looks at something and judges it. It is always wearing, not rose-coloured glasses but Do-You-Love-Me-coloured glasses. And based on whatever it is you wrote or painted or built, it decides whether you are a good human or a bad one. Whether you should keep being an artist or go be a mailman instead. The ego is a blunt instrument. A bit of a lunkhead. Thuggish even. Because it's not that wanting to be loved is a bad thing. It's just that the ego goes too far. Kind of like those overly muscled steroid guys at the gym who have gone past good looking and are well into grotesque. The ego grunts questions like 'Who do you think you are?' when really all we needed was to see if this section flowed into the next one. That's the ego. Freakin' goon. Go wax your back. Can you see we're workin' here?