A primary beauty of making theater is community. In a society designed to isolate, we need each other to make theater.
The community is often temporary, but it is real. It is sustenance we need.
The community we forge mounting a play requires exposing our individual vulnerability, encountering risk and engaging in mutual support.
In the absence of trust and safety between theater makers, the community and thus, the play, shatters.
It is as something sacred between theater makers: missteps and gaffes, moments of frailty and weakness, even failed experiments must not result in shaming and attacking. On the contrary: When one of us falls, we all pick her/him/them up.
The harm a theater maker(s) suffers when shamed or abandoned by a collaborator(s) during the process is profound and can affect their capacity to enter again into theater communities.
Making theater is the fruit of apprenticeship and of learning from those who came before us over millennia. Much of this apprenticeship consists of learning the primary lesson of mutual care and support - even as it runs counter to the ethic of hyper-individualism and ego-driven behavior found elsewhere in society.
A primary beauty of making theater is community. In a society designed to isolate, we need each other to make theater.
I have found that addictions cannot be replaced with nothing, only with engagement in other positive and regenerative activities. It is why I propose focusing on travel within one’s bioregion as an alternative to plane travel… Learning a language people spoke in your region before their displacement by the people who came from Europe. Worlds that were here before the destructive project really took hold. Carlos Fuentes called it “the buried mirror” — what lies beneath the Old Navy, the AT&T store, the Chipotle.
The hand that signed the writ
that felled the tree
that grew the leaf
that fell to earth
that fed the roots
that blocked the road
that crossed the land
that caught the sun
that burned the wind
that blew the sand
that reached the sea
that made the waves
that hit the shore
held by the land
crossed by the road
blocked by the roots
fed by the earth
that held the leaf
grown by the tree
felled by the hand
that signed the writ
1/2/23, Monday - A good day to come out as an anarchist. To me this means embracing love, wonder, care, responsibility & curiosity and it means striving to form communities not defined by oppression & exploitation. People feel bad because humans long to live within spaces and networks of kindness and openness, and yet we were born into systems of cruelty and destruction. Being an anarchist also means to oppose with passion white supremacy, patriarchy, anti-queerness & the cold hate gaze of the fascist. For me, to be an anarchist is to remember what we were before the time of the empires - when we lived within the web of reciprocity of life and wisdom traditions, understanding that we & all of creation are sacred.
Writing poems to be forgotten as fires consume the city hills and equestrian statues sink beneath the pooling water. Everything is fine. Men whose brains are on fire push us on toward destinations chosen over drinks at manic lunches. It is all woozy and thrilling if your soul is broken just enough. bewildered, we go on within The grand designs of great men too dull & afraid to live among love, kindness & imagination.
Each of us will fail
At dawn, at noon, at midnight
In the twilight world of our dreams
We scarcely escape the falling embers
From the sky
We run like antelope chased
By bullets
We hide in crystal caves
Adorned with glyphs written
To confuse or beguile
You'll run out of money
At the laundromat
You'll run out of cash
At the gas station
You’ll pawn your sofa
Your Neruda books
For mac n’ cheese
The glyphs, the glyphs
In the crystal cave
Return now
And read them
Among the strata of rubble, a faint, pulsing blue light. Digging to identify the source. A monitor is extracted. They shake it, wipe it with a rag. Repeating on the screen, an image of someone from Their Time, the time of the Loco Eagles. In a scene with a house and a lawn, some words can be heard. "Now." "Didn't you?" The person saying the words moves with poise, grace even. Her blue and white clothes: water and light. She leans out the doorway of a white bus. Beatific smile. The pair thinks, They were not all killers. "Flow." Did one of the others call her “Flow?” Movement, grace, hope among desolation: Flo. God (who is absent) is not against us, the pair thinks.
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