Rainy, and Free, Satuday

Most of life is mundane: laundry, errands, cleaning, work, etc.  I guess I've been waiting for inspiration, to have some eloquence of writing, but it doesn't arrive.  And maybe I'm not eloquent, anyway.

It's raining now.  Got a walk in earlier.  Bumper crop of Amanitas under the birch and cedar trees.  Crowds of parents and dogs and runners and friends; shouts and cheers in the distance, for some rowing event.  A little while later the wind kicked up, boats and birds and flotsam all bobbing on the water.

Had errands to do.  Started making a salad three hours ago, which led to a scouring of the fridge and cooking various items before they went bad (and lots of cleaning, and taking out the compost and garbage.)  I haven't been home much, my good intentions haven't panned out.  When I've been home, I've mostly just slept.

Anyway, made a curried apple salad (yogurt, celery needed to be used), and that turned out the best of everything; it's pretty tasty.  (Apples, raisins, walnuts, celery, scallion, sheep yogurt, lemon juice, and curry powder.)  Also, I decided to go off of sugar for a while, as of Halloween, so, the sweetness of the raisins was kinda' pleasant.  The only thing I'm really craving is an eggnog latte, but that was more power-of-suggestion, because I read a news story that mentioned it yesterday.

Sauteed kale and garlic (kale been around all week.)  And then made apple sauce because one of the apples I bought earlier today was unpleasantly mushy, which led to me finding more and more apples stowed here and there.  Anyway, there's a lot of it, and I'm waiting for it to cool down so I can go pay a bill and get out of the house.

I thought I had to work today, but found out I had the day wrong, and so had a day with no "shoulds" attached to it.

Working on three scenes for acting class, all from "Kramer vs. Kramer" (Joanna and Ted).  (Curiously, all of our scenes for the class are from movies, though one was a play first, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf".)  I need to write out my script; I keep changing where Joanna's coming from, and my "wants" from last week are not necessarily relevant to where I'm at now.  The stakes are super high, she's not the kind of woman that takes leaving her child lightly.  In the first scene, I feel like the first half is like a check list you make for youself to check stuff off that you did, all the while knowing that even as it looks like you've accomplished something, you haven't done the ONE thing that you had to do.  In this case, she's telling Ted that she's not taking Billy (their son) with her when she goes.  And then when that comes out, she has to convince herself that he's better off without her.  Because that's the choice: herself or her son?  And she says that if she stays, she'll kill herself, so, her choice is to leave.  (If you believe that the words are true for the character when they say them.  And I do.)  This is week four or five?  I can't remember.  Psychologically, logically, I understand it.  Emotionally, I'm still trying to find how to get there.  How I get there.

Still haven't figured that out.

Transition

It was so dark this morning, I convinced myself my housemate had left earlier than normal and I didn't need to get up yet.  When I finally did check the clock, it was long past the time I should've gotten up.  Past the time to catch the bus to work.  And so, I guess I won't mind the impending time change and afternoon darkness quite so much.

Mid-autumn.  Scorpio season.  Halloween and All Saints' Day.  When people believed (believe?) the veil between this earthly life and whatever exists after death runs thin.  And we touch or glimpse the unknown, the things we fear the most.

I was watching a video on YouTube about how we have a light and shadow side, as does everything, and if we don't address the shadow, it expresses itself anyway, and if we are able to look it squarely in the face, we can learn from it and be inspired; or at least become aware of why we do the things we do, behave the way we do, respond as we do, without necessarily wanting to.  Understand more what has become ingrained behavior, and maybe decide it's not inevitable, we can change.

And the show from last weekend dealt with death.  I go back and forth in my mind whether or not the character had already died and the conversation was in a holding place after death, where one lets go; or if she was hallucinating it all at a point before death, and dies in the end.  Either way, there was a final transition of letting go at the very end.

Working on the show, and listening, experiencing what I could from the process and from backstage, didn't make me depressed.  It made me feel super alive, and happy, and in love with the world, especially all the people involved.  Someone said something about the going from two people to a crowd, and I can't remember what they said exactly, but there are two people, then the sensory deprivation, and beams of light that rise from the wings like sun (or a double sun, so that it washes away the darkness) and lights that twinkle like stars from the ceiling and a rising song, all before the HYPERCUT crowd (us) comes on stage...I don't know, the last couple of times I experienced that transition, the gentleness of it, like coming out of a long, dark tunnel, a long dark, night (out of the lonely dark, and into light and company) was so moving to me.  That someone designed that: it was perfect.  It made me cry.  (Of course, then I got disoriented on one of my very last exits, smacking hard into one of the main performers-I apologized later.  Hurt so bad, I missed my last entrance, standing in the wings in a daze. - Every transition happened in blackout.)

And what seemed like it had been longer than a week (barely a week), was suddenly over.

And it's on to the next thing.  (And autumn shows us how to let go, and move on.)  And I want that next thing.  I live for this.