At any given moment, there are millions of artists and craftspeople working around the world, making things that may or may not have any pragmatic use (depending on how you define pragmatics), and for most of human history, those artists worked in small corners, unnoticed except by the few.

Not so today, thankfully.   An explosion of exposure to the truly stunning array of creativity on this planet is now at our fingertips, and for me, the effect of this exposure has multiple prongs.   I’d be curious to know how you deal with it.

First of all, there’s inspiration.  Yes, I can barely tear myself away from browsing among artists’ websites, and now that Pinterest is here, so many curators make discovery a simple process.  Simply find a board displaying the kind of artistic sensibilities that turn you on, and begin to follow the trail to site after site after site of truly creative, beautiful things.  Sometimes these artifacts and pieces are done for social cause, but more often not.   Beauty of line, form, color, and composition just calls to us, and there are images and sculptures and fashions that catch our attention, make us laugh, amaze us, make us point and share and post to Facebook.  We “repin” things all the time, saying “look at that,” “look at that,” “and that, too!”

And with that energy running, we turn to our own work, and get to it.

But there’s another piece to this, and I’m wondering if you feel it as I do.

It’s that what you’re about to make, as much as it comes from your own heart and sensibility, has already been done, perhaps—if not probably—better than you’re about to do it.   Follow the threads of photography, art, color, and design on Pinterest, Flikr, whatever, and there is such brilliance there, it seems as if it is ubiquitous already.  What is the need of yet another picture of a tulip?  What is the need of another play on racism (well, maybe we do need one of those) or better yet, King Arthur, of all things?  (For those of you that know my playwriting.) What will a poet say that has not been said far better? (An easy thought to think on Shakespeare’s birthday, which was yesterday.)

All of this, of course, cuts to motive and the heart.  Why do we make what we make?  What are seeking?  What do we hope for as we forge our novels, plays, paintings, and poems?   I don’t know the answer to this.   Here’s one of my mantras: motives are always mixed.   Humans are not purists in this way; we are motivated in gradients and mixtures, the slider leaning toward the noble or the more selfish, depending on the day.  In secure times, we lean toward complete service, hoping to further all the love and altruism the world can take on.  In lean moments, when the terror of utter failure raises its head, we can become self-serving sellouts, desperate to pay the bills or get the one nod of approval we think is going to restore our sanity.

Stephen Pressfield (The War of Art) writes all this off to resistance, which he calls evil.  I’m paraphrasing him, but Pressfield says resistance not only wants to shut your voice down, it wants to kill you.   He’s serious about this, I think, and as I sit here writing this post, I think I’d better be, too.  Because he’s right.

And finally, my own pushback to this notion that what I’m making is not needed because there’s so much great stuff out there already, is simply this:

What I’ve always wanted were moments.  Moments in which the curtains part and something of that invisible trail that leads to God (or insight or beauty or love or whatever it is you want to call it) becomes visible, slips into your spirit, fills up your soul, and you are reborn a little bit.   When I had those moments as a young man in my teens and twenties, I couldn’t name it, but I could sense—feel—what I was after.

A moment of light through a petal’s delicate membrane; a moment of a human body held in tension on the point of balance wherein all is still; a moment of voice uttering words five hundred years old in such a way as to break a postmodern heart.  A moment of holy silence in a chapel holding nothing but us poor, ignorant humans splayed out before the mystery of things.   A moment at a desk laboring to capture that elusive future moment when an actor will play an action that you’ll write today, and in some far off place, a person you will never meet will sit in the dark for an hour, and, responding to a moment you dreamed of years ago, he or she will make a small turn of heart, and hope will enter the world again.

Moments are not repeatable or interchangeable.   A human moment is about here and now, mindfulness, about being awake.

There will never be enough of such moments.   How many will you find, make, and share today?

“You are the light of the world.  A city set on a hill cannot be hid.  Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket.  No.  They set it on a table and it gives light to everyone in the house.  So let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good work and glorify your father who is in heaven.”

– Jesus of Nazareth

We can be such fools…

Got your coffee?  A cup of tea?   Here we go.

So the conversation begins (see yesterday’s post) with a sampling of my tetrameter (eight syllables per line, roughly) musings, a discipline I’ve continued each morning for over a year now.   I’ve decided to ignore whether or not these writings can properly be called poetry.   They are what they are, and I’d love to publish a bunch of them someday.  We’ll see.

This from a few days ago (picked almost at random for this post, the riffing coming after I’d chosen it), reflecting on the way we use the words “love” and “hate” in our language.   I think it’s hard to hear what people mean by the words they use.    The lack of nuance in these English words provides enormous opportunity for misunderstanding, murky feeling and thinking, and sometimes, manipulation.    These days, when people use the words “love” and “hate” in popular culture and in social media, my radar tends to wobble over toward curiosity and suspicion, wondering just what they mean, and I’m often sad to realize “love” and “hate” are being used–sincerely, most of the time–strategically, as rhetorical devices in some sort of power battle over policy.  Who most persuasively defines the popular meanings of the word “love” and “hate” holds the moral high ground.

Love.
What is this word?
Swelling of  heart and tear ducts
When hunger looks at we well-fed
And we, full of pity, feel sad?
Or need we feel at all to love?
A hand offered in bitter hate,
The hate made all of feeling rage,
But the mind o’ercomes it and bends,
And the muscle of the hand moves,
Out stretches itself, and lifts up,
And love and hate live together,
And the lift is all that matters.
Is it true of all hating, too?
Such warmth in our breasts for poor folk,
But eat we on, the muscle staying put,
Nothing stretching out, not at all,
And the poor, so appreciative,
So respectful of our warm glow,
Die as we shake our heads, all sorrow.
What are feelings that they serve us?
Action is the coin of the realm.
The kingdom of God does not bend
To mere emotional sweat, but
Works day after day, in all hope,
Against despair–Oh, poor feeling, that–
Believing goodness and thick joy
Will one day stretch out like that hand,
That muscle, and we will no more be torn.
Love of heart and love of muscle,
Love of first move and love of work,
Love of touch and hand and kiss,
And love of giving up our lives,
Knowing  we cannot keep them.
To hold the fist tight is to lose,
To die, to forget, to never love.
How severed at heart and soul’s joint,
And only Easter seasons heal,
Though we won’t know it until then,
Until death rolls us in its grip
And we fly to whatever waits.

Empaths value feeling.   Workers value action.   Muscle and heart go together, don’t you think?   What we do is our heart, and if we say we love, describing sincere feeling, sincere inclination of the heart, and yet we do not love, at least as understood by the loved, then which is true?  Do we love or not?  Have we loved or not?  Who gets to say?

If you’re wondering what I meant when I said “love” in the sentences before this, you may be getting the point.

Why is this such a big deal?   Because “love” is at the core of things.   God is love, we say.   Oh, no, he’s not, say others.  This is love.  No, this is love. If you loved me, you would do this.  If you loved me, you would feel this.  You would do this to show me you felt this.   And if the notion of God loving us is the big idea behind so much religious thinking (not only in Christianity, but other faiths as well), it seems to me it matters what we mean.

And, I suppose, for me, in the end, sadness creeps in when I realize that folks who originally sought love, trying to understand at a deep level, often get lost and end up shouting and warring, metal and/or linguistic guns at the ready.   How odd that we must war for love.

How odd that we must war for love.  

And of course, if we must war, people who sit thinking about these things while the battle rages make for easy pickings.   “Nice guys finish last” comes to mind.

“Move soldier, there’s a war on.”   

I have now lived ten days longer than my father.

As we flew to Hawaii on Friday, April 12, I was thoughtful of another date: July 23, 1988, was Jimmy Joe Berryman’s 19,707^th day, and his last.

April 12, 2013 was Jeffrey William Berryman’s 19,707^th day.  All that day, I reflected on the fact that my life’s length equaled that of Dad’s, who died just shy of his fifty-fourth birthday back when I was twenty-nine.  Acute leukemia killed him one month and three days before Amy was born.

This is the question I kept asking myself out over the Pacific Ocean: what should I make of this period of time neither my father nor his father got?

Anjie and I have been talking about the future a lot lately.  Our lives have changed in recent years.  Though we remain strongly connected to our children, they’ve each gone off and begun the process of doing just what we wanted them to do, which was to build solid, independent lives built on foundations of faith, dreams, perseverance, and service.  “The kids are gone and the pets are dead”—we once heard that was the true definition of freedom—and as thankful as we are for our lives thus far, we have grown a bit restless, agreeing together that we need to make new patterns of meaning, behavior, rhythm, and service.

So we’re in the process of praying, thinking, talking, and dreaming just like we did years ago, and though we’re both in the middle of jobs and projects well in motion, we’re trying again to discern the larger picture, and get a sense of which way the wind might be blowing for us over the next 15-20 years, assuming (knowing that it might not be true) that God’s going to grant us this next period of time.   We often say—with a twinkle in our eyes—our lives are just barely half over.  True or not, that’s the way we’re approaching the conversation.

For those of you who know me, you’ve noticed by now that I haven’t said much lately, via blogs, Facebook and Twitter posts, or in performance.  Frankly, there is much to talk about with me, and I hardly know where to begin.   The writing’s been as warful as implied in Pressfield’s The War of Art, and there are days when it’s pretty damn discouraging.   Regrets related to some professional decisions early in my career have been having a field day in the back of my mind as I struggle to make my script work, and the mistakes I’ve made relationally with many old friends creep into play as well.  But back of all that is a growing and changing understanding of life and—most importantly—faith.

In the coming days, I’m going to be blogging a bit more. (“Yeah, we’ve heard that before.”)   How much more is hard to say.   I think about the following things a lot: the meaning and practice of love; racism; playwriting; church; poverty and wealth; theatre; the role of criticism in the theatre; the making of meaning; water (those who have it and those who don’t); injustice’s root causes and the various battles groups engage in to define it and fight it; Christ; art; Islam (I am ¼ of the way through the Quran); the stories we tell ourselves; LGBT issues; the nature and essence of religious experience; brain science; imagination; creation; current events (Boston, the new pope, the theatre I see, pop culture); the list goes on.  Plainly, focus is a problem.

The difficulty of knowing lies at the heart of my journey.   I’ve blogged about that before, and so it’s old news.   But for whatever reason, complexity will not yield in my thinking, and I am reluctant to launch into the sound-byte infested waters, but reluctance can one day give way to cowardice, and with so much at stake in this life of ours, silence does not serve.

It would not be false to say that I come with uneasy voice and a quivering membrane of a spirit as I begin to talk again about my questions and the particular shape of my changing understanding.

I hope you decide to follow along.

And now, back to the question:  what should I make of this period of time neither my father nor his father got?

Something beautiful…

From a prompt from Julia’s Place.
The prompt:  …the extreme weather meant… 
100 words.  Here we go.

FOG AGAIN, HE SAYS, CURTAIN PARTING

Fog again, he says, curtain parting,
Fingertips nearly numb with night
Still cold on them like blunt, iced hurt
The extreme weather meant to leave,
Meant to deposit on blued skin
Left from yesterday’s hard clinging
While walking home from the grocer.
Sun’s not coming anytime soon,
But brisk, he’ll walk again today,
Hurrying off, hoping to miss
The lovely girl who knocks at noon,
Who wants nothing but to drink her
Loneliness on the rocks, with him,
His cold fingertips so, so fine
For stirring thick, soulful toddies
On long, frigid afternoons.
Heart worn, he climbs the white hills.

© 2013

From GMI Airport, Concourse C. Mosaic by Carlos Alves

WE NEED, WE MEN AND WOMEN, WANTING MUCH

We need, we men and women, wanting much;
A breakfast bun, a hand nearby, a breath,
And quicker answers to the mad questions
Buzzing our quiet times, distracting us.
From nothing we came, but what does that tell us?
What nothing is nothing, what kind of nothing
Do we claim as true origin and home?
Chance tossing up sunsets by emergence,
Waltzing with time to spin out symphonies?
Do higher emergent realities
Need strong actors to set them first spinning,
Or did water leap into being alone,
Hydrogen and oxygen attracted
To each other through near sexual moves,
And one day, voila!  Water born, cold, wet,
Full of all life, language, and brain would need?
What imagination and faith is required
To believe in nothing nothing.  But still,
Its mystery all around.  It’s an ocean
We sit in, our planet and lives islands
In vast seas, small libraries of knowledge
Floating in oceans of long horizon.
What we know is real enough, I suppose,
But what interests me is the water out there.
Perhaps this life is a rehearsal after all,
A long preparation for sailing seas
That we can’t go to until we finish here.
If you long to sail, learn to tie knots in ropes.
Get strong, get open, get wisdom, and soon.
Though it cost all you have, run up your sails.
Sacred texts are gifts, blueprints of sailing,
But will their ship designs stand the tempest?
Is the water out there what we think it is?
God only knows, but He’ll judge us anyway.
Or will He?  Perhaps forever judges
Souls as oceans judge a ship’s worthiness.
“Will it sail?” being the only question.

© 2012 Jeff Berryman

After a great Christmas in New York, where I got to hang out with my NYC gang—namely, Amy Berryman and Daniel and Grace Berryman (my amazing kids), not to mention my lovely wife Anjie—taking in all things Christmas (except Rockefeller Center, can you imagine?) and eating day after day like I might never get another meal, and after a solid week of teaching at Abilene Christian University, where 25 top of the class young people jousted with me about art, music, meaning, faith, pop culture, sex, aesthetics, poetry, and Les Miserables, I am now firmly seated at my desk, my computer yawning threats at me (or is that just boredom) if I don’t get to it with my 2013 agenda: I intend to complete two plays and a novel.

I’d better get to writing.

I’ve got my allies arrayed close by: Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, the Zanders’ The Art of Possibility, Bayles and Orland’s Art and Fear, Robert Genn’s ongoing letters from the Painters’ Keys, Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Stephen King’s On Writing, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Eric Maisel’s Deep Writing, and of course, Robert McKee’s Story.   Then there are the fiction writers to both inspire and terrify.  So far I’ve been listening to Walker Percy’s voice in The Moviegoer and John Updike’s in the brilliant and strangely upsetting novel Rabbit, Run.  (Did Updike know these people?)

Will books and writers help?   Do they help you?   They do me, especially when I open them, read them, listen to them, and make some kind of effort to let their words and wisdom work on me.

And then there are my good friends and colleagues who accompany me on this journey of writing by reading my tomes and offering varying kinds of feedback.  Of course, with plays you need actors and workshops and directors to help you find your way, and I’m grateful to have some skilled folks to help me sort things out.   The novel?   This is where the brave folks come out, willing to read all manner of craziness in hopes of coming across a solid storyline or two.  We’ll see what happens there.

And hopefully, I’ll get a couple of the children’s things out as well.   Sending queries to agents just now, and no bites yet.

Strange to be my age and still pitching as if I were a youngster just starting out.   Before long I’ll turn into one of those inspirational older folks young people point to in shaking-head wonder, thinking, why doesn’t he just give it up?   Can’t give it up, though…I feel as if I’m just getting underway.

So February 1^st starts the New Year for me—January is far too connected to December to make for a clean break between eras, so I wait for February.   That’s the day the new grind begins and focus returns.    Oh, I know, it ought to start today, and truth is, with this bit of writing, it’s begun.   Pushing back the dark one more time, ordering the chaos, doing the best I can with this image of God thing.

How’s your year going?

Time waits for no one…

100,000 words in sessions of 15-20 minutes a day 5-6 times a week.  Had no idea until I transferred all of it into Word files.

Is it any of any good?  Oh, I don’t know…but there are some pieces I like.  I’ve posted a few over on a poetry page, so you can go read if you’d like.   And I’d love to hear some feedback if you’ve got any.  If not, enjoy and slip silently into the night.

Why tetrameter?

I have no idea.

My first thought was to emulate Czeslaw Milosz (as if), whose poetry kept me going for about eighteen months in daily, early morning readings.   His ability to capture the fleeting moment, especially on behalf of some unknown person that he found captivating, spoke to me of the worth of each man and woman, every day of their lives, regardless of what they were doing, or what was happening to them.

After writing a bit of verse with Milosz in mind, I decided I needed a frame, a boundary that was a bit stricter.  So I looked at the ceiling and thought, “Pentameter.”  Then I thought, “No, too many syllables.”   Why?  Just an intuition, so I pulled it back to eight syllables, and wondered about rhyme, and thought, “Nope.”  So free verse tetrameter, it is.

And I began.

I’ve written about family, about love, about God, about religion, about coffee (lots about coffee), and all manner of art, beauty, and questions.  And sex.   (I often wondered if I was allowed to be writing about sex, but hey, there you go.  Curious now, aren’t you?)

Those lines are in the lock box for now.

Anyway, I learned one more time that boundaries and frames are good things, allowing for connections and ideas that you would otherwise never find, never see coming.

If you’re interested, here’s a piece to get you started:

 

STAMEN WET WITH POLLEN GLITTER

Stamen wet with pollen glitter
Thrust from red centers of soft yellow,
Inspiring the middle aged man
Wandering the hills looking for light.

White roots reach over sloping ground
Like arms sinewy and strong,
Gripping earth, holding place for good,
Come hell or tsunami or dark night.

Yellow-bright leaves, big with old life
Nestle against these arteries,
These tree branches skimming the earth,
Sighing a last time, thankful for wind.

They fill with morning light’s best glow,
And shine as best they can at Heaven,
Knowing God catches those who fall
In proper season, hearts effort-weary,
Done with trying, done with longing.

Stillness settles, and breath eases
Away, slows as if at ease, and closes
Out its long, long run of living.
Who knew leaves sometime fall in Spring?

What is at the heart of the conversation between art (in all its form and expression) and the faith of the Christian (in its multiple and varied flavors)?

Here we go again…for more than a decade I’ve been leading an annual discussion with undergraduates at Abilene Christian University concerning the intersection between the real world making of art and the living reality of Christian faith.   When I started this class, I knew what the answers were.  Well, that’s an overstatement, but I was pretty sure I was on the right track.   Now?  Oh, it’s a topsy-turvy world we’ve got going here, and I often wonder…what in the world was the Creator thinking as He got to work in that “let-there-be-light”, big bang impulse of a moment?

So without much fanfare, I want to ask you, my friends from far and wide, some of whom I know, and some of whom I don’t…if you were to try to launch a group of passionate young artists on this life long conversation of making form from varied and disparate material, somehow letting that making being informed by a faith in Christ in one of its multiple and various forms (my emerging biases are showing now), how would you articulate the question at the heart of the matter?

How would you articulate the question at the heart of the matter?

I’d like to say it’s simple, but at least for me, I’m still plowing through mounds of complexity.  But before I tell you what I think the deal is, as seriously as I know how to ask, please pitch in here.  I’d love to have a no-kidding, gather-around-the-question-without-any-great-desire-to-win kind of discussion here.  Many of you are far more grounded than I am, and just now I’m sitting in my chair in class, hoping the instructor shows up.

Your turn…

…and thanks in advance.    

Here’s a piece that I’ve performed a couple of times, down at the open mic of the Seattle Poetry Slam and then in a worship gathering at the Northwest Church.   (edited slightly for the church performance.)   There’s a series of these poems based on the notion of “Don’t Reduce Me.”   Reductionism is at the heart of stereotyping, and the fact that we often deal with each other as if a single fact (skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever) tells us everything we need to know.   Truth is, identity is mysterious and emergent, and we should all pause at the holy mystery that is the other person in front of us.   Needless to say, life goes too fast to allow such a thing.

To read each other like poems, we’d have to slow down.    Way down…

—–

MAKE ME A TOWER

Don’t reduce me.
Make me a tower.
Shower my mind with reasons
Why days all of grime
Can turn into fine
Seasons of nothing but better.
Better yet, can you cut through the clutter
And just sputter me out some hope here?
I’m trying to cope here, and I don’t want to shutter down,
So please—just utter me some good.
Give me some kind of beauty
I’m looking for my heart; I lost it, in part, to duty
And fear of hell, and fell notions of holy.
Now only oceans of you can open the fist.
I missed this,
Missed the gist of this.
Don’t dismiss the potential for bliss here, people.
What I need are open faces,
Designs of production making praises that function
Like light on the leaves of opening trees.
I need to receive the sun’s gift, that spark
That runs down the dark, runs down the miles
Arriving to open the sad into smiles, through all of life.
A kingdom of good I would make if I could.
Now, that attention you pay,
The fine notice you take,
It starts turning the pages,
It rattles the cages inside this man, and
This dead heart starts to shake, starts to quake, and maybe it has to break,
But it can, in time, start to wake up, and by God,
It’s sublime to find in the fine detail what really might be a human face.
I’m more than a race, some type and some chatter,
Be in my now, right here has to matter
We all got some color, some black, white, and brown,
We’re deeper than that once the bias breaks down
Let’s get past it, let’s ask it, whether all that typing and crap
Is what’s wrapping our spirits up so damn tight,
That we fear it, we won’t come near it, our own spirit, we steer it into hiding,
Riding straight into the abyss,
Missing what “could have been” in our time.
Put your mind to better use, and try to deduce the me,
The whole me—I been standing here the whole frickin’ time,
Man—the mission is the recognition
Of the emergent, towering woman and man,
That powerful I am that stands in every common
Image carrier of God.
I’m not a body, I’m not a soul-
I’m a human, I’m whole
An entire being, tired of being abused.
Of being used so poorly.
I sorely hope in the future, we can just refuse to do that,
And choose to see each other—
Don’t reduce me.

Unless of the course, the actor playing the famous detective short-circuits, and has an experience we call in the theatre, “going up.”   Which, in more common language, means he forgets his lines.

Truth is, this sort of thing is fairly common in the theatre.   You know what you’re doing, and suddenly, you don’t.  The audience may or may not be able to tell that you’re struggling, but your fellow actors know, and for a few brief seconds that seem like a few long years, your mind is a white-out, and you are falling through an abyss that is the heart of the actor’s nightmare.

I had a couple of these moments over the opening weekend of Taproot Theatre’s Gaudy Night, and I suspect it’s not all that proper to talk about these things in public, but the experience of that kind of terror (too strong a word here, but not far from it) has spiritual and ordinary life analogs that I think are worth considering.

I’ve heard a couple of accomplished people lately (a leading Broadway actor and I forget who the other one was) say that in truth, no one in the world knows much about what they’re doing—we’re all just winging it as best we can.    We’re making it up as we go, and as we have all experienced, the thin veneer of confident presentation can suddenly come apart, it’s sickening disappearance amazingly swift.   A credit card doesn’t clear and we’re standing in the grocery line as everyone stares at the insolvent dude, humiliation pretty complete.   We sit on the freeway, car dead, backing up traffic for miles, suffering the withering stares of passing folks who used to be in a hurry.   Sexual performance short-circuits, critics call your writing bad names, a junior high audience of two-hundred popular kids from around the state of Texas bursts into loud catcalls of laughter when you begin to sing at show and tell, and you’re serious as all get-out (as we used to say in Texas.)  What do you do?  You wilt, you hide under a rock, you climb back into bed, you sing on to the end—by God, let ‘em laugh!

That last event (the laughing junior high crowd) was one of the epic experiences of my childhood, one that marked me more deeply than I care to admit.  Failure is confusing.  I’ve been in a couple of plays where I lost my lines so badly that there was really no escape.   Should we admit these things?  I don’t know, but it’s the truth…this is life.   We lose our lines.   We forget what play we’re in, what character we’re playing, and who the hell knows what action we’re supposed to be playing at the moment?   Our actor partners get bug-eyed, stammering, wanting to help, and they do in some way rescue you, but truth is, you will either get back on track or you won’t, and the play (or the job, or the marriage, or the education, or the poem) will live or die, and employment will go on or end, and either way, you’ll go home at the end of the night and decide how you will respond to this ongoing yawning reality that tomorrow will bring yet another opportunity to public embarrass yourself.

Welcome to risk.  Welcome to opportunity.  Welcome to what it means to be alive.  As my wise mentor/voice teacher/second mom told me years (I was about to get married, and the comment referred to the possibility of having a child sooner than later), “If you don’t want to play, don’t suit up.”

“If you don’t want to play, don’t suit up.”

Truth is, when I’m at the theatre as an audience member, I always enjoy the moments when actors get lost a bit, mostly because it immediately illuminates the difference between theatrical time, that magic state of mind where we travel imaginatively to where the play has us going, and actual time, where flesh and blood panic, and adrenaline rushes not because of anything fictional, but because suddenly, the very real human stakes of accomplishment and failure are laid bare, and now, something alive is happening, drama running all over the body, capturing in a heartbeat the human struggle we all face, every day.    It’s not good, it shouldn’t happen, we’re all professionals here, it’s a breaking of the contract with the audience.   But truth is, it happens, and we get back up and go on.

Or we don’t.

That impulse to stop, to lay down, to quit making, to quit risking, to quit giving, to quit putting yourself in the place where failure is not only possible, but likely…I get it.   Life is hell, sometimes.   It hurts.   It breaks our backs.    We get betrayed, or we betray, and desperate, we think we can’t go on.   Been there, done that, may go back to it someday.  Maybe today if the wind changes.

So yes, I forgot my lines.   There are reasons, but they don’t matter really.   And let’s not overdramatize.   Truth is, I got back on track, and we delivered the play.   Disaster avoided.   Mostly.   But when the lights go down, and you know you have another show in a few hours, here’s what you do.   You go to work, you do your damndest to make sure it doesn’t happen again.   And you take courage and comfort in the words of the actors around you, all of whom have been there, as they offer you grace and strength to go out and do it again.   And again.   And again.   And again.  And that night, you sweat bullets, and the words are there, every one of them.    And you thank God, and move on.

Go be a part of your life’s drama today.   Who knows what part of the play you’re in?  If you’re struggling with your lines, speak anyway.   Trust that they’ll come.   And if you see any fellow actors, those friends caught up in the intersection of your story with theirs, struggling with their lines, elevate the attention you’re paying, and hold them up.   The audience they’re playing for needs you to help them.

Those audiences may well be divine.

Speak the speech, I pray thee, trippingly on the tongue….