and I said to the star, "Consume me".

 

 

As my yoga apprenticeship draws to a close, I am engulfed by waves of feeling that are completely unfamiliar to me. I have one class left, and am already mourning what may be lost in my day to day. I had thought my previous class was going to be hard in my emotional state, but as soon as I walked into the studio, the wash of calm came over me, and I was too filled with a sense of rightness to feel anything else.

Having the break from construction work, from constantly having to ignore my body's needs to serve someone else's purpose, the teaching and taking of yoga is such the opposite - reminding self and others that conversation with body may be the most important conversation of our lives - the push and pull in such opposite directions feels almost like choosing between life and death in a very real sense. And that starts to bleed into other aspects of life, like expression of creative self, of feeding curious, hungry parts of self, of inspiring growth in self. So I have looked with clear eyes on other parts of my life that I am giving time and energy to, but will not render out into something I want to be or have in the future. Sometimes we need things, like habits or jobs, to keep us moving forward into some kind of future and sense of security. But there comes a time where those things can begin to hinder us, because they are easier to continue doing, than to explore our boundaries and move beyond them. The yoga reminds me how much more is to be had inside of my own body - all of the things we aren't taught to explore or question or listen to. If, the more we do something, the more we become it (the mind AND muscles develop neural pathways and bulk up in the areas we exercise the most), the feeling of rightness when I walk into a yoga studio makes me increasingly aware of the opposite feeling in other places. Of how much more there is to be had in Life.

So I have been slowly turning down the freelance jobs I get offered that I am more than capable of doing, but that feed a future I am disinclined to be a part of. A lot of the entertainment work fosters aspects of the economic and cultural structures that I am finding myself fiercely against, and what is perpetuated in real lives that feed that machine, which only cares about money. But as I let those things go, so too do I lose the power I had to fulfill other people's needs, to be filled with and validated by achieving other people's desires and deadlines and budgets.

And the people that formed vast networks of support and deep understanding of the worlds we crawled around inside of together - the farther I remove myself from those layers of knowing and getting through the bullshit together - the less connected I am to those webs of people, as the similarity of our priorities and experiences evaporate. There will always be love, but our beliefs about our needs and desires are suddenly diametrically opposed. Awareness of the subjugation of our flesh and time and soul incites a revolution against those things, and not everybody is ready to fight that battle. The cost seems too great when you have learned to look at the value of your flesh as relative to the value of money.

Those things have meant life to me.

I learned so much about how to wield my body with power, how to use my words to move small armies of men with precision. I was able to find things that were stripped from me in childhood and rebuild a powerful seat for my soul. But redefining my sense of power means allowing myself to be emptied of previous concepts. Refusing to be defined by other people's needs means I have to let go of the feeling of being purpose driven by them. I must become a Vacuum, before I can be filled my own needs and my own purpose.

I never anticipated feeling so uprooted, because I have never had a sense of being rooted to something. The sting of feeling disconnected, untethered to time and space, and my sense of where I exist in proximity to those things has become suddenly overwhelming. But like the practice of pouring ourselves into asanas (yoga poses), something that shows us how we respond to intense and unfamiliar territory - I have always backed off too quickly to reach whatever lessons may lie on the other side. Missed out on the strength that may be born from learning to feel without running away. Of course I can't take anybody with me on a journey inside myself - turning inward is a necessarily singular path, even if I mourn the loss of what I once had. There are different rules in this game than ones I have gotten used to playing, so I have to let my habitual reactions fade away as they do not serve me here. The ways in which I communicate needs and desires will inherently have to change, as I navigate a landscape that has no map, and all of the external images and associations I've consumed in my lifetime can provide no assistance to an internal compass.






We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
- Jack Gilbert

 

 

 

 

it's because you taste like home.

At the movies with a handsome carpenter on christmas, I had one of those moments where I remembered who I was, and the true value of what I am doing. It is so easy in the entertainment industry to get lost in the brilliant waste, of building concerts and spectacles only to ride home on the subway and hear the audience members around me open and close their mouths with debilitating, complaining negative noises about the experience I gave the labor of my body to, for it to have manifested for these ungrateful bastards. Seeing the newest Disney Princess confection (Frozen 2013) the best part of the movie was hearing the reactions of the children around us, especially the loud "Huh?" every single child uttered when the prince/boy did not save the day. Discussing the newest line up of Disney princesses with some of my close female friends, all of us with a vested interest in the genre, as a large amount of our college friends have ended up in the Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks world, it was fascinating to note the extreme and different reactions we all had to the different stories, what we resonated with was so much deeper and more tangible than the barely more than skin deep princesses that defined our concept of femininity, destiny, self worth and true love in our child selves.

How would my mother and grandmother be different, if they had these kinds of Disney characters in their earliest memories and associations?

I witnessed, in that audience, the shift from previous expectations and the happily ever afters my generation and those before me chase, crumbling under the weight of failure... and I saw the future change. As much as movies and tv shows are crafted for children to sell a ton of merchandise, more than make something beautiful, there is an inherent shaping of culture that is taking place, and it may be decades before the meaning underlying the medium of transmission can fully reveal itself in our adult incarnations. Stories like that of Wicked, and soon, the movie Maleficent, go back to the stories of our childhood, to look at what happened through a different kind of historian's eyes. The new Batman movies, and Daniel Craig's James Bond focus on pushing our boundaries of right and wrong, black and white, bringing us into the shadows that our existence is actually comprised of. Allowing children and young adults to weigh motivations, to feel for what was previously considered the 'bad guy', to see past labels and unlucky situations is giving our youth the ability to come into their own with a much deeper awareness of the depths and feelings that trigger the responses of the people around them. Buying that ticket to see that movie, that crappy princess Merida costume, those Batman action figures may be feeding into the mindless consumption that some of us struggle against, but when our children pretend to be these characters, they are embracing the depth that WE as the makers of entertainment have given them.

It may be that the only way to truly experience/engage/affect culture is to be immersed in it. Maybe to be above it, or better than it actually separates us because we are stepping out of our time and its realities, and become disconnected from time altogether. If a handsome stranger running from an unpleasant past hadn't walked into the Columbia Restaurant in Sarasota Florida and made eye contact with a youngish woman who hated her father, sometime in the late 80's,  I wouldn't have had the silly, sweet voice on the phone with me last night, listening to my panic attack about my career - my sister would not exist without the holes created in our mother by her father, who then allowed that handsome/horrible stranger to alter the direction of her life. those threads are necessary in the grand design, and to go back in time to fix those holes would alter the entirety of the universe. It is because of my grandmother's 16 year old self, writing letters to a handsome young man in the air force that my mother grew up broken and angry, a cause and effect that we can have no cognizance of how it will ripple the future, how that 16 year old's first love, sometime in the 1950's may still hinder the positive choices I make in my personal and sexual relationships now. Memories are as real and tangible as atoms, they construct the realities we live in and the things we choose to define ourselves by. They are real, and they exist in this time, because we carry them with us, using them like divining rods to navigate the future. We are carried along by the momentum of simple actions, getting up in the morning, buying that cup of coffee, the smile one gives a stranger whose life may be altered by that simple muscle twitch, evolved from southern manners an individual cannot escape. The feelings of a 16 year old in the 50's resonate with so much momentum, they are still swimming around me in the now that I exist in, in such a real, unbreakable state, just as real and powerful as Elvis's pelvic thrust in defining culture and moving us all forward. Just as I may have atoms from exploded stars composing my flesh, so too are moments from a past I will never know reflected in the anatomy of my own unique existence, and every choice we make is a ricochet of those 'past' atoms, colliding and making 'future' atoms, no different than matter and anti matter, just unnamed and undiscovered by the science community yet - the 4th dimension, the undiscovered plane of existence that we are unable to see as a scientific reality because we are still so emotionally sensitive to it.

Some of us, 70 years after the great depression, still cannot walk past that huge value bag of greasy potato chips that their grandchildren will never eat, because some part of them is still caught in the scarcity of the past, on repeat, like a scratched record, or a ghost, walking the same hallways, doomed to live a traumatic event over and over again. Some people repeat their parents mistakes, or continue to fall in love with the same kind of man, at the expense of their children's safety over and over again, stuck at a point in their development where things ceased to change, to grow. Like the past atoms became a cancer, that multiply and fill them up with a time they cannot escape and are doomed to repeat. I also know people that are so afraid of the past atoms they were given by their parents, they choose to only live in the future, and are caught in a time warp of working and planning so strong, they cannot even see that they are missing out on their lives in real-time (I was caught up in too many past atoms once, and encountered someone filled with future atoms and flaming red hair, and a few conversations with him exchanged enough mutually missing atoms to balance that I could move out of the mistakes I had been repeating. Those conversations changed me and my entire life path). And some of us are taught as children that there are no boundaries, that we can do and be anything we want - some of us learn it the hard way, later in life, how to get past the skip in the record - and some of us have been doing it the whole time without ever realizing the power of our actions and self explorations:

Change is time travel. It is dependent on one's emotional state and their concept of boundaries. To disrupt the waves of poor choices or bad memories carried throughout history, to stop and actually effectively choose what kinds of momentum you offer to the universe intimately manipulates the future in ways so far past our ability to see, it is when we are fully present, to give positive ideals and experiences to the collective waves into the future, the rooting of and knowing of self in our own time and cultural history that we actively define the next generation, what matters to them and how they see themselves. Just by living more deeply than our parents and with more awareness of self than previous generations we are laying a stronger foundation for the future.

I saw it for a second, the future, like a flash in that dark movie theatre, and I no longer doubt my ability to be a part of it.



"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Astronauts love golf.

 

     Action vs reaction. Inertia and momentum are fixed states in a vacuum. Chaos theory is a way of defining probability and patterns in everything around us. We have found the god particle, the higgs-boson, but did we find it because it was waiting to be discovered or because we created a concept to explain reality and manifested our own limitations of existence? Are theology and science really so different?

    I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to be 30 years old, to have laugh lines and a defining wrinkle or two, and suddenly, I can feel the momentum building, and the fear of inertia dropping away as I read and work, converse and watch, as the world continues to fold in on itself. Globalization is creating a fantastic new landscape for human interaction and social development, but depending on what industry you fall into, you witness such differing notes of a grandiose symphony, and we are all so busy trying to master our individual melodies and personal instruments, that it can be difficult to truly experience the powerful pattern we are all so deeply a part of. Running away from the separation between artist and reality, I found myself stumbling into an entire network of powerful young adults who FEARLESSLY navigate the entertainment industry in its technical aspects, rolling and riding the rising waves of our needs for constant entertainment as a way of dealing with a monumental economic shift happening. Such shifts have happened before, and to spare you the history lesson, I'll just touch on a few key moments in the development of the human race. 

   Cultivating/controlling nature to reap its reward in a time frame, agriculture stopped us in our tracks as roving bands of nomads and quite literally rooted us to locales, giving us the permanence to establish communities of wildly different values, beliefs, and personal and spiritual histories. The printing press gave every individual the power to choose how they interpret and share ideas, which gave us access to translations and notions that broke us free from kings and church heads and inspired revolutions worldwide over the next century. The industrial revolution brought materials things into plentiful reach, redefining comfort and luxury as accessible in a completely new way, changing our labor force completely, as machines could seamlessly start to fill laborer's roles, freeing up large amounts of society to cultivate new invention and greater intellectual pursuits. In the past two decades, the development of the internet and the software boom has continued to accelerate our ability to outsource jobs so they get done faster and cheaper, freeing up even more of the workforce to delve even deeper into the virtual landscape that has manifested, in which we all act and react to with the most powerful ability the individual has ever been able to have, and be guaranteed an audience. We are in a time where there is no excuse, there is only lack of drive to explain one's inability to carve out whatever riches they desire from the global community.

   For those of you who have been incubating the same job for 10+ years may need an attitude adjustment, or else the world may provide one for you. 

   Having just taken part in NATEAC, a conference on theatrical elements of engineering, architecture and other key elements to physical productions, I noticed some specific and interesting blips on my radar of where there are starting to develop very strong overlaps across a number of previously almost unrelated aspects of entertainment as an industry. As I attended one of the top animation schools in the country, and watched the animators get snapped up by the top animation companies worldwide, I've been considering the basis of needs in society that are being filled by these individuals, mirrored in the world of gaming, the development of interactive greeting cards, gaming graphics, 3 dimensional movies (since we have all but given up on the 2 dimensional disney landscape of my childhood) in animated characters and environment, as well as live action movies shot in 3D, the comeback of letterpress as an art form profound for the high key of emotional experience of truly handmade items brings us that much closer to other individuals and realistic interpretations of existence. So listening to IATSE union crew's presentation during this conference, I heard a lot of unasked questions trying to surface about the next big development in the world of larger than life theatre. Automation has been developing for some time now, and has succeeded in cutting backstage technicians to a slight few, further dissipating the needs of the labor force. Slowly, patterns are emerging where the industries that I straddle seem to collide, and noticing on my facebook, some of the animators I went to school with were talking about an international tour of an arena show that was based on an animated movie made by a major animation studio. More frequently now we are seeing theatre and literature derivative of movies, just as the comic industry has had to shift their entire story structures to fit the huge movie market for their characters that only previously lived and breathed in the pages of a comic book. At the same time, I found out someone I have been taking notes on in a more technical world, involving some of the foundation structures of the entertainment industry was touring with the same animated movie turned theatre show. Suddenly the degrees of separation have shrunk to olympic standards of hundredths rather than whole numbers. So whilst everyone writing about globalization talk about the software boom and the power of the internet as a force for collaboration, I have just witnessed what seems to be much more all encompassing than that, as expressed through how society either seeks out or is simply given an entire new way of experiencing the world around them.

    After some quick research, I was stricken by a number of implications of our changing expectations of experiences. The automated dragons are massive. Massive. I can't even imagine, with only a slight awareness of weight displacement and the intricacies of rigging myself, the kind of preparation that goes into most shows, let alone multiple characters moving as the CRUX of the magic show that we provide for our patrons, sometimes 3 times a day for a week, before dragging the whole thing to another city, and another, and another. During my sessions at NATEAC, I remember specifically hearing an engineer mention that we as an industry have more frequently completely overloaded the venues we load in and out of beyond their capacities, and this show seems a prime example of a work of art coming into a different venue every week with completely different circumstances in each building, but very set and specific needs for the magic of the show. There are only so many flexible aspects of any show, and one focused almost solely on flying dragons doesn't have much in the way of weight related changes that can be made. But if this is a reoccurring scenario, our shows as a whole have gotten larger in flash, higher in audience expectation and much more intense in its engineering needs to manifest all of these elements. So here we have an interesting connection between Art and Engineering. What makes this even more emphatically important to me, is that in the world of animation, with the 3D programs that have become industry standard, from conceptual development to final movie, you have to take almost the SAME considerations of characters as the automated puppets we see on stage. In Maya, you build the frame/skeleton/rigging of a creature, test out its movements, model in incredible detail the outside surface, from a sculptural and textural standpoint, it has to be lit in a space, all the same kinds of processes that go into the creation of any kind of show. And if companies like Dreamworks know they are planning to create physical representations of their movies, character development then begins to take on a whole entire need for engineering awareness, to more adequately prepare for when their characters come to life in any type of theatre near you.

    In a more philosophical vein, I wonder, with the highly interactive experiences being developed by the entertainment industry at large, especially as they have to collaborate across boundaries that are falling away as you read this what that is unveiling about our own inner nature. Just like the Higgs-Boson, the 'god particle' that has been found and will most likely define this scientific slice of my age group, this prevailing idea that there is some invisible glue holding the atoms in the universe together, this powerful collision of various industries seems to be rooting out the same thing, some underlying connection between all things, a blurring of the boundaries, a freedom to manifest whatever one truly desires, if you know how to ride the waves, whether they are sound waves, or brain waves, microwaves or ocean waves.

The power to see through the differences to the root, where all things are the same.