outdoor theater

🎭

anagnorisis.

It’s been two months since I wrote, scheduled, and did not send what follows these preliminary paragraphs. Two months of season-changing, life-changing, and life-living moments. But this is it, right? We’re as much a changing season as the seasons change us. Right now, it’s spring somewhere, and I love people in those places, and even while the light grows on their side of the world, their world is also covered in the shadows we share collectively, just by virtue of our aliveness right now in this time.

I didn’t send the below at first because it wasn’t speaking directly to what I was truly feeling the moment I wrote it, and that seems to be the knot I am always trying to untangle, to lay before me, the frayed strands of it all in search of looseness, in search of connection. How to be as honest as possible while also staying in my own skin. To share from a place of openness while also maintaining the boundary beyond me. How to be as authentic as possible while also being careful of others’ feelings. This is the calculus I am constantly working on.

A year ago, I began sitting upright and thinking about the future again. After a couple of years of summiting an endless mountain, I had finally found refuge on a perch, but I was much too tired —much too stunned —to move. I sat there for a long time while I sorted through the puzzle pieces, rearranging them all over again. I’m no longer whoever I was a few years ago, or even a few months ago, and it shows up in everything.

And I’m feeling it here, too. So, while I wander the boundaries between language, truth, memory, agency, and respect, I am exploring the four chambers of my heart through writing —an endless doorway to this terrain. And as ever, I am inviting you to do that with me and see where it takes you and what it wants to show you.

Below is something I wrote and scheduled to publish, and then woke up in the middle of the night to cancel. I share it now because I found something more true in it today than I did then.

On the way to the concert, we’re practically howling out the window. We howl at our lives. Our marriages. Bodies. At the world and the beauty in the horror so intricately held together like spiderwebs caught in the light, making tiny diamonds out of spun silk. This time of year, they are illuminated, practically exalted - those spiderwebs suspended like planets - in the tilted, dropping sun. We’re angry, respectively, like most people — but perhaps particularly as women — as we attempt to comb through it all in search of the follicle, the place in which it all began.

At least, I think that’s what we are trying to find.

The light around the amphitheater rests above its head just like a halo would. The sun hasn’t set yet, but the concrete stage and high-as-the-sky scaffolding holding up all the lights block out the horizon, and a crescent moon is already showing like an earring hanging in a distant lobe of the sky. So it appears to be dusk.

I’ve seen this before: how something can block out the horizon.

I’m disappointed to report that, as far as I can tell, I seem to be surrounded by only middle-aged white people. I am, of course, a middle-aged white woman. And still, I find this disappointing.

The music begins, and I find it disappointing, too. There I am, surrounded. Out for the night without even one of the people — my kids or husband, for whom I care in one way or another day in and day out — yet there are people everywhere, and it also feels empty.

I’m not sure where the twisting and turning is, but I know it’s not just me being wrung out.

Earlier in the day, I had planned, or at least hoped to fill the stadium of my mind with freedom and noise coming from somewhere else, as in not my own. But I can’t stop the ghosts from coming up through the concrete benches everywhere.

I graduated from high school in the very same place over thirty years ago, emerging from the cement seating into a new threshold. Not a butterfly, but also not a caterpillar. This liminal passage I know well. I remember my husband that morning, just friends back then, sliding the tassel from my cap away from my eyes before we eventually walked across the stage, accepting our diplomas, respectively.

All the times I was right there for other shows, listening to other music —countless, often forgotten days and nights. It all seems to still be there somewhere.

Just as the stars come out, I half expect to see all I’m looking for roaming around like little lost discoveries. But after a lifetime of scavenger hunts, there’s a lot I still don’t know about finding.

I could make it all a book, I sometimes think, while I gather little tidbits from the world and my memory and bring them back to my nest like a bird. All the beginnings, the endings, and all the time in between, including right now. I think about how places like books, nests, and theaters hold so many stories.

All the comedies and all the tragedies.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve been in the exact same place between bookends. But I have. Pages filled with everything under the sun. Childhood. Puberty. Divorce. Estrangement. Marriage. Childbirth. Pandemic. Puberty. Perimenopause. Cancer. Crysalis. Return. Recovery. Reckoning. The voluminous reckoning. How voluminous. How incomplete. And also how full.

After we’ve had enough, we leave the concert early. When I’m back home, I crawl into bed as soon as possible. I take a mountain of vitamins and supplements that I pray will help me sleep through the night. That’s what it’s come to.

The next morning, I wake up before my husband, kids, and even our puppy and wait to see them all again. I sit in the dark morning light before the sun rises, searching for them in the audience and on the stage. I remember small things about them, how Luna’s tears, like giant globes, are earnest and full of compassion, and how she cries for things that define who she is - she cannot stand suffering of any kind, on anyone. How Rafi walks across the street into her new school while I watch her take such big new steps into the world. She’s at once 12, millennia old, and a newborn. The sincerity of her spirit bubbles over the top of her well, the depths of which I still can’t see all the way to its bottom. And Fonz and his multitudes. The terrain of his will. How he cares for each of our plants as if they were his own children; there is something nameless at the center of him that I always long for.

They are all still asleep just down the hallway, our very own ghost town, or horizon, or stadium. Our migrations out and back make spirals in the sky, returning us, but different. And then, the sky gets lighter and the day begins, and there they are again. All of it. All of them.

And there I am. Here we are. Somewhere. Everywhere.

* Friends, I’ve been struggling with payments/registration on my website for the last week or so (blame me, the AWS shutdown, the stars, who knows), just in time for sharing all these amazing Pop-Ups I have in store for you. Each class is an opportunity to explore the four chambers of your heart, bravely, in a contained space with others doing the same. We write, we connect, we listen, we share, we breathe, we create. It's a deeply generative and gentle practice for anyone who knows how to hold a pen or pencil. So, if you head to my site and see a class you’d like to sign up for, and the payment system is still being rude, drop me a line here. There are seats just for you at my Four Chambers Writing table. Let’s write together. 🫀