Branching like Libraries

Today was the re-opening of the Page Street Library.  Circus Center did a marvelous thing in associating itself with the event.  A circus should be part of its neighborhood. Clowns should be unleashed to mingle with the community.  Besides, books are a fantastic thing.  "Save the Books."
I was in heaven! :)
It was an especially cold day in San Francisco, though not in the usual humid way.  No wind blowing from the Pacific Ocean.  No clouds running across the sky.  It was quite sunny in the Upper Haight.

I dressed in clown, putting a 'costume' together out of slightly mismatched regular clothes (I found my new favorite shirt at the Sebastopol Goodwill, after our tea house 'gig, which is another story :)).  I packed some juggling rings, balls, scarves, and clubs, as well as a kazoo and a bundle of sage.  I brought a camera, because I'm leaning to "think business"- which simply means that I'd like to make a living following my passion

On my way there I remembered a sign I thought of making.  That's when I saw a cardboard box on the sidewalk (or did I see the box first?) so I decided to tear off a panel and make that sign.
I didn't have a sharpie on hand, unfortunately.  But I walked across the street and in the paint shop, and asked the clerk if he had a marker I could borrow.  He smiled, at my clothes perhaps, and handed me a sharpie for me to make my sign: "Today is Beauty-Full Day".  When he saw what I was doing he gave me an even better, thicker black marker.  He smiled at me.

I want to walk the street and look at people in the eyes. I want to draw or create a smile on their face, or even just a look of recognition.  I want us to acknowledge one another when we cross paths on the streets.  I want us to acknowledge a lot of things.
I want to put on a big plastic red nose just to see people have all kinds of reactions.

Today a little black girl sang 'Get Up Stand Up' with me.  It was sunny.

So I guess it was my first official 'walk around gig'.  I had not fully realized what it meant; I had not realized that this form of clowning is a huge part of what I love!  This way of creating connections with strangers, the way I like to make connections all the time.  To dance whenever I feel like dancing, to interject in random conversations, to sing nursery rhymes with a group of kids, to wonder at magic, to love people.

Axe! Ache! Ase!

re-cyclus

The thing is,
It would seem that I am already provided for.
(Why such inequality in the [material] world?)
The thing is,
I'm already doing what I am meant to do.
It's also called responsibility.
(It's like Robbie said)

Tripping and falling
on concrete
hurts
sometimes
leaving scratches and scrapes
But we keep
walking.

How ironic.  This week the reading assignment is a book about "The Pickles Family Circus", which were the precursors and founders of the sf circus center:  Judy Finelli, Jeff Razz, Wendy Parkman, Bill Irwin, Diane Wasnack (a.k.a. Pino).
Today we are told that the school is in deep financial trouble, so that the board has resolved to change the locks on the building to show the severity of the situation...
And so we are here, clowns without a roof.  And at best it had been a leaky one.  The circus is on the streets.
Isn't it where it belongs?

My weekend.
Saturday morning I went to work with a new friend who's offered me work with this place called Whole Child, a space for kids with developmental disabilities and "behavioral difficulties"to come play and develop social skills.
I was thrown in a play room with three other instructors/therapists, and about five or six boys between the ages of 5 and 9.  For some of them is what more apparent; a shyness, an akwardness, a retraction.  For others, hyperactivity and need for attention.  Lovely children who ask or refuse to play.  And I observe and I try to engage in play with them.
It's a challenge for me as well.
Another group of younger kids, this one with more severe on the spectrum of autism.
And there I am, thinking to myself: "wow.  I can't believe that I am doing this.  My whole life it has been there, this fascination for mental difference, for autism, hyperactivity, etc. I remember that summer at the summer camp, how I had considered going into special education and take that direction.  But I didn't.
Yet here I am.
I'm doing it.

Axé!
Booyah!

And that just saturday morning!
In the afternoon I gathered with the nine or ten strangers that constitute "my" psychodrama training group."
I had a shamanic experience.
We all did.

Today I went with May May to the Edgewood Center, and played clowns with six youngsters of the residential program.  It was marvelous.  Moments of shyness and tadams! Laughs and aliveness.  Improvisation, stream of thought.  Balance and motion.  Laughs... Sunshine.
Axé!

And I don't know if there will be access to the circus center tomorrow morning.  But tonight I'm going dancing anyway.

this acro life...

Whatever I am "supposed" or "fated" or "meant to" do,
whatever I want, or chose to do (what a privilege! or is it?)

I just had another beautiful conversation with Robyn, the second in two days.  She's one of my five roommates; one of the many daily mirrors to my psyche.  She is a great woman.  She's got the mind and the heart.  I like her.
I told her I had a challenging day at school.  It was also a really good day, because I learned a really big amount.  It started by an acro class taught by a different coach than our usual.  Xiao Hong, our teacher, was running late, so the other guy, Chris, took us in his scheduled class with the acrobatics program.  Chris' comments were difficult to hear.  He called me out after seeing me shake my head.  "When you do that," he said with a paternalistic tone, "you've already failed."
I felt tears running up to my eyes, and remembered myself as a young soccer player.  I realized that perhaps my main obstacle with acrobatics isn't my age, but the same habit I had during my soccer years... this lack of confidence, this feeling sorry for myself, this being so hard on myself for being short of perfection.
Then Xiao Hong arrived, and we worked on head springs and forward hand springs!! Such an edge.

For our second class, we had Dan Griffiths as a guest teacher.  Dan came in strongly, he was so eager to work with our small group of clowns.  "They say I teach hospital or therapeutic clowning," he told us "but there's no such distinction.  There's only one big sacred way of clowning."  He spoke of clowns like shamans, always standing between life and death... celebrating the obstacles, the failures and mistakes and short-comings of existence.  "Clown is not a name, it's a verb."
He threw us into a series of exercises, starting with "the fall."  He asked us to call each other out whenever we saw or felt inauthenticity.  He asked us to open our eyes wide, and to breathe so as to entrain the audience with us in the emotional journeys we hopefully go into.

And so after class I was struggling a little bit emotionally.  Self-doubt had been creeping in, and again I could see myself losing grip on this sense of possibility that I could hold not as late as yesterday.

In conversing with Robyn, somehow and oh! so beautifully, I came to consider some new things...
Yes, I am different.  I want to talk about real shit, about important issues.  I have a message.
"Cause I struggle quite a bit as I explore and open myself to different ideas and conceptions, about "what clown is" and "who my clown is".  For around me, people seem to often speak of clown as simpleton.  They speak of innocence, of basic human drives, of libido.  They say that one cannot be analytical and  do this work.  I'm trying to figure things out here...
you see?!  I'm so freaking heady all the time!!
But I've figured it out! My thinking is a defense mechanism, and underneath it there actually lies a river of feelings and emotions.
I think I'm not the only one this way.
That was part of why I was drawn to this work.
I remember.

And even though I didn't pick up on it at the time, tonight I remembered Dara talking about the... "uniqueness" of my work... about how it's not one thing.  I have these different parts.  There is possibly no single school or institution where I could bring these aspects together in "my work".
Robyn has a similar situation.
And she said that, to her, I could well be the person to bring "clowning" to a different population, because I can also be of this world, this real world of working people dealing with social and economical problems.
How to reach these folks?
And for the first time I heard myself formulate the idea that I might want to go to Europe in order to look for that depth, that tradition.
American clowning is often superficial, perhaps because the US of A is so historically uprooted and alienated form the cultures that constitute its melting pot.

I'd like to go learn German.  I'd like to go find clown-healers and bouffons to be inspired by and to learn from.  what else?  I'd like to look for myself... I'd like to follow my path...

To be, or to be? That is the question!

Does the future lay dormant in the present's seed?  Is there a path, predetermined, to follow to my actualization?  I like to believe that we hold the truth within ourselves, and that perhaps if I could just listen attentively enough I could hear the advice from my own inner wisdom.
I think about the future.  I think I'm doing pretty good living in the present, but I know the future distracts me considerably.  I'm trying to untangle things, get clarity on priorities.
Do I want to live a life of performance and teaching as a clown?  Do I want to become a drama therapist?  (How many other options am I not thinking about?)  My heart tells me I wish for it all.  I can even see it all, in due time.  But what's next, as of next Fall?
Why clown?  Well, because it's my spiritual path.  Because it's the crux for my soul.  Because the archetype resides and dances in my heart-mind and I cannot deny how alive the idea makes me feel!  But can I endure this life of "performance"?  Can I endure the perpetual unknown? (Isn't that part of the spiritual challenge?!)  Can I endure my relationship with Creativity?
Or do I want a job, with a bit more structure?  Do I want more of a regular schedule and salary?  Do I want to have more direct and explicit interactions with people, assisting them through their healing process?
Why couldn't I create a regular schedule and salary for myself as an artist?
Is it that one is more extraverted, more centered around self-expression, while the other is more grounded in society and more low profile?  Do I want to expose myself, or do I want to hold and create space for others to explore themselves?
Do I want others to, in a way, depend on me, as opposed to feeling like I'm generally perceived as a mere entertainer?
Can I be good enough as an artist?  Would I be content with not making history?  Yeah, what's up with this "hero" complex anyway.  What is it that I'm trying to prove, and to whom?  Perhaps what Eve wants is a simple somewhat normal life, without explicit or public recognition...
Decisions, decisions...

All I know is my heart is big and beating, and I want to feel with and for people.  Around the world would be nice.  Around the hood would be really good.  All I know is I want to EMPOWER people, FREE them, generate TRUST and LOVE and CONNECTION and INSPIRATION.

Musings of a thursday evening.  Does the future already exists, dormant, in my subconscious heart-mind?

family version

We come from the Greek and the Romans.  They come from other folks.
i think in scattered titles, it's not my fault

Thank God for laptops. Seriously.
Do yo realize?

Do you feel your shoulders the way I do?  Hyper-consciously.
Seriously.

I'm trying to learn how to make fun of myself
And how to get beyond tragedy.

What a day,
Spending it with a person, a woman, my "ex" as we'd say, an extraordinary friend I have to say.  In between, ourselves... organically - yet never without that struggle- growing towards something.   We can't quite define yet we understand.  And we under-stand, and somehow support, the weight of each moment where truth is almost to good to be true...

It has been a while.
Maybe not.

Embodying Zarathustra, three times. only.
Happy birthday, she said.
As I turned the corner of that small street I had never crossed before.  In Cuba.

Travelling.
Moon Uranus.
Arche-
types.

Memory.
And projections.

As I try to navigate.