Why these plane tickets?

It's Pride weekend in San Francisco City.  Around me something has been happening... is it San Francisco?  Such a carnivalesque city, such a Dionysiac presence.  With half the population [of Northern California] medicating and mediating the many ways of the inner and outer worlds by using THC, on one hand, and the expanse of a not so Pacific Ocean on the other, the "city by the Bay" is just so much more than it is possible to verbalize.
It's the last frontier of the Western World, there where consciousness folds onto itself to blur with the Orient and create another round of itself...  I just wonder how many hubs like this exist on the planet - I know they do, in pockets everywhere - where people actually discuss these things, you know, cosmic blueprints and karmic energies, ego-Self axes, striving to re-embody a Land...
Such privilege and abundance too.  So that's why we dance!  'Cause we can't deny that we have Life flowing in our veins, and that we want to look ahead towards an open horizon.   We can't deny we had to flee our past to find ourselves, to run away to the very edge, so that we may be forced to start looking inside... There is so much suffering in the worlds, that we have yet to come to terms with.

So why these planet tickets again?  Why would we fly away to other destinations when there is such an explosion of love and creativity here!?  I know nothing of what is ahead.  It's the same for those of my friends who are also about to leave the area.  We are all scared.
We have our reasons:  N. wants to get away from the radiations, which is probably a wise thing to do except that I for my part probably wouldn't leave for that reason alone.  The whole planet is a ticking bomb at this point, I think cynically.  But she, like me, is Canadian and unable to work legally in the US.  So that's another reason.  (so much to say about "immigration") I am leaving because of many reasons too.  I surely don't like being in this illegal position.  Part of me is happy to be fu#*ing with the government a bit (all in the name of progress, of course!) But another part of me understands that it's probably normal for the "Law" to catch up with the common sense of a collective unfolding.  This being said, I'd rather be safe than sorry.  So I don't want to overstay my welcome.  After all, I freakin' love it here!  So I'll respect the law and I'll see what else is awaiting...
H. is nervous too.  She bought her plane ticket about a week before meeting a man she has been falling in love with.  She's quitting her job in the Fall to go make art in Berlin.  She doesn't speak German, but her clown is universal.  She's gonna give it a shot.. we're gonna give it a shot.

I realize it's time for me to switch and stop spending so much energy in holding the scales.  It's time to let the scale slip to one side and see what it could weight... I'm going to Germany!!!

touta unsense

Mon esprit voyage sans cesse! Monkey mind.
J'ai toujours écrit.
C'est ça, ou je dois crier.
Écrire dans cette langue si goulue; ma langue maternelle.  Pas "natale", mais maternelle.
Sauf que moi je n'ai pas fait "la maternelle''.
Quand t'as un déficit d'attention tu t'arranges pour développer plusieurs passions.. et puis tu zap, tu cliques et double-cliques, tu joues.  On est toute une generation.
T'as compris que le sens de la vie, c'est d'etre un 'gamer', dans une parallel reality.
(Et dire que tout ce découle de l'influence de Nietzsche!) ;)
I was thinking, or rather being thought perhaps..
What if being patient meant that I am meant to be roaming the Earth for a little while?   That my heart does belong so much to something that could be... in Quebec.. a culture.  That I do want to take part in the cultivation process.  Linguistically aussi, oui oui, puisque les mots sont les rivieres de nos terres...
Je pense à Montréal.
C'est le solstice, la Saint-Jean-Baptiste.  The sun has stopped at his zenith and is ready to go back to the other side slowly, taking his light with him.
Why is the sun male again?
Why is the moon female?
What is with illumination and reflection?
One active, the other one passive, and in their circular dance they create our seasons.  We live on a planet! And She forever spins on her axis, there amongst other planets.  And they are all doing the same, so fast in fact since there is more than one axis really.  Time is much more than days and seasons, in the universe they are... eons.  We are floating in a spiral of stars in the middle of a universe that keeps expanding.  To hold that notion in one's mind eye is to lose your mind, to the greatness of that from which we were born!  To lose one's mind and to surrender, finally, to something bigger.
Humility is perhaps to me the greatest of virtues, together with having that sense for paradox and absurdity.

I've been saying that I've decided to go to Europe.  I've tried to believe it myself.  I can almost see it.  But I gotta say that part of me wants so much to go study Theater and Development.  I can see that too!  And I can see Drama Therapy... So what to do?  If I listen to my elders, in fact, they tell me: do it now, travel.  When you settle it's too late and then you're too old to take advantage of it.  And I'm noticing, that I didn't talk about my parents.  Their job is to be worried for me.

The Perpetual Birth of Tragicomedies.

I have been reading a delectable book: The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (by Steven E.Ascheim).  My new friend, Lynn, lent it to me after we had a conversation outside of a Dubstep club about two weeks ago.  Yes, I went out dancing and ended up discussing Nietzsche outside of the bar.  In fact, there was a direct connection with the place-event we were in, because we actually talked about the body, Nietzsche, and the Buddha, if I remember correctly.
Yeah that's a lot of what's been on my mind lately.  Motion. Lots of Motion.

I did this Butoh workshop a couple of days ago.  It was offered by Deborah Butler (Kitsuno Butoh) and was entitled "OUTside INside Butoh", which meant that we were going to spend the afternoon on a sweet sunny clearing on the UCBerkeley campus!  So there we were, four women with a desire to embody this chosen natural environment through the cryptic form of butoh.  We walked to a patch of grass, put down our belongings, and gathered in a circle to introduce ourselves and start warming up.  Soon we were moving like kites in the breeze, letting our bodies explore the myriads of directions and leading edges it would go, if only placed at the reigns of consciousness for a while.
Yesterday I has a conversation with Jérôme, who has lived in SF before but now has returned to Paris.  He mentioned something very important to me; that the French are very much in their head because they are so crowded in their proud city that they have lost contact with their body.  Here in California, we are trying to re-member.  Here in the Bay Area, we are talking about somatics therapy, emotional freedom technique, and embodied spirituality.  Here we meet young adults at Dusbstep parties and we end up discussing Antonin Artaud and ritual Theater, around a bond fire on a solstice night.  But I'm disgressing.

The body and the mind.  Dionysus and Apollo.  Flux and Order.  I wonder, because I myself experience such a tension between my desires for chaos and for... stability/preservation?  It's health I think a lot about.  First of all, what is health anyway?  Well, in truth what I really wonder is why I battle with so many little vices?
I am eating healthier than ever: probiotics and superfoods, fresh organic salads and whole grains.  Non-industrial meat.  It feels good in my body.  But then I also crave chocolate, and coffee, and cigarettes.  I smoke splifs and I get the munchies.  I treat myself to ice cream.  The thing is, all these "bad habits" are associated with small pleasures.  And I wonder.  Because I'd like to be completely "clean".  I do believe it'd make me more "in touch", closer to having clear senses, and thereby more intuitive and wise.  Would it make me more sensitive?  Certainly.  Unpolluted, un-intoxicated, I would get to experience the real reality of the world around me...
Perhaps that's why I'm resisting.  Some of these energies are just so painful to witness and be a part of.
Or perhaps my struggle also reflects another phenomenon... having to do with the dance of Dionysus and Apollo!  For here we have the ancient god "of ritual madness and ecstasy" versus a fatherly, orderly, structure preserving, Apollo.  It makes sense to me; on one hand I want to be a productive member of a sustainable society (be part of a clean, ethical, perfect creation-experience).  On another hand (Shiva has many hands!), I want to merge with, and party with, the collective unconscious.  I look around me everyday and I see we all perform these dual aspects.
(I should say here that I don't consider myself to have a profound or precise conception of what those Greek archetypes actually represent.  But I have had them in my baggage since I first read The Birth of Tragedy and fell in love with Nietzsche.  So it's through my humble Nietzschean inclinations that I have appopriated these concepts and made them work for me.  Then I discovered astrology, and in that pantheon Pluto and Saturn.)
I want to be nomadic, spontaneous, expansive and loving; I want to follow the Tao and be of service to that which is greater than me.
I want to send my roots down into the Earth, and build something, a community, a movement, a cafe-bistrot.
I want to be a channel of God's will through me.  I want to honor my visions and the clarity I have about the Way and the way of men.
I want to be a leader, but I want to teach humility.

As I reflect on the few major conundrums I've been grappling with lately, there seems to be a subtle yet solid thread.  It has to do with centers in motion.  And it's holographic.

So, I'm reading a delectable book.  What perfect timing?  Two months from now I might very well be in Berlin.  Finally, all these years of German classes would find their purpose.  It would be my pilgrimage to the land of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein... Goethe!  So many great minds arose out of this surrounded land.. So what's there now?  And what is there for a lady clown like me?
I could make theater that's radical.  I could rub my mind against that of the many European people I would run into and juggle with.  I could get a new perspective on matters I might be blind to, having lived in the United States for the past ten years!
Or I could go [back] to my homeland and start making ripples there.  I could go make peace with my projections and find my place in the matrix.
To be free, spontaneous and alone, or to root down and [eventually] bear fruits for a community I belong to?  Somehow that's along the lines of what my beliefs seem to be.  Is it possible to integrate all of this?
Return saturn, come back!  Return and help me contribute to the miracle of Life..
(I'm such a ___________) - said the fear-plagued, ego-monitoring, critical voice in my mind.

One

red band, a photo by egevad on Flickr.

I am immersed in a Mysterious Sea. It's a sea of dreams, where my consciousness is at best liminal. I'm reclaiming my power as a witch, as an intuitive person, as a two-spirit maybe. I am affirming my spirituality to myself, and my desire to live in a world deemed sacred. I am a clown, a leader, a priestess. I am shaman.
Not that I feel ready to be as powerful as I can be. There is so much to learn, remember, and integrate still. But I want to say it out loud: I do feel the sacred Well inside of me.

I have been gently but surely falling in love with Butoh. Japanese and universal, it is a form that seeks to reveal and explore the signification of the body in its relationships to the Earth and to the social self.
"The body is deconstructed to reveal the universal self and expose our primal roots through heightening the elemental or nature body after which the self is recreated in a revitalized journey of individuation."
I want to take that path so bad. I want to shed my body of the ideas I have of it. I want to exist in that seamlessness where Earth lives through me. How archetypal! Wanting to be one with the Mother again... well why not? There is something phenomenal with this movement. It is perhaps a feminist venture; though please gentlemen, do join the movement! It's for all of us to develop an awareness of the ways in which we are Earth and Sky, and breath and bones, bodies and consciousness.
I think Nietzsche would be delighted.
I want so bad to take that path. Yet there is a distance between my understanding and my standing under; I fear my body's limitations. I fear the pain of having taken so many stifling habits throughout my developmental years. You see I had to be strong and build that armor. I had to keep myself together.

Now I see myself wanting to open up like a flower. Would it be so ephemeral, so vulnerable? I want to open up from my core (mon coeur) and transmit the light (delight) that I sense swirling inside of me. I want to be a channel. I am immersed in a mysterious sacred Sea.

NoShame!

I've been working with Harvey on ShameNoShame! for about what... a month?  With Harvey, we've met two or three times per week for the past four or six weeks.  We've rehearsed at her apartment, on Great Highway Boulevard right in front of Ocean Beach, out in the yard.  We've rehearsed in my dinning room, to the bewilderment and amusement of my roomates.  They would walk in the kitchen and see us, Harvey holding a Breadman puppet with an erection, and myself wearing pink high heels and a tutu over my jeans!
The process of ShameNoShame! has been such a fabulous experience!  For one thing, it's undeniable that Harvey and I found an amazing partner in each other.  We're both freaks, queer, crazy.  She pushes gently on a lot of my boundaries...

ShameNoShame! is about sexuality and acceptance.  Harvey began working on it several months ago as part of her residency at The Garage.  I saw her first showcase one night, and the next week we were working together under the direction of Dan Griffiths.

Originally, I would say that her play explored the tragi-comic realities of a sex worker looking for true love, and the path to recover one's sense of wholeness in a culture where pleasure and judgment seem to perpetually collide.  Sex is sin, sex is sold.  Sex is learned, and stolen.  Sex represent one of the most vulnerable and intimate subject in one life.  Sex is present in everyone's life, in one form or another.  Yet sex is taboo.  And we have much to learn.
What is most fascinating about this experience, is that the play Harvey wrote has transformed and evolved greatly over the past 6 weeks.  The incorporation of my character surely helped move the story as a new dialectic unfolded.  Harvey's clown is pre-verbal and all appetite; she is libidinal.  My clown appears as the ring "mistress"type, a cross between the dominatrix MC and the drag Queen that I can be.  I am at once sexy and grotesque.  I seek control and power, but I too have my limitations.  And that's beside Harvey always messing with me.

This process has been a blessing.  I've spent about 10 hours/week rehearsing, and there is not even a dollar at the other end.  We have two shows this weekend, and that's it.
Well it doesn't have to be it.  If I decide to go to Germany it seems that Harvey and I could very well find some work.

But it's insane! Going to Berlin to work on clown theater that actually puts a mirror to some real social taboos?!  The thing is, that I don't know how much I want to do this.. I mean this character is a trip!  I would've never thought I could do the things I've been doing on stage.  It is sexy, explicit... gender-bending... it is sexuality affirming.  That's why it has been such a growing edge!  ShameNoShame! has allowed me to explore my relationship with sexuality (I hope it creates a similar effect in our audience!) in a way I could never have.  For some reason I cannot yet say that it has been healing (although it certainly has too) for the reason that I am still quite uncomfortable and have a lot of questions about a lot of what comes up in the play and in the process.

But that's what it's all about.  I feel that I am exactly where I should be, doing exactly what I am meant to be doing right now.
So I praise the All.

O day..

Tuesday morning.  The end of May.  It is sunny and raining simultaneously in San Francisco.  The usual morning ritual.  Upon waking up, I roll over to my stomach and reach for the notebook I keep right next to my bed.  I gotta write three "morning pages", as part of my "creative recovery program", which I picked up from a famous book called "The Artist's Way".  Every morning for the past two weeks, I have taken time to scribble down whatever thoughts come through my sleepy mind.  I write three pages like that.  It's paradoxical, because it is supposed to free my subconscious mind (Does the book say that, or am I making it up?) but I feel like going directly into verbalization might produce the opposite effect.  Words make me think!
Then I get up and go brush my teeth before heading to the kitchen for a delicious breakfast of granola with almond milk and a banana.  It's so good, I go for seconds.
I have nothing going on today.  Almost absolutely nothing.  I have an appointment at the community acupuncture center at eleven, and that's it.  I have no plans.
I have been practicing the challenging art of non-doing.  Well, I have been trying...
No more "should do this", for I have noticed that I tend to operate that way.  Indeed, many of us do.  The superego is a pervasive and pernicious force in the psyche.  It is pernicious because it has obstructed me from myself, from my life force, from my creativity and my joie de vivre.  Because "I should" always do more, and do it better too.  I should always be working towards the betterment of the Earth Experience.  I should always be fighting against the forces that blind and divide us.  I should, always, be on my way...
Or should I?
I thought the Way was One.  I thought the Way was already perfect and timeless.  I thought the forces of both destruction and creation were constantly at play in this great evolutionary dance.  So who cares if I spent a day of doing nothing?  If I spent a day of not having the pressure to be great at something, of not working towards some heroic goal?
And besides, I would like to see what arises when I stop trying to figure it out.  Perhaps the answer (or at least part of it) to the big question "what do I wanna do?" is really already there inside... that it can sprout out if I give it time, and listen.
Yet how uncomfortable sometimes, when the sun walks its trajectory above our heads while I remain useless and alone!  How challenging to hear the voices in my head, those mildly obsessive tendencies and thoughts, compulsive behaviors always lurking around.  I want to eat, I want to get high, I want to text a friend, I want to "should".  'Cause each one of these behaviors brings meaning to my existence, right?  Eating fills the void, getting high expands my consciousness, texting a friend or attending to Facebook gives me the impression of friendship or of belonging to something.  Well, it doesn't really.  It's just trying to cope with my existential predicament: I am alone and I am One, and then what?
Am I supposed to just be in love with existence because I know that I am Consciousness and Consciousness is Everything?  Am I supposed to feel better because I am Everything in each Instant?

I wonder.  Perhaps my anxiety stems from the fact that I am the World, (And so are you, in case you didn't know) and that the World is in pain.  So it would not be alienation that causes my illness, but rather the opposite: it is the pain of the Earth, of which I am.
Who knows?  I'd like to call for a town meeting and ask: who knows?