Poetry Slams & Other Dreams

Have you ever had a crisis remind you that there are things you've always wanted to do but in the business of life you voluntarily let seemingly unimportant desires get bumped off this flight for a later flight? A flight that never seems to take off? Of course you have!

I've always said, "If I never get around to doing ________ (insert dream activity, such as performing in an Off Broadway hit for example) I take heart in the thought that I get to do it in heaven." However I have a hard time visualizing what it would look like being an actress and performing in heaven. I mean, who'd the audience be? Everyone whose ever existed? I'm glad I can project really loudly? Of course, God would be there. He's like everywhere after all. How intimidating. But I guess I wouldn't have such inferior feelings in heaven, and, anyway, God would be my biggest fan after all.

My experience in acting thus far, in this second-rate body, includes nausea and major butterflies in the minutes prior to entering the stage. The only time I didn't experience such nausea and butterflies, I got on the stage and half way through the piece completely froze. Total stage fright. I've concluded, therefore, nausea makes for good acting. So I question whether I will be a good actress in heaven since I assume God won't stand for nausea and butterflies if we can't cry either. Then I think, "but what about a good cry?" I love plays that move me to tears. I just don't know. Yet I still cling to the idea that if I never get to ice climb a waterfall, play the cello, or knit really cool hats, I'll get to in heaven.

Over the last 3 years I've experienced knee buckling loss, grief, hopelessness, and helplessness. That's the short list. You know these times. Mine included deep clinical depressions that I somehow survived by grit & determination. When I say survived I mean I didn't take my own life. Two things kept me alive: believing that God really didn't want me with him that badly quite yet, and not being willing to put my parents through the horror of surviving their only child's suicide.

In those 3 years, despite the encouragement of loved ones, I was certain my life was over. It wasn't drama, it was a reality. So when I started getting better about a year ago I began tentatively picking up things that had fallen apart, things I was incapacitated from doing, and wondered if I could live again. I backpacked and started to feel some of the joy and wonder I used to feel. However, I have had to get used to experiencing wonderous landscapes with less manic enthusiasm since my medications bring me down to, what others encourage me, is the "normal" level of awe. It's kind of boring and anti-climatic really. Colors are less spectacular. Sounds aren't so sensual. Sometimes I sit and look over what I know to be an exquisitely spectacular landscape -mountains, canyons, waterfalls, meadows- and I struggle to overlook that at one time I would have cried with ecstasy over the beauty of it all.

But now things are "normal". I'm not just tolerating normalcy, I think it's alright. And having gone through the last 3 years of "dark night", I find on the other side, possibility. Not manic, over the top, I want it now and I want the best and to be the best, kind of possibility. I've always wanted to be a poet. Not a closeted poet with hopes that when I die someone will come across my profound, dusty verses and in tears proclaim, "Someone must publish these poems!" Kind of like Anne Franke...or maybe not.

I write poetry. I always have. Really bad peotry and lovely poetry. I love poetry. It expresses life at a visceral level. A level that transcends and actually snubs the use of definition, explanation, punctuation, and gross superficial drivel. Yet the poet has to find an audience of people who "get it". Otherwise known as other poets.

That is what I'm getting at. I survived the last 3 years and now I do things like go to poetry reads, poetry slams. Something I always wanted to do and never took the time to do because I was so busy "living". I even read my poetry. I usually get nauseous and have butterflies in my stomach, and I feel really alive. I bumped onto a later flight to the same destination, just with an later ETA. I know God will LOVE poetry slams in heaven!

"Love with its power to charm
so touched my best and worst
that all, even cankered harm,
turned fiber sweet and warm
(being in love immersed).
No wonder resinous fire
leaps sinewy and gay,
as clean to a clean pyre
I burn, I burn away."
-John of the Cross (1542-1591)