House of Healing

I had a few daydreams about coming up with a nickname for the duplex that Asharah and I share, something really clever and catchy.  Unfortunately, I have a terrible time naming things (it took us months to come up with a name for Delirium, and I’d had to resort to reading poetry every night before bed to find it).  It seems like my circle of friends and visitors have already taken to calling our home “The Circus House,” so I guess it’s named.

When Asharah and I were apartment hunting back in March, the both of us tired, worn out and drained from life and from sleeping in spaces that weren’t our own, we both expressed to each other a need for the house to “feel right.”  There’s this feeling of a puzzle piece falling into place, a key fitting into a lock, that happens deep in your gut when you come across something you’re meant to have, a place you’re supposed to be, a match for you.  I find it with jewelry sometimes, furniture, artwork.  Most of the jewelry I wear in fact, from the nepalese spiked necklace I’ve worn every performance for five years, to the labradorite pendant that cried at me from across the store until I took it home, to the Mira Betz pocket watch necklace my dad’s spirit told me to buy, has felt like I was supposed to have them.  I need to feel that from a house.  I have to bond with the place where I live, or I’ll be restless, unhappy and planning to move out as soon as I’ve moved the last box in.  Asharah felt much the same way.  And so we went house shopping.  We saw several houses that were shoulder-shruggingly cute, or would work fine.  One adorable cottage whose windows we peeked into in the middle of the night made our stomachs do some preliminary flip flops, but turned out to be already rented.  We were tired and dejected when we pulled in front of Circus House, which was sixth or seventh on our tour.  As soon as the house came into sight, we both looked at each other and said, “This is it.  This is the one.”  We started moving in three days later.

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Somebody called me an ice queen the other day.  I think this was supposed to be complimentary, as it was in the middle of a long, poetic courtship email sent over facebook.  But it stung a little.

I’ve always had this strange dual personality of being incredibly strong, outspoken and thrilled to be at the head of everything, but also very introverted and cautious.  I can get overwhelmed by people, especially crowds.  I will often hit brick walls where I have to go home, close the door of my room and not deal with anyone for a day.  It’s seemingly random, and depends on a combination of who I’m around, how much “me” time I’ve had and how much stress I’ve been dealing with.  When my father got sick, my social meter bottomed out at zero.  I stopped teaching classes.  I stopped going out to Art Bar.  I pulled myself inside an armored shell and grieved there alone for three years.  But old coping habits die hard, and as I slip sometimes into silence, social awkwardness and disengagement in public, I give off the impression that I’m an ice queen, haughty, snobby, or a bitch.  I think it’s hard for many people to realize and accept that many of the circus kids, onstage, larger than life, manipulating fire and looking at ease in twenty yards of costuming and bulk quantities of liquid eyeliner, were the same kids who were ostracized and stuffed into trash cans as children.  We are the island of misfit toys.  Our armor is well-worn and dented.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized that I’m incredibly sensitive and empathetic to other people’s moods.  I figured this out when I briefly dated a man who was incredibly charming, handsome, talented, and, as I found out, an alcoholic.  I became uncontrollably neurotic in the few weeks we dated.  I yelled more and cried more in two months than I did in some relationships that spanned years.  I would go home and huddle in a ball at my desk and wonder if I was going crazy.  Eventually, young as I was, I realized I had to get out for the sake of my sanity.  The next boyfriend I had was chosen carefully for his calmness.  A relief.  I leeched and fed off his stability while my father wasted away and died.  I bled him dry and he left me two weeks after the funeral.  I’ve tried hard since then to try to ground my energy out on my own terms, mostly through yoga, dance and a lot of tea drinking.  If I ever get a handle on whether or not it’s working, I’ll let you all know.  I’m hoping that better awareness counts for something.

Empathy is both a gift and a curse.  I can read certain people truthfully like a book, head to toe.  Not everyone, but some.  When they come to me for instruction, or advice, I can give them a nudge, or sometimes a shove, in a direction they need to fix something within themselves.  But to open myself to be able to read the subtleties of someone also leaves wide open the door for people to drag their baggage into my head and set the suitcases down.  I lived with a previous boyfriend who threw a lot of parties.  Many of the party goers were wonderful people.  Quite a few also drank everything in the house, broke things, and got into messy entanglements with each other.  I couldn’t handle it.  I’d be in a great mood throughout the day, and as the hour of the party approached, I’d feel this terrible storm cloud seep into my brain and I’d get more and more sullen.  I spent a lot of our doomed relationship locked upstairs in a bedroom with a book, listening to the party rage downstairs and wondering if I would ever stop feeling so depressed.  In another instance, I once woke up in the middle of the night and lay awake for a while.  My half asleep brain asked why I was awake, and it occurred to me that a friend’s father, who’d had a stroke, must have died.  When I talked to him the next day, I found out he’d gotten the phone call right at the instant I’d woken up.

There are a couple empaths in the circus.  The ones in Delirium especially, because we train so hard on minuscule muscle control, and being able to read each other’s body language to a huge degree in our ATS improv format, have locked into each other pretty hard.  We’ve been tired lately, and some of us have been having the same injuries, muscle aches and fatigue in the exact same spots at the same time.  Sometimes we can figure out who’s actually having problems and who’s just echoing, but we can’t tell this go round.  When Asharah goes to California to do Suhaila Level III training, I know I’m in for a terrible week.  As she breaks down and cries during emotional prep exercises, I start sobbing 3,000 miles away.  My psoas will lock up and hurt like a motherfucker, and a phone call to Asharah will reveal they’d been working on pelvic V’s.  I take on other people’s chronic muscle fuckups, and I’ve had both of my favorite massage therapists tell me “I know you care about these people, but stop carrying their shit.  That’s their job.”

I try.  I really do.  I think the ice queen behavior I’ve been attributed as having has been there long before I figured this out as a defense shield.  I have to disengage sometimes, whether I’m one-on-one in a coffee shop or surrounded by people at a bar, to close the door.  If it seems like I’m callous, or I don’t care, I probably actually care too much.

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Living situations for me become very important, then, as I need a refuge and the energy in the house needs to be stable or I start alternating between pulling my head sulkily inside the turtle shell or bouncing off the walls.  Mostly the former.  Five years ago, Toby and I came here from New Orleans following hurricane Katrina.  We moved into a house owned by my uncle that was nice, but neither of us could bond with it.  We were also both very empathetic, and as we both struggled with PTSD and depression, we both fed and amplified each other’s despair until it became a complete downward spiral.  Though I didn’t understand fully at the time what was going on, instinctually I knew I had to get out if I had any chance at recovering.  I’ve spent the past two years in that situation again.  When my life fell apart after my father’s death and the economy started collapsing, I stayed off and on at my mother’s house.  Mom’s incredibly supportive and generous, and she kept me alive, eating and warm through a nasty phase of homelessness with no complaints, guilt tripping or demands.  I am so lucky and so grateful.  But I am very much my mother’s daughter, very much alike in many ways, and living in a house with my mother’s devastating grief at losing her soul mate put me on the edge of breaking.  She’s also empathetic, and we got stuck.  I went to some really, really terrible places in my head that I don’t ever want to get close to again.  The balance was tipped in the wrong direction and everything slid off.  I looked at Asharah during a visit during the snowstorm last February, said “I can’t live like this anymore,” and we talked about the possibility of picking up and moving to New Orleans.  Maybe the west coast.  I let the idea slip to a couple of the circus kids, which caused freak outs, some long conversations over tea, and in a roundabout way, much strengthened friendships.  The empathy link seemed to send out distress signals, and I suddenly had friends I hadn’t talked to in months calling me up to go to lunch.  Three of them responded with the same advice: that I could move if I wanted, but the same problems would follow me there if I didn’t address my own issues.  About a week later, I had a really vivid dream that Toby and I moved back to New Orleans.  It’s rare that my dreams are vivid or that I remember them, so when it happens, I tend to pay attention as it’s probably pretty important.  In the dream, I spent the entire time miserable, on the phone to South Carolina and trying to figure out if I could make it back to Columbia in time for circus practice.  Toby got up and wandered away to another room, and after a while I looked up and couldn’t find him.  So I went back to the circus phone calls.

I closed the New Orleans craigslist searches and switched back to Columbia.  Asharah started making calls.  I would stay in Columbia with my circus and work on my self-imposed isolation instead.  Two weeks later, Toby died after a motorcycle accident.  My circus was there to catch me, figuratively in the weeks and work that followed, and literally, as I sunk to the floor crying in the middle of the vending area at Tribal Con, cellphone in hand.

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Asharah and I are not super woo-woo, new age people, but we called up Chris, my massage therapist and snarktastic medicine man, to smudge and saltwater the house before we moved in.  I have no idea if burning sage, carrying stones, figuring out astrology, reading tarot, spinning in circles or praying to God in a church have direct power in themselves, but I have become a great believer in the power of intention and focusing intent.  And so we followed our friend through our house as the sage burned on half a conch shell, gathering up wishes in my head and my heart and my gut and pushing them into every corner of every room: Dear God, Universe, Self, whatever is out there, please make this a house of healing and love and friends.  It took about two minutes, and then Chris, his task done, lit and smoked a cigarette on our back porch.  Asharah had to go back to DC for almost a month, and so I was left alone to move my things in and unpack.  I unpacked much of my life and things that had been boxed up and hidden in a storage unit for two years.  I created a bedroom that felt like me and my style, and put a lot of love and care into it.  I remember spending my first night alone in my old bed with the dog curled up at my feet.  I didn’t have electricity yet, but I stayed there anyway.  I opened my eyes, and for the first time in many, many years, felt calm, safe and happy.  My brain was amazingly clear of emotional sludge and gunk.  I felt immense relief.  I was finally home.

Three weeks after Asharah turned up with her moving van, we held a housewarming party.  We probably had fifty people wander through the house all night long, bringing us teacups and bean plants, meditation beads and puja kits.  Asharah and I, formerly unpopular introverts that we are, were amazed at how many amazing people turned up, but also how positive it was.  Wonderful people spreading joy and good vibes, even when it got crowded.  At 1 AM, I heard squeals from the front room, and figures leaping to give hugs to a tall man in a fedora.  August from the Mezmer Society drove 3 hours from a gig in Atlanta and turned up with accordion in hand.  We played music until dawn.

The meditation beads and puja kits ended up on the dance altar.  We light candles and incense when we dance, practice or have people over.  People keep sneaking jars of nutella into our spice cabinet.

The beans have outgrown their stakes in the back yard vegetable patch, where the tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, melons and cucumbers are really happy with all the downpours we’ve been getting.  One of our circus minions gave us a hammock.  Jaia, when she was in town, started our compost pile.

When I need introvert reset time, I often go thrifting.  For whatever reason, trolling down aisles by myself, letting my fingers run across fabrics, with my ipod blasting in my ears, is one of my favorite ways to reset right now.  I love having quests, or scoring amazing things for $2.  One day I heard something calling to me from across Goodwill and unearthed an arched wooden hutch.  I knew immediately that this should house an altar in my bedroom.  I sat on the front porch in the rain after a show one morning, surrounded by friends who came over for breakfast and ended up staying all day, and I took the doors off the hutch with a mini screw driver.  Kendal took a bunch of dried flowers off our fuchsia plants and put them in a coffee mug for me.  I gathered up my statue of Tara, a Nepalese goddess, that had been given to me for volunteering a performance at a benefit for the Ganden Buddhist Meditation Center years and years ago.  It was Delirium’s second performance ever.  She’s been traveling with me from place to place, house to house, situation to situation, mostly ignored and put up on a shelf somewhere.  She’d ended up on the dance room altar when we moved in, but I stole her back and put her in the wooden hutch.  I surrounded her with the flowers, added an old lotus-shaped incense burner, and housed her in my room.  Like I said, I’m not sure how I feel about the more literal interpretations of faith, but I’ve become a huge proponent of intent.  So I burn incense to her?   The universe?  My subconscious? every night as I’m getting into bed, and sometimes pray for things.  Often times she answers.  Sometimes she kicks my ass.  I’ve learned to be careful what I wish for.  We’ve started taking her to Art Bar with us, though.  When horrible thunderstorms threatened “Midsummer” last month, I burned incense and asked her for clear skies for the show before I put my makeup on.  Turns out, several of the visiting dancers made the same supplication throughout the evening.  We brought her with us and she lived in the changing tent during the show.  Seems to have worked.  It rained cats and dogs in a perfect circle around the Art Bar, but the show stayed dry.

The healing and love and friends wish has come back to me in spades that sometimes threaten to overwhelm me.  Circus kids camp out here for hours several times a week, often hanging out and laughing, sometimes dancing by themselves in the dance room with the lights turned low.  Sometimes I can’t get them out of here.  The tea cabinet is three shelves and overflowing, and the teapot sings constantly.  The front porch is covered in lanterns, and I’ve spent countless nights in the last few months sitting out there by candlelight, drinking tea–wine and cognac in some cases but mostly tea–laughing, sharing, listening and counseling.  Especially listening and counseling.  When we asked to have a healing house, it turned out to be healing to a lot of our friends, too, and it’s not uncommon to get phone calls from friends in crisis asking to come over for tea.  ”Coming over for tea” has become code word for “Please help me, I’m in shambles and need refuge.”  When we have guests over or throw parties, a lot of people end up hanging out in my room.  A few dancers who are much more spiritually enlightened than I am have pinpointed my altar and made a wish.  ”She’s really powerful,” one of them told me.  I just nodded and sipped my tea.  It’s all about intent.  And this is a house of healing.

Emotional prep

There is this absence of breath that happens, when fingers close around wrists for the first time, when you’re standing way too close, when you know that you have a plane ticket out of the country in four months, or that the dynamics are too complicated to be sustainable, or that he won’t choose you over her in the end, when there’s no way out except through what no doubt will end up being pretty wretched heartbreak, where you’re suspended between walking away to save yourself and the curiosity and anticipation of going through with it anyway, just to see, just to feel, and when the wrestling in your mind is done, there’s a small breath in, a signal, a turn of the head and a glance downcast at his shoulder, an assent.

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Asharah and I often sit at the kitchen table with our laptops going through our music libraries and trolling Itunes, Emusic, Amazon, blogs, youtube for new songs to dance to.  We’ve been rather excited about the new Itunes network sharing feature, which allows anyone on our wifi to have access to each other’s libraries for listening purposes.  Music is very important to us, and we always have music on in the house.

2 AM seems to be my golden hour lately.  There was one late night a couple weeks ago when I started listening to a couple of Anouar Brahem Trio tracks I’d randomly downloaded, and when I realized the tracks were extraordinarily magical, I went online and downloaded a few full albums.  On one of them, I found this gem:

I know a song is a good one if I start sighing with longing or appreciation while I’m listening.  Also, potential moves and choreography sequences should be pretty regularly springing into my head for certain sections.  The music and score have to be danceable, not just pretty.  If I become obsessed with a song, and start listening to it on repeat for days, weeks or months, there’s a good chance it will end up in my repertoire at some point.  Some go to work immediately.  A couple I’ve tried but aren’t done percolating in my brain yet.  A couple solos have been waiting upwards of five years for my chops and technique to catch up, and may end up sitting for a couple more years.

“Leila” is one of those songs.  The above is a live recording, which is brilliant, but there’s something about the first studio version on the album (there are two) that gels in an intangible way that makes you think there was something trancey and electric and cosmic going on in that studio.  Asharah and I have a hand signal for music and middle eastern dancing that has this quality, like you’re gripping an invisible orange in your hand and shaking it back and forth a few times, usually with your eyes tightly closed.  Asharah and I were both letting out gasps of appreciation when we heard this song for the first time, especially when that eighth note section on the accordion starts halfway through.  Instant magic layering section of choreography!

After driving everyone nuts with it on repeat for a few weeks, I went to work this week on the emotional prep for “Leila.”  Asharah is big on emotional prep and having an emotional anchor to all of her pieces, and she’s heavily influenced a lot of my solo dancing and Delirium’s big piece at Tribalcon last year (I’ll post about that when we get closer to our fall “Ghosts” show, where it’s going to get resurrected, pun unintentional but I’m leaving it there).  Bellydance, especially tribal bellydance seems to be going through the same growing pains that ballet did at the turn of the 20th century.  Doris Humphrey wrote a wonderful book on choreography called The Art of Making Dances that if the world were mine, I’d make required reading for anyone trying to put a piece together.  In it, Humphrey writes about the transition that ballet made from pretty displays of technique to tackling meatier subject matter:

“The dance has been, until recently, entirely ingenue, a sweet obedient child brought up in the theater and the court, and told to be young, pretty and amusing… Plot, when needed, was patterned after drama, but only the lighter and more whimsical forms were used.  The drama was interrupted by display pieces of technique, thought to be much more important than the story… There is not to say that the ballet form was bad, but only that it was limited and suffered from arrested development–a permanent sixteen, like the Sleeping Beauty herself.  So well established was the formula over so many hundreds of years that, as the twentieth century dawned with its flood of new ideas, there was considerable resistance to any change from the light love story and the fairy tale, and there still is.”

Asharah and I have had many, many conversations over the years, between ourselves and with others, about tribal bellydance, especially the many strands of tribal fusion out there, and how so many dancers tend to get trapped in the physical portion of it.  There are many technically proficient and flashy dancers out there who aren’t saying anything in their dance.  That’s not to say that every dance needs to be a fully fleshed out narrative, autobiographical, heavy and/or depressing.  I realize that my dancing tends to be rather on the down side, but that’s because I’ve been through some shit and I’m still working out those personal demons.  There are dancers out there who say “Dance is glorious and it makes my life rich and happy” while they dance that make me fall out of my chair watching them.  But too often, in tribal fusion especially,  I travel to perform and work, or fire up youtube searches from the latest events, and end up watching a lot of technical displays with vacant expressions.  I have hope, especially from hanging out with the Southern Fried Tribal crew (a moniker for a sort of family clan of dancers and musicians from across the southeast U.S. that shares information, advice, thoughts, performances, gigs and a decent amount of alcohol) that eventually the artform as a whole will generally pull out of this phase into something a little more mature and developed.  And I say this as a still fairly young and emerging dancer that’s still working through a lot of growth and processes and experiments, much of it bad and painful.  I just hope we’re all moving.

In the meantime, living in a house with Asharah, and with Megan Hartmann from Missouri crashing on our couch and training with us the last few weeks, we’ve been taking the month to start developing new pieces for ourselves.  There’s been a lot of quizzing each other on the emotional aspects of the piece before we really get to dig in on the choreography, and we often end up giving each other homework: journal entries, timelines of events vs. timelines of the music we’ve picked, collaging, etc.

Asharah teaches an amazing workshop called “Dancing Your Demons” that takes you through a lot of emotional exercises and then marries them to simple dance drills.  The workshop borrows some from Suhaila Salimpour’s level III emotional prep work training and owes a lot to Carl Jung.  If you’re a dancer and get the opportunity to take this workshop, do it.  It will change your whole approach to dancing.  It did mine by helping me find a process to prepare offstage for this sort of emotional bloodletting that sometimes happens onstage.  My personal process looks something like this: at some point before the show I put together an itunes playlist of songs that speak to me about whatever I’m dancing about–kick ass and shitkicker songs if I need to portray a lot of power, sad breakup songs for broken hearts, quietly devastating songs for a piece I did with Delirium on death–and as I warm up and stretch in a quiet corner of a dressing room or a hallway or in the wings I pipe this stuff directly into my brain via ipod headphones.  I do a lot of repetitive drills and start sending my headspace back to whatever moment in my life I’m drawing from to portray whatever it is I’m dancing onstage.  I take that emotional energy and bathe in it, until my muscles and sinews remember what it felt like physically to go through that moment.  When my arms buzz with the energy, or feel heavy with the emotion, I go onstage and I relive the moment through the choreography or improvisation I’ve mapped out.  If I’m dealing with something heavy, I usually come straight offstage and have to go cry in a bathroom stall somewhere.  Then I go and meet and greet and network or party feeling like I’ve been hit by a mack truck, but hey, part of being a professional performer is having to do all the administration and schmoozing, whether you feel like it or not.

I should note that this is the process I usually go through in smaller, one-off performance events, regional bellydance galas or shows that I don’t have to produce.  Art Bar performances get short shrift because I also produce the event, and usually am backstage calming the fire marshal, handing out set lists and dealing with all the last minute goof ups, so I can’t take an hour to warm up and play around in my psyche.  It ends up being kind of like a mom with young children who tries to take a bubble bath while the kids beat on the door every five minutes.  Things have gotten better this year since we’ve assembled a crew of volunteer stage and tech ninjas and I don’t have to spend hours putting PVC pipes and extension cords in order anymore.  But if you ever see me come on the Art Bar stage touching the stage, then my ears, forehead and heart, it’s because I’m trying to clear my head and ground myself in the performance a little better.

But when I’m not in charge, I usually take a long and luxurious time to dive emotionally into a piece and my past, muck around in there, get my hands really dirty.  I find that as I dance through issues a couple times, the effect they have on my life tends to lessen.  I had a long and fascinating conversation with Fred, my hypnotherapist friend, over lunch one day.  He was really intrigued with my description of this process and said it sounded very similar to hypnotherapy regression techniques that he uses to help people process traumatic experiences in their lives.  Through emotional prep, I end up processing a lot of what bothers me through these dance experiences, and eventually it can even become difficult to pull up the raw emotion again.  There have been a couple pieces, like “Nannou,” the infamous bird costume piece, or “The Chairman’s Waltz,” that have shifted emotional anchors as I’ve performed them over two years.  That’s actually kind of a cool thing because I can explore the same music and choreography with different emotional perspectives, and that keeps a piece fresh for me, even as I perform it again and again.  And I hope it keeps it fresh for my audience, too.  Sometimes, though.  I use the piece up.  I mine it until it goes dry.  And then I have to retire it.  Asharah’s done the same with several of her pieces, including “Grist,” which was one of her big hits that propelled her into the A-list on the teaching circuit.  Years later, people are still requesting she dance to it, but she’s done with that piece and  just can’t go there anymore.

The other night, after being incredibly studious and in my head about analyzing this piece musically and trying to put an emotional anchor to it, Aaron from Tribe SK stole Asharah’s ipod and set it up in our living-room-turned-dedicated-dance studio (we made our dining room the living room).  This was Sunday night, I think, after music rehearsal for “Midsummer,” and it was probably around 1 in the morning.  The music had beats and stuff to work with, but was mostly low key and a little dark.  Aaron grabbed Megan away from her laptop on the couch where she’s been sleeping, and they both started freestyling by themselves.  By 1:30, I decided to join them.  And even Asharah, as in her head as she declares herself to be, joined us around 2 when we hit a long and sweet section of Portishead songs.  We weren’t really dancing with each other, and we weren’t being formal about it, or even paying much attention to the mirrors or what was happening.  We were just dancing.  I mentioned in my last post how I’m realizing that I’m incredibly attached to my body, and that I process a lot of things that way.  I can trance out during active yoga, but meditating during savasana is a hideous challenge.  I can’t quiet my mind during meditation, but I can lose time and go blank during Suhaila drills.  And so we turned the lights down low, lit a couple candles and incense on the altar and had this amazing and quiet little emotional trance dance session that lasted until the wee hours of the morning.

We paid for it the next day by overshooting our planned wake up and start training time by a few hours, but I think it opened me up enough that when I put on “Leila” the next afternoon and started an exercise where I only did arm movement improv, the emotional focus for the piece fell into place fairly fully formed.  The piece is about sex.  It’s not going to be overtly depicting sex; I won’t be humping the floor or grabbing my boob onstage or anything.  It’s going to be another one of my really pretty choreographies with probably a good deal of my signature extension.  The music, though, is incredibly quiet and stark but just crackles with intensity, and I think my emotional perspective needs to reflect that.  So the opening passages of the song are about that breathless moment at the beginning of a love affair when you’re still weighing whether or not you should do this when you know there’s no future in it no matter how much you want it but it’s too late and you’re already in.  It winds down into a sort of sad wistfullness, drinking tea alone in the house when he’s gone.  I’ve got a few past experiences to draw on that I’m kind of smooshing together in my head, and I draw the line at sharing details because it’s not just my past I’m publishing for public consumption.  Also, there are certain people that I don’t want to encourage.  Also, my mom reads this blog.  At any rate, I have a week and a half before Asharah and I headline an intensive and gala show in Atlanta, and I’d like to have the piece in working order there, even if it’s still somewhat experimental.  I’ve analyzed the music and divided it into pieces.  I’ve made a list on my igoogle page, right next to the grocery list, my accounting notes list and the cleaning schedule list, that spells out the emotional perspective for all of those musical sections, so the internal story is pretty straight in my head at this point.  I have certain sections choreographed in my head and I’ve started working through some of them in the studio to see if they’re viable in reality (sometimes they’re not, or take a lot of tweaking).

The countdown is on.  Let’s see where this goes.

Apple pies and abandoned journals

I’m blogging again.  I’ve decided.  So here it is.

It was a little over two years ago that my life hit one of its bottom points: my job was gone, my father had died, my boyfriend had left me; and alone and desperate in my half-boxed-up rental house in Olympia I huddled in a blanket at 3 AM and started to write.  I started to write for the first time in years, crafting these little time capsule blog posts, putting them out into the ether on myspace because for god’s sake the pain had to go somewhere.

I was surprised then how many people ended up reading those and commenting.  I’ve also been surprised at how many people, even two years and change later, mention those blog posts and ask when I’m going to write more.  There was a time in my life when I wrote for pages every day, especially when I was 21, living in London and only owned what I could carry on a plane the week after 9/11 in two beat up suit cases.  I curled up against the radiator in my tiny closet of a flat at London Bridge Station and wrote.  I sat on the Tube and on trains to Scotland and wrote.  I rode random double decker buses to strange places around the city and wrote.  I sat in misty parks and wrote.  I perched in coffee shops and wrote.  I got a degree in English.  I worked as a journalist in New Orleans.  I dreamed of being one of those sickeningly precocious novelists that won the Pulitzer Prize by the age of 24.  What a brat.

Looking back, I wonder if I would have stuck with it even if the hurricane hadn’t swept in and killed so much of my life and habits and joy.  I did ballet until I was 12 before switching my interest fully into music.  I was one of those kids who could not stop creating.  I wrote plays.  I wrote songs.  I made clothes and costumes and jewelry.  I ran into my third grade teacher at my grandfather’s funeral a few years back, and when she asked what I was doing with my life and I told her I was running a bellydance and circus company, she rolled her eyes and said, “Well, that figures.”  If, godforbidknockonwood, I woke up tomorrow and couldn’t dance anymore, I would find some sort of creative thing to do: costume design, music again, writing a novel from my wheelchair, something.  But I picked writing to pursue as a profession because for a while I dutifully believed my parents’ fears that while artistic endeavors were great as extra-curricular activities, it was Really Not A Good Idea To Actually Do Them For A Living For Real.  When I got to college, I grudgingly took a look at communications and marketing classes because, according to an article my mother read, my writing abilities would be utilized well there.  After about a semester of that, I gave up on the notion that I would ever be happy doing something sensible with my life and declared my English major.  I would be a writer, because I was good at it.  But even that was a compromise.  I really wanted to be a musician, but figured I could placate the naysayers in my family and my life with writing because it was the most academic of all my interests.  This was long before I even discovered eating fire.

Yesterday was a rainy Sunday.  I spent a lot of the day in bed recovering from a lot of things: a massive birthday party we’d thrown for several circus performers and staff the night before, performing a couple times through the week, still a bit of post-partum from the Midsummer Night’s Cirque premiere and continued prep for the reprise.  It was gray and dark outside, and my room was clean for a change and my bed was cozy, so I snatched an opportunity to close and lock my door for a few hours, catch up on internet fluff and finish a book I’d been sporadically attempting to read.  My old lover “M” from the London days popped up and started chatting for the first time in a while as he rode the bus home to Cambridge.  And after typing for a couple hours, he picked up the phone and actually called me for the first time in years.  He’s not changed at all.  He claims my southern accent has come back.  At one point during our catching up he reminded me of these homemade-from-scratch apple pies I used to make in the shared kitchen of my dorm when we were dating.  I’d forgotten completely about them.  They got to be so notorious that I used to open my door in the morning and find bags of apples resting against the doorstop; a hint to make a pie out of them, filling the 15-story building with the smell of them, sending the British kids running to our kitchen hoping to grab a slice.  ”Do you still make them?” M asked.  ”Actually, babe,” I said, “I haven’t made one since I left England.”

When I leave a place, especially if there are tears and regret involved, I often leave bits and pieces of myself and my interests behind me.  When I left London, I never made another apple pie.  When I left college, I didn’t play music for six years.  I often tell people that when Katrina hit New Orleans, I lost my love of cooking, my love of gardening and my motivation for writing.  But if I were to be honest with myself, I think I left my writing behind in that bed by the radiator, in the Tube stops, in M’s flat where we got into a lot of trouble.  When I returned to the states, my journals were left mostly empty after several false starts.  When I graduated and moved in with Toby, he left me at home in a student slums hellhole he’d found so that I could write my first novel.  I had nothing to say.  I choked up with the fear that I couldn’t be clever enough.  I made clothes.  I wandered around New Orleans.  I eventually landed a freelance job with Gambit Weekly, and at least I could write features and blurbs.  But I was pigeonholing myself in the wrong art form, putting all my eggs in what I thought was the most respectable basket.  And, of course, it all dried up on my fingertips.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with my roommate and dance partner, Asharah, about the way our brains and bodies work.  Asharah is a fellow chronic overachiever, who went to an ivy league school and balanced a marriage, an international dance career and an analyst government job before she threw over her job and left her husband and ended up sharing what amounts to a a two bedroom headquarters for a strange little alternative circus in South Carolina with me.  Go figure.  Asharah is in her head a lot and very visual.  I inhabit my body very snugly and am very tactile.  My muscle memory and retention is much stronger than my intellectual memory and retention.  When Asharah listens to music, she sees colors and patterns.  When I listen to music, I’m analyzing melodies physically by air playing flute keys.  When Asharah choreographs in her head, she sees it on a headless dancer outside of herself.  When I choreograph in my head, I imagine what my muscles and bones will feel like as I execute movements.  Both of us have been hypnotized to various degrees by a friend of ours, and while Asharah had a very vivid visualization while she was under, I can’t see the damned hallway Fred keeps instructing me to see, and he couldn’t get me to leave my body for anything.  A lot of this dialogue springs from a conversation we had after a funeral we attended earlier in the week; we were sharing our wishes for what we wanted to happen after we died.  Asharah doesn’t feel much connection to her body and would rather be cremated.  I feel too much connection to my body and want to be buried in an ecofriendly way where some semblance and form of my body is retained, and sad little nerd girls can come to my grave, preferably under a dramatic willow tree, and preferably at midnight or later, to leave pennies, wine and other offerings in the style of Marie Laveaux.  So as can be expected when you stick two nerd girl artists in a house together and make them run their bellydance businesses from laptops on the same kitchen table, we’ve been expounding on our different approaches and how they affect our lives and our dancing for about a week.  We go through a lot of tea during our philosophizing, it turns out.  So as I sit here at 2 AM with a teacup at my right elbow and nutella at my left, thinking about the death grip my consciousness has on my broken and screwed up body, it rather makes sense that I ended up happiest expressing myself physically through dance and music, instead of rattling around in my neurotic head all day via pen and paper.

Last night Asharah ended up free dancing in the dance room all night and I’m up at 2 AM writing 2000 words about how I didn’t really want to be a writer after all.  We’re nothing if not stubborn.

Why am I doing this?  Because the other night at 4 in the morning I had this crazy idea that I needed to write a book at some point about some of the crazy shit I’ve learned, and this seems like good practice.  Because I’d like to give my brain some exercise.  Because I’ve been reading in bits and pieces and fits and starts when I hit those brick walls when I just can’t be a cirque-oholic anymore, and reading others’ work makes me miss the puzzle and joy of crafting pieces that shine (this isn’t one of them.  This is more of a brain dump.  But it’s a start).  Because I’ve had several people tell me lately that I’m working too hard and I need to take more time for me, and this might be a way to do it.  And because I’m falling into the small town trap where everyone knows me as The Bellydancer and I’m hoping in some perverse way to actually show the sometimes messy and neurotic girl behind the curtain.  And because if I take on a writing exercise in public, I’m much more likely to keep it going due to peer pressure and public shaming.  If you’re reading this, and you don’t mind, please endeavor to keep me on track.

And so I try to get familiar with the pen again.  And for the hell of it, I may try making an apple pie.