An Air of Finality

Due to an assignment, I find myself reading my first and last journals of my university experience.  I am to write my personal artistic mandate.

This is a fantastic exercise, one that I have already thanked my professor profusely for assigning, and one that I think every artist, nay, every person should take the time to do.

Of the first show I was cast in, I wrote, "Myth will change my life. I know it."

I had absolutely no idea how true those words would be.

So many words I wrote in my first and second year have ended up as prophesies over my life.  How powerful it can be when we write in the name of a calling or a gift.

This time next week I will be the proud owner of the esteemed title: BFA in Acting.

Just pray I don't trip on the way to receiving it.

Okay last one...maybe

In a dancer there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength. In a thinker there is a reverence for the beauty of the alert and directed and lucid mind. In all of us who perform there is an awareness of the smile which is part of the equipment of gift of the acrobat. We have all walked the high wire of circumstance at times. We recognize the gravity pull of the earth as he does. The smile is there because he is practicing living at the instant of danger. He does not choose to fall.

-Martha Graham

satisfy me in the morning with your love

A darkened room

with a darkened door

satisfied by the squeaking chair

of your rolling, wayward heart

my love

i say as I slip into subconscious

behaviour

waking up without you is half alive

half a person

compliant with mortality.

i am not.

A Great Privilege

About the artist:

"You are a great public servant," [Martha] told her dancers. "You are fulfilling a person's dream of what a man and a woman can be or should beware of being. Sometimes you are doing something for them because they cannot do it for themselves, at least not in the same way. So you are a servant to the public and that is a great privilege and a great honor."

"I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance or a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God."