"Greetings"

this last weekend was busy, and a little strange.

friday night i went to see sam in a play called “greetings” at the tryon little theater. a great ensemble performance, tied together by sam’s very talented fiancé chris, who has apparently been in theater about as long as i have. he, of course, is still involved, while i’m… well, i’m not anymore. that may change when duckie gets a little older, and it might not. will have to consider it carefully – later, when my mind is not quite so full. sometimes i think i need a pensieve – although i think this blog is a kind of pensieve in itself.

the show was fantastic – heartbreaking, joyful, hilarious, and emotionally terrifying. religion and spirituality were almost separate characters themselves. during the beginning of the play you get the exposition of two seemingly opposing points of view – the monotheist versus the atheist. the monotheist said to the atheist, “well, who do you think created all the beauty in this world?”

and i heard someone behind me say, “amen!”

i couldn’t help but cringe right along with the atheist, because you could see what was coming. the atheist (played by sam, btw, with an emotional intelligence and presence that was beautiful to see) was about to get a major reaming out. looked like it was gonna get ugly – and it did. there were several times when i wanted to crawl under my seat and hide – and other times when i wanted to stand up and slap the shit out of the monotheist, just for being such a hurtful bastard. (you see the irony there, i’m sure.)

and at the height of the tension, when it looks like the father’s about to take his cane to the son, a new character appears – yes, “magically” – who sends the whole show in a new direction.

and oh, the feeling of profound relief when he appears. it’s no surprise to me that i had a slight crush on lucius, the new character, by the end of the show, and i was a little sad to see him leave. because as soon as he showed up, it became very clear to me that the playwright might perhaps have a working knowledge of buddhist philosophy. the concepts i’ve been pondering for the last few months were offered back to me on that stage, a kind of blessed acknowledgement that i’m not alone in my beliefs. (which, as you might imagine, is an illusion I struggle with on a regular basis.)

now’s a good time to say thanks to james for his upkeep of a beautiful buddhist blog that i don’t visit enough. i stopped by there late last week, and very much enjoyed the reminder that life is about more than cookies, and that the best part of christmas is the giving part.

i really need to get the script of "greetings" from sam so i can add some of the lines to my inspirations page. my favorite line, though, came at the end of a repartee about how everyone has been everything at one point or another: artists, parents, teachers, soliders, prostitutes…

sam’s character, the atheist, is highly miffed by this new-age magic stuff. “oh, really?” she says tartly. “what kind of a prostitute was I?”

deadpan, lucius replies, “enthusiastic.”

i left the theater wrung out emotionally, a little embarrassed, thankful that my mascara was smudge-proof, wishing i’d followed my instincts and grabbed some tissues from the duckie-box in the car.

the drive home was uneventful, peaceful, giving me time to regroup before i stepped back into the turbulent waters of family life.

i don’t know if it started then, or if i was feeling this before and just noticed it this weekend, but i have lately been experiencing another period of disconnection from my world. it’s not like i’m escaping, like i was last year when things were really bad. it’s almost as if i can’t accept the reality of the blessing – that my daughter, this beautiful child, is a part of my life, and that my life is so infused with love from all directions. it’s almost as if the dreams i have at night are more real than my waking life.

it confuses me, and concerns me. i know that aspiring to free one’s self of inappropriate attachment is one of the main tenets of buddhist philosophy, but i don’t think it means to cut yourself off from a sense of being in the world. i think it’s a step up to hypomania, is what i think.

continued in next post...