the starting of a brand new day

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What the hell does that mean, anyway? Every time the sun rises it’s a brand new day, right?

Oh but damn, looky there, we took the Senate, too, and that just makes everything feel great. Even if it’s only for a few days or weeks or however long the honeymoon lasts.

Yesterday I felt a quiet, profound, glorious sense of opening up, as if I was finally allowed to believe what’s been stuck in my heart and my head for so long now that I thought it had withered and died. And just below it, there was a gentle surge of potential creativity just waiting for me to tap into it. It wasn’t even a hypomanic feeling (I don’t think, although when that happens I’m not always the best judge.) It felt good, and healthy, and safe.

I think they call it hope.

I’m not even gonna question it right now, or worry too much about where it’s coming from. I’m just gonna groove on it for a while.

I practiced yesterday afternoon. I kept getting giddy and distracted by the phrase “Madam Speaker of the House.” Still gives me the shivers, in a really nice way. This is huge. It means so much for our country, and for our world.

So this morning’s practice was devoted to letting all of that go – knowing that even the happiness was attached to the anxiety of the last three years in so many ways, and that the joy would still be there on the other side, waiting to fill me up again.

I know there will be hard times ahead – there always are. I know that there will be raised taxes in our very near future – but again, there always are; it’s only a matter of time. I’m not entirely sure how we expected to pay for a hugely expensive war without sacrificing something at home (other than our civil rights and our trade deficit.)

This will sound insane and naïve and hopelessly unrealistic to some people, but if I have to pay higher taxes to improve health care, education, the independence and environmental ethics of our energy use, our children’s future, and our world – well, fuck it, I’m OK with that.

There seem to be a lot of folks who are scared of watching our government swing way over to the left. I hope it doesn’t happen – that our new leaders can avoid knee-jerk reactions. Seems to me that a lot of the new blood Democrats are pretty far over to the right themselves – otherwise I don’t see how they could have gotten themselves elected in the first place. Shuler, our new Rep, is strongly pro-life, and wouldn’t work on Sundays even when he was trying to get elected. That was his time with God and his family. I’m not a Christian, but I have to respect that commitment.

When change happens, I hope it happens in tiny little increments – and I sure as hell hope it’s tested first. It’s a lot less expensive to test and troubleshoot a new process when it’s not implemented on the scale of entire freaking country.

When I used to direct, I was often struck with odd ideas for new blocking or readings or set changes. I’d suggest them, and my actors would look at me as if I’d gone completely off my noggin.

I’d say, “Let’s just try it. We might not use it. We might use it to get somewhere else. We don’t need to worry about the final results right now. Let’s just try it, and see where it takes us.” We threw out some stuff, we kept some others, and we found little moments of truth, beauty and brilliance during the process. Places we wouldn’t have gone if we hadn’t tried to walk down a strange path.

So, hey – let’s just try it. Let’s just try it, together, and see where it takes us. Maybe we can save some lives. Maybe we can make the world a better place.

I’m just sayin’.

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