cypher

I know now what had been growing in me all that time. What I felt, so suspiciously, in the cavity of my chest. I remember how, even after the show and the residency and all that making, I somehow still felt full and unfinished. I felt like a carton of eggs with only one missing. I remember, too, how I wrestled with that feeling for months. The most awful sense, impending birth of something totally unknown. It was as if the sky was either about to rip apart or come together and I didn't know which or in what direction. The sleeplessness, the dreamlessness, the slow agony.

What was growing in me was subtle awareness. The eggs that waited in my cardboard carton where plenty, and they were fertile. You see, sometimes, when we are drowning, we get aboard whatever ship comes by. And we love it. But that ship might not be going where we intended to. And, if we are not careful, after a time, we will forget our original itinerary and be content to mop decks and play solitaire on sea-sick nights. And that is what happened to me. Ojai was the whale that rocked my ship apart and swallowed me whole. Only, instead of spitting my up on the shore of some far off land, it rather delivered me, piece by piece, back to myself. Like those bones I wrote about so long ago, it is the nature of something that belongs to come back to itself.

While I was aboard that rescue ship, I knew, I knew, that part of me was still drowning. I knew that something was getting lost in all that mopping. But great things carry with them great inertia and the ship that saved me was the greatest of them all. Ojai was just the beginning, and it was so big, and so different, that despite my weekly mandated journeys back into Los Angeles, it ripped up the soil long enough to drop seeds inside of me beneath the roots of foreign trees. Each seed, each vision I had up there, each dream, each word I wrote, each thought, lay within me growing and growing like different pieces of a puzzle. They got so big, first I had to make a small change, then another small change, then a bigger one, and then, at last, I made colossal changes left and right, up-rooting what did not belong and making way for the new, waiting to see what shape it would take.

Well, it's been almost a year. And the shape is clear.

But I'll tell you later....


goodnight.