A Love Letter…

     There are some parts of the world, some parts of our lives we can only ever see from underneath. Some angles we can only perceive once enough time has gone by. Once we have tried, maybe more than a few times, on our own, to find our way back home. There are some things in us that only grow downward.
A theatre is a world above and a world beneath what we experience in our moment to moment living on this earth. This place is changing. Always trying to forget and remember itself at the same time. For some, it’s a place to go on about business as usual. A place to take what they do remember about their lives and put it to good productive use. For others, it’s a place they can finally feel in control. A place for them to feel big and strong in ways they could never feel elsewhere. It’s true that all the world is a stage. It’s true also that we all play our parts as best we can. Ten years ago, we may have been the lover. Some nights that we’d rather not recall, we played the devil’s part. Sometimes we were simply stones, rolling along and passing the time.
If there is a grand design to this life, then perhaps all we are ever capable of seeing, knowing, or playing is one or two little scenes; painfully (or blissfully) unaware of how our acts fit within the overall plot. Time passes, the lights shift, characters come and go, and the setting changes. The king becomes the fool, the fool becomes the devil, x happens which causes y and ends up in z, and the train rolls on down the tracks. People, plans, and points in spacetime pass right on by. That’s what’s called life, wonderful and otherwise.
For some, it’s easy to think the play means nothing, that it’s simply an entertaining illusion. For others, it’s even easier to believe the play is all there is. There is so much happening all the time, how can we even begin to process it? What will be there to greet us when we disembark the train? Get off the elevator? Who shows us to our room? Perhaps it’s only ever us. Perhaps we carry each other along, and teach each other the words we need to remember in order to talk about the things we can’t talk about. Perhaps the home we are all searching for is only a house made of threads and particles and stories from our fathers who came before us, or our hopes of a world up above, in the sunlight and stars.
These big black boxes, the rooms of empty space in the cosmos–to be filled with all the dimensions of the human experience–are the scratch paper. They are the empty track that stretches out into the infinite landscape laid out ahead. These are the roads that offer us up a sense of potential, possibility, and progress. They can hold all the joy and all the betrayal. They can hold the loved and the forgotten, the mistaken and misgiven. All the hope and all the pain and all the everything. And when the houselights go out, we can come home into ourselves for some little time, remember what we can, and forget what we must in order to move on. We see ourselves as lover, parent, devil. Ten years may go by in an instant  and suddenly we see ourselves as ghost, talking to walls and whispering to anyone who comes after and will listen. Warning ourselves against our selves and forgiving everyone around for all the pain of simply being human.
The theatre is home. And for this place and this time, it’s our home. It has happened before, but never this way. It will always happen again, never this way. Never the same way twice. We have an opportunity in these big empty spaces. To fill them with love and drama, and all the lifeblood of our whole selves and see what’s left to learn and take back with us to the surface.  Supposing we ever get there. Supposing no one calls our name from someplace behind us and sends us or themselves right back to forgetting who we are and where we have come from and where we are going. But even if, the road home is always there. Just another step ahead of us. All we need do is turn toward it. Take the step. Buy the ticket, learn the lines, or simply sit and listen for the word we remember. Our name. Or simply “home”. We are not sitting or walking or going alone.
Somewhere in a play it is written that the world is like a great woven cloth, and each person is like the place where two threads meet. Pull on one thread, you move every thread. What one of us learns, or remembers, awakens all of us. Or at least tugs on another’s heart just enough to generate some motion, maybe some light and heat in the big dark world. Sometimes we are above it all, and sometimes beneath. But the truth is we are never by ourselves. We reach down or up into the unknown dark and brilliant light and a hand will catch ours. Without fail. Because someone else out there remembers, and can teach us to remember. They will hold our hand and tie a string a string around our finger so we don’t forget when it gets dark again or we get turned around.
Our stories are our gospel. And our stages are our cathedrals and our grand arenas. Here we wrestle with our devils, our doubts, and our desires. We mix and melt and meditate and when the scene is through, we are left with some better version or ourselves. We grow up and maybe a little downward, too. We grow all around and most of that is going to come with some pain. But it’s always, always the worthwhile sort.
We want to hold on and dig in. We want to avoid the rocks and frost. We want desperately to avoid the times when others are there to learn from our example, or simply neglect us. But it helps to know we are all in the same darkness, bumping up against each other and bruising along the way. We need the space, we need the time, and the light. We need the thoughts of wind and rain and the reminders of sunshine. We need the witness and the direction. We need the room and the reasons to grow. We need The laughter and the tears to clear all the cloudy, shrouded and darkening air.
These stories, these old cathedrals and big black boxes are our fortress against becoming truly lost, truly forgotten. Strangers to ourselves. It’s true when they say we are walking with each other, following the paths we see as faithfully as we can. Soon, and always, we are one step away. Just above. Just below. We are all one remembered word away from coming home. We try not to forget, but if we do, we can look around in the dark for the person standing next to us searching for the light, or the right cue to take us to the next act; to take us the rest of the way to remembering home.