Lately, it feels like I’m crawling out from under a rock, looking into a blinding, bewildering chaos replete with great suffering.
I spent most of last year deeply immersed in a challenging leadership development project and an aerial highwire act within an annihilating love affair.
As I pivoted out of the fog of 2024, I started to see glimmers of an ‘escape from Alcatraz,’ those darker hell realms of my own psyche. My soul finally bleated out like an angry goat , ‘That’s enough! Take off all those ill-fitting clothes! Whose idea was it to dress in ropes and compression bandages anyway? I can’t breathe!”
And so, with no small amount of trepidation, I started to redirect my passion for communication and relationship from the tighter, linear spaces of the written word and into the open, fluid world of music, song…and jestering, of course.
I picked up a guitar and started writing songs. After 20 years of encouraging others to “Make Art Anyway,” I allowed myself to heed the same advice. Now I see with great precision why art making is equal to scientific exploration. We are lost without this capacity for rendering our soul’s expression into novel forms. It may be our truest form of redemption. I am only here now, of sounder heart and mind, because of a stringed instrument disguised as Cupid’s arrow.
The other stabilizing wisdom that’s emerged from this year’s pummeling is the belief that the only way out of this madness, is through it. Through the wars, the power grabs, the name calling, the desecration, the dis-membering and the boundary violations that happen inside of us. If we focus too much on the madding circus we observe in our politics, our institutions, and our anointed leaders, we lose sight of the source from whence it all arises—our own inner reality.
So I have taken up the mantle to nourish the healthiest version of the circus that jostles around inside. My attempts at explanation fall short. This constricted, restless soul of mine will be patient no longer. She exhorts me to tend to those things that bring delight, healing and humor even in the darkest places. I trust it will make me a better advisor, facilitator and coach.
Thusly, you’ll find me mostly here. Raw, improvisational, unplugged. As always, I welcome my fellow clowns, chanteurs, lion-tamers, magicians, and aerialists of the heart. Wherever ever you are, I want to hear your song. Maybe there is a circus to create together.