As I've mentioned several times previously on this blog and haven't stopped talking about for months now (leaving my friends and acquaintances no doubt really really ready for me to actually leave), on July 6th, at 1:45AM, I will be on an airplane at JFK, heading for Phnom Penh, Cambodia. With a stop in Taipei for 3 hours and to convince myself to get back on an airplane after 16 full hours to get there.
Sass aside. I have a one way ticket. I have no idea when I am coming back, or where. I've started telling people I'll be there until I leave, which no matter what will be true. It should be somewhere in the six to nine month range, I think, and sometime next March I will probably be found in Denver. Maybe.
As for what I'm doing...well, that's a bit up in the air too, but at least until the end of the summer I'll be teaching choreography workshops with Cambodian Living Arts, an organization with a mission to rebuild the country by bringing back the arts. I'll probably continue working with them during the fall, including an all-expenses paid trip to Siem Reap to teach at the School of Fine Arts there.
In the meantime, I'll be teaching English to pay the bills (I hope), collaborating with whatever arts organizations I can possibly collaborate with, and (hopefully) producing work.
It sounds fantastic, and I'm so thrilled, but I always get asked, why in the world - literally - Cambodia?
Well. My friend Nettra, my suitemate freshman year, is from there, and infused me with her passion for the country. Somehow, we decided I should go, but there was never time, until there was, and I threw the idea out into the world to see what happened.
Simply enough, I thought it was time to give back. I'm fascinated by how the arts are returning, having been entirely stamped out during the Khmer Rouge, and I have the opportunity to really be a part of the movement to rebuild.
And besides -- I love how I can get real experience teaching and working, and in the process immerse myself in a part of the world that is entirely foreign to anything I have previously experienced. I love how I can go and be whoever the hell I want, as accomplished as I care to be.
I'll probably have a camera, and at the very least, I'll be keeping up the blog, writing down the adventure as it unfolds under my feet. I have absolutely no idea where it's going to lead me, but I think I want to be there to find out.
See you on the other side! (literally)
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
Rolling Home
Well I don't know, I ain't been told
Everybody wants a hand to hold.
They're so afraid of being old,
so scared of dying, so unknown
and so alone, rollin' home.
You'll hear me talk a lot on this blog about being alive, and storming after dreams. I would say they're obsessions, and I do my best to always be doing both.
Recently I was talking with a friend, and he asked, "why wouldn't people just do what they want all the time?" Why indeed, settle for a job you hate or at best dislike, and put away what you truly want as being unattainable, silly, and generally impossible?
I can't answer that. If I could, I'd be very rich. But I think it has something to do with the above lyrics, from a folk song. Some deep fear -- maybe of being the only on the road you're on, the outcast, the wandering beggar. Or maybe not. Maybe it just takes too much energy. Sit down, you're rocking the boat, indeed.
I don't know the way out. I think I have some inkling, what works for me at least. A few years ago, I thought I wanted to save the world. That was a pretty ridiculous thing to think, but it was hard to let go of. So scared of dying, so unknown and so alone, right? But I realized somewhere along the way, I don't need to save the world to make a difference. I don't even need to try.
There's nothing big I want to prove, no mountains that I need to move
or even claim what's right or true for you.
My sights, my songs are slightly charred, but things are only what they are, and nothing new --
But for me, I think they'll do.
Now I just have my dreams. They are what they are, and for me, they work, and I storm after them with an obsession that is if not blind, at least consuming. I don't have to move mountains, just climb them step by step.
As for me, I think that'll do.
Everybody wants a hand to hold.
They're so afraid of being old,
so scared of dying, so unknown
and so alone, rollin' home.
You'll hear me talk a lot on this blog about being alive, and storming after dreams. I would say they're obsessions, and I do my best to always be doing both.
Recently I was talking with a friend, and he asked, "why wouldn't people just do what they want all the time?" Why indeed, settle for a job you hate or at best dislike, and put away what you truly want as being unattainable, silly, and generally impossible?
I can't answer that. If I could, I'd be very rich. But I think it has something to do with the above lyrics, from a folk song. Some deep fear -- maybe of being the only on the road you're on, the outcast, the wandering beggar. Or maybe not. Maybe it just takes too much energy. Sit down, you're rocking the boat, indeed.
I don't know the way out. I think I have some inkling, what works for me at least. A few years ago, I thought I wanted to save the world. That was a pretty ridiculous thing to think, but it was hard to let go of. So scared of dying, so unknown and so alone, right? But I realized somewhere along the way, I don't need to save the world to make a difference. I don't even need to try.
There's nothing big I want to prove, no mountains that I need to move
or even claim what's right or true for you.
My sights, my songs are slightly charred, but things are only what they are, and nothing new --
But for me, I think they'll do.
Now I just have my dreams. They are what they are, and for me, they work, and I storm after them with an obsession that is if not blind, at least consuming. I don't have to move mountains, just climb them step by step.
As for me, I think that'll do.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
A late Father's Day shoutout
Father's Day was yesterday, but I thought it might be time to give a mention to my dad, who has been mentioned here briefly but never with any detail.
Dad used to be a lawyer. He wanted to go into music and writing out of college, but that wasn't going to pay the bills, so he went to law school instead. Some thirty years later, he got a shock from the maker on a ski slope, when he fell from a poma lift and shattered his pelvis.
That was in 2006. Since, his life -- and ours -- have never been the same. He decided he was done stifling a boundlessly creative soul, and hasn't stopped creating since. At the beginning, it was a multimedia show that he and I were partners in crime on, but it spiraled from there to screenplays, more shows, books, seminars.
None of his productions have come to fruition yet, but to say it was just the products that matter would be a great oversight. Not content to purely change careers in his mid-fifties, Dad embarked on a life-changing quest to find a whole new way of living -- a full-accountability, fully alive, fully aware kind of life. It was a journey so transforming that the whole family was touched by it, and are all on our own journeys in the same vein. Of self-discovery, forgiveness, lack of judgment.
Throughout the process -- well, you couldn't expect it to be easy, and it wasn't. There were many times when the normal person might have quit and gone back to the hated status quo, begged the universe's pardon for disturbing it, and forgotten how to dream.
Not Dad. He kept going, kept creating, no matter what happened. He is without a doubt the most courageous man I have ever met, and I'm constantly inspired by him -- and challenged to be a better person. I think, even if he wasn't my dad, we'd be friends.
I encourage you to check out his website, which just launched a couple weeks back: www.kevin-rhodes.com.
Happy Father's Day, Dad! Love you dearly.
Dad used to be a lawyer. He wanted to go into music and writing out of college, but that wasn't going to pay the bills, so he went to law school instead. Some thirty years later, he got a shock from the maker on a ski slope, when he fell from a poma lift and shattered his pelvis.
That was in 2006. Since, his life -- and ours -- have never been the same. He decided he was done stifling a boundlessly creative soul, and hasn't stopped creating since. At the beginning, it was a multimedia show that he and I were partners in crime on, but it spiraled from there to screenplays, more shows, books, seminars.
None of his productions have come to fruition yet, but to say it was just the products that matter would be a great oversight. Not content to purely change careers in his mid-fifties, Dad embarked on a life-changing quest to find a whole new way of living -- a full-accountability, fully alive, fully aware kind of life. It was a journey so transforming that the whole family was touched by it, and are all on our own journeys in the same vein. Of self-discovery, forgiveness, lack of judgment.
Throughout the process -- well, you couldn't expect it to be easy, and it wasn't. There were many times when the normal person might have quit and gone back to the hated status quo, begged the universe's pardon for disturbing it, and forgotten how to dream.
Not Dad. He kept going, kept creating, no matter what happened. He is without a doubt the most courageous man I have ever met, and I'm constantly inspired by him -- and challenged to be a better person. I think, even if he wasn't my dad, we'd be friends.
I encourage you to check out his website, which just launched a couple weeks back: www.kevin-rhodes.com.
Happy Father's Day, Dad! Love you dearly.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
And then life happened
And muttering constantly about how long May was taking to finish, I turned around to open the door and found weeks trailing behind me like little ducklings, wondering how long it would take until I noticed them.
It all just happened, just like every other moment of our lives, important and unimportant and essential and thrown away -- it doesn't change, each now unravels precisely as did its predecessor. If there's an apocalypse, it will be just like every other moment and we'll probably never know it happened, until much later.
I don't remember what it was like to be in school, to have homework, to go to class. That's probably a strange thing to say, but this is coming from someone who has trouble remembering what happened last weekend. I think it's a caveat - if that word is even appropriate here - of living in the now. But needless to say, I don't miss it.
Perhaps one reason life is happening behind my back, only to stop guilty when I turn but betrayed by its movement, is that I've been feeling particularly transitory -- unsettled in the most literal sense, un-settled, not settled. And no wonder -- I'm staying in someone else's apartment. I get my clothes from a suitcase. I'm leaving in four weeks (!!!!) from Thursday, to somewhere across the globe that promises to be exactly like nothing I have ever experienced, ever.
It's been many years of violent transition in the family -- the easiest way to describe it is Dad changing careers, but that doesn't cover how the whole family melted like steel in the forge and came out changed. How the life we had before is nothing like the life we live now, down to the way we think, act, make decisions. Inside it's easy to think this is all there ever will be, this uncertain wobbling as we try to figure out where and what to do, how to live when we can barely see tomorrow, let alone our hands in front of our faces.
Lately, I've had a couple thoughts. One, a simple bit of optimism: it won't always be like this. I can imagine a time in the not so distant future when I will have a little place, however small, that is mine, that I can buy little decorations for and come home to each night. Sure, I probably won't know when or where or how to make my dreams of dancing and choreographing come true, but I will have that one little bit of stability. Maybe even many years from now, my company will be well-established. Stability, like life, goes in cycles. At least, I'm willing to bet on it.
The second is something zen masters would probably approve of: until such time that I am settled, I must become settled in transition. Transition needs to be my home for now. Travel lightly. Dance from place to place like a sparrow, ready to fly at every moment.
In the meantime, I'm preparing for the move as best as I can, holding rehearsals, working. Thinking I'm paying attention to time and turning around to find it sneaking by while I wasn't looking.
It all just happened, just like every other moment of our lives, important and unimportant and essential and thrown away -- it doesn't change, each now unravels precisely as did its predecessor. If there's an apocalypse, it will be just like every other moment and we'll probably never know it happened, until much later.
I don't remember what it was like to be in school, to have homework, to go to class. That's probably a strange thing to say, but this is coming from someone who has trouble remembering what happened last weekend. I think it's a caveat - if that word is even appropriate here - of living in the now. But needless to say, I don't miss it.
Perhaps one reason life is happening behind my back, only to stop guilty when I turn but betrayed by its movement, is that I've been feeling particularly transitory -- unsettled in the most literal sense, un-settled, not settled. And no wonder -- I'm staying in someone else's apartment. I get my clothes from a suitcase. I'm leaving in four weeks (!!!!) from Thursday, to somewhere across the globe that promises to be exactly like nothing I have ever experienced, ever.
It's been many years of violent transition in the family -- the easiest way to describe it is Dad changing careers, but that doesn't cover how the whole family melted like steel in the forge and came out changed. How the life we had before is nothing like the life we live now, down to the way we think, act, make decisions. Inside it's easy to think this is all there ever will be, this uncertain wobbling as we try to figure out where and what to do, how to live when we can barely see tomorrow, let alone our hands in front of our faces.
Lately, I've had a couple thoughts. One, a simple bit of optimism: it won't always be like this. I can imagine a time in the not so distant future when I will have a little place, however small, that is mine, that I can buy little decorations for and come home to each night. Sure, I probably won't know when or where or how to make my dreams of dancing and choreographing come true, but I will have that one little bit of stability. Maybe even many years from now, my company will be well-established. Stability, like life, goes in cycles. At least, I'm willing to bet on it.
The second is something zen masters would probably approve of: until such time that I am settled, I must become settled in transition. Transition needs to be my home for now. Travel lightly. Dance from place to place like a sparrow, ready to fly at every moment.
In the meantime, I'm preparing for the move as best as I can, holding rehearsals, working. Thinking I'm paying attention to time and turning around to find it sneaking by while I wasn't looking.
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