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.

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.

At a loss for words (part 3)

It's somewhat fitting that when I get to the part in the story that left me speechless for the first time, I have no more words to say.

I can't tell you about Paris -- I already have too many times and stuffing it into words makes it into language, and I want to keep it in the same plasma state it was. I'd like to tell you -- about each moment and each now, and how the colors inside them blinded me, how everything burned and how I turned around one day and realized I wasn't lost anymore. But I can't. To do so would be a great disservice.

All I can tell you is that -- and what a silly, piddling statement it is -- I changed.

Maybe that's the theme I'm going for in this series, the only thing I can say for sure at the end of this mad, violent, busy, wonderful, intensely full period of life they call college. It's nothing but another door, but this door means something because I've changed -- but not just changed ---

I think the word I want is become.  I have become.

This past year, the final one, has been no exception. I spent the first semester staring at myself in a mirror and having no clue who was looking back, struggling to fit the life I had before with the life I had created. I knew I'd be culture shocked and thought I had prepared, but prepared to fight a monster whose face I didn't even recognize when I saw it.

Sure, there were the academics -- a thesis, for one --  but this year was about making a dream come true, and celebrating the journey. I think I did both spectacularly.

I have nothing more to say about it, which is not to say there is nothing to say about it -- about each year and each summer and each splendid moment that was terribly unperfect and perfect, and about this year, but again -- I can't. I've run out. Paris left me speechless and I haven't recovered my tongue yet.

I'm just the girl who has become, and turns to face the world with immense passion and determination. Who is either really stupid or a visionary, and I guess we'll find out soon enough.

It's been a fun ride. I wouldn't have wanted it any shorter or longer, any more or less, anything else than exactly what it was.

(Everything is always perfect, remember?)

Retrospective, part 2

Sometimes I feel like I got it all together, and I can do anything.

Sometimes, I feel like a kid and the sheer audacity of what I propose to do knocks me over.

I have probably said it before, but let me put it straight: I propose to move to Paris and start a dance company that will be world-famous, all while breaking all the rules of contemporary dance. Before I hit thirty.

The girl I was just out of high school wanted to save the world. Something involving a world-wide revolution for life or something like that. I commend her vision and her passion. But something happened after my sophomore year of college -- saving the world just wasn't that important anymore.

Changing the world around me, the people I meet, the circle I move in, for the better -- that remained. But I realized, in one of those terrible moments when you think to yourself, man, this must be what it means to be an adult, that I just simply can't save the world. I know, it sounds obvious now. But it came as a surprise to that Gillian. All you can do is live where you are. The world is too Big.

Sometimes I find it hard to remember what I was doing the first two years of college. That was when I was still convinced that I was going to double major, when dance was something I loved but not yet something I couldn't live without, still playing catch-up with my technique. When I was still considering musical theatre and did those shows on campus. More than anything, I was busy. Tons of classes, work, shows, rehearsals, what have you.

In fact, looking back, I'm quite impressed with freshman and sophomore Gillian's sheer willpower to get through the semesters she did. I went to Oxford for Christmas, spent a week in Orlando for an acting/dancing/etc competition thing that turned out to be a total waste of time and money, spent a summer teaching dance and circus, and quite stupidly went over the credit limit in fall sophomore year.

The sophomore slump hit me hard, dragging me through an extraordinarily difficult five week stretch that I only later realized must have been some kind of depressive episode, which I finally pulled myself out of by my bootstraps. Coming into the spring, I was hit with a burst of madness and had a (to me) very real dilemma:

Should I stay at Columbia, work my butt off, and graduate a year early so I could get my life started, or take a year to dick around in Paris and then go back and graduate?

To everyone except me, the answer was obvious, but for a few weeks, I agonized over it. I was working a fantastic internship at an off-Broadway theatre company, I was balancing a 20 credit load with the internship and some 12 hours of work while I was at it, and had just decided, for the first time, to ditch the second major and focus on my passion -- wherever it took me. Bursting with the energy from that decision, just getting my life started sounded like a great idea.

Then it happened. I was at an info session for the Paris program, and I saw myself on a bike, pedaling through the streets of Paris. On a cloudy day, over a bridge. Whatever was happening that day, it was significant.

I can't explain it. All I know is that, in that moment, I knew I had to be in Paris, because something important was going to happen that day and I needed to be there to know what it was.

Following that moment, not going to Paris was no longer an option, and I barrelled forward as though nothing, including a complete lack of funding, could stop me.

The rest, they say, is history.

Graduation and Imposing Language: A retrospective (part 1)

It's getting to the place where graduation is close enough that it's got me looking forward, but especially looking back, thinking back to the four years I've spent associated with Columbia University in the City of New York, the institution of which I will soon become an alumn. Which seems, at this present moment, somewhat surreal.

I'm not a fan of words, in general, and especially not in situations like this, because I always feel like they add colors and interpretations -- or more accurately, take away colors -- so multi-faceted, impossibly colored experiences just look like one thing. Words add judgments, and what simply was becomes good or bad in their light.

But at the same time, I do want to put words to it. Maybe, as I think I wrote somewhere once, if only just to figure out what I myself think about it.

I think, since there is a lot to be said, I'm going to do this in several parts, at least that would be the plan, so I've somewhat optimistically put "part 1" into the title, though the chances of parts two, three, etc being forthcoming are a bit iffy.

The first thing I think about is the difference between this graduation and my high school graduation. High school. A gymnasium, a class of 72. As valedictorian, I gave a speech that absolutely no one cared about and that I can't even remember myself, then quietly got my diploma and went on my way. I never belonged there and no one made any move to pretend otherwise, least of all myself.

But this time, I'll be one of thousands, probably not distinguishable in any way, in light blue like everyone else. And thrilled to be there, proud of what I've done.

Though there has been a lot of water under the bridge -- so much I think the bridge itself has probably been destroyed and remade a few times -- I think that the only thing that hasn't changed is that my focus is still forward. But when I left high school, I just wanted to get away. Now, I'm just excited for the next step. One is past-centric, the other future. It makes a big difference.

I arrived at Columbia with that fresh out of high school 'gotta save the world' attitude, the kind of young, invincible thing drilled into you, because you're the next generation and dammit, you gotta do something worthwhile. I had a strong extraordinary complex, the kind of outsider mentality that carried over from high school -- okay-to-be-a-loner-cuz-you'll-save-the-world. Like I said, extraordinary complex. I had all sorts of visions (delusions?) of grandeur and hell, I was barely 18 years old. I've always been a bit ahead of myself and as such, I don't let myself be young, but I was. Naive and inexperienced and well, you can't really expect much else, could you?

I've read her journals; I know what she thought. I think I understand why she thought them, though not always. I assume I'd recognize her if we met. But I'm not sure she'd recognize me, and when I read her words, I don't relate to them. We are separated by only four years, but much more time, and more than a few lifetimes.

Perhaps in a further post, I'll take a more detailed look at the years.

But right now, I can just think of this:

She was such a cold little girl. For one thing, she thought she could never fall in love. Since then, I've been in love twice, each equally magnificent and heartbreaking and dramatic, and neither of which I care to go into detail except to say that -- as cliché as it may be -- I was fundamentally and permanently changed by the experience.

She thought she was such an outsider. Since then, I've learned how to be beloved, and how to belong somewhere, how to let myself be at home.

She thought she was so old. Now, I think I'm so young.

However ---

I can look back and point out everything she wasn't, and everything she thought because she was young, and she didn't know better, and all her arrogance and melodrama, but that would be forgetting one very crucial thing --

She had the courage to jump and become who I am today -- certainly not a finished product or perfect or whatever it may be -- but someone I'm proud of. There's a song in Cirque du Soleil's Quidam that says "Someone I am is waiting for my courage/the one I want, the one I will become will catch me."


So whatever else she might have done, she had the courage to jump, and trust that I would catch her.

For that, I have to thank her.

The Aftermath: Paris the 2e Tour

I believe I mentioned, some time ago, that I was returning to Paris, and had some anxieties about it. I just looked through my recent posts and realized that I said nothing further, and yet one week ago, I returned from a ten day trip to the one city in the world that has managed to completely and utter capture my heart.

Well. Time to fix that.

I have trouble describing it in few words, but I think the main things are simple enough. The main anxiety was that returning to the place of such an incredible and life changing experience was bound to be a letdown, or strange, or that somehow my memory was rose-colored and I would not feel the same perfect peace and belonging as I did in living there. That I would feel the same terrifying unknowing that I did in returning to the USA after 11 months away, the same uncanny displacement that you can do nothing about but turn in circles until you find yourself (which didn't happen until December).

On this account, I shouldn't have worried. The second I arrived, I felt as though I had never left. Friends greeted me as though I had left the day before. The signs, the metros, everything. I only realized the sirens were different when one of my dancers pointed it out.

French people always ask me why in the world I would live in Paris when I could live in New York. I say, it's less stressful, and they say, well Paris is stressful too. I think it's not quite that, then -- the real fact of the matter is that Paris has an energy that I feel better in -- ça me correspond mieux.

The other thing about the trip was that it was so deeply and incredibly encouraging. The idea to come back for the April festival at Paris 7 started out as a mere possibility, a dream, and for a year it was all I thought about. Everything I did revolved around making it happen. I had dancers leave and a real dearth of funding until the last minute, but then suddenly we were there, and it was real. What had been a dream was reality, and it was exactly as I had wanted it to be.

Well, if I could do that -- suddenly it seems very possible to make other dreams come true. Of course, with time -- but I have time, my god I have so much time.

It was interesting -- people kept telling me how incredible it was that I did this, that I got a group from Columbia to Paris for the festival, and it allowed me to step back and be proud, because inside of it --

Honestly, it wasn't anything amazing. It was nothing more or less than something I had to do. Not doing it was not an option and therefore I had to find a way. Simple.

But either way, I know now, it's possible. You just have to be completely obsessed, and I am.

That's why, for the past week, I have not been depressed like I thought I might be after leaving Paris. I was missing it terribly on Tuesday, sure, but the pervasive energy has been so positive and exciting -- because I know I'm going back. I know it will be just as wonderful, and that I can make all my dreams come true.

You just have to give me a few years.

Everything is Always Perfect (Even when it's not)

I've mentioned this a few times to some of my friends, who always, being very sweet, open-minded people, nod and smile and say, sure, they suppose. But I thought it deserves a more in-depth look here -- at least so I can explain myself. It is, I admit, a sort of strange thing to say, in a world and a life so obviously UN-perfect.

The essence of it is this: I don't mean 'perfect' as in "perfection", or "utopian". These words suggest strange, vacant, vapid places of idyllic beauty, filled with vacant, vapidly happy people stumbling around in a daze on golden streets. No, I don't mean paradise.

I mean perfect as in the idea that everything is always exactly as it should be at any given time, as it must be, because it could not possibly be any other way.

This is not to be confused with the idea of "fate", which is a whole different animal. A cold and unfeeling universe unfolding with no chance of redemption or fixing what has already been given to you to break does not sound like my idea of a picnic. No, the universe is dynamic and changing and changes as we choose and create the realities we want to live in.

But at any given moment, everything is exactly as it needs to be. Perfect. Even if it's not perfect.

It's not an easy philosophy, but it's the only way to make sense of the world for me, especially because it demands a certain loss of judgment. Good and bad distinctions are the world's favorite way of speaking, and I just can't deal with it. I honestly don't believe in "good" or "bad" -- I believe things can be constructive or destructive. Construction leads to life, joy, creation. Destruction is pain, despair, and fear. One is certainly more desirable, but I am loath to use the word "better." I simply try to live my life in the most constructive and creation-oriented way possible, for myself and for those around me.

Getting back to the topic, if everything is always as it should be, then it's very hard to call things good or bad. They simply are. They are exactly what they are and nothing more or less. In that way,  you can just deal with things without the halo of connotations and judgments we carry around life in.

Sure, it requires a lot of patience, and trust, and I freely admit to not always following the philosophy as much as I'd like to. But I do try.

"Whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding exactly as it should."