17 March 2004: Downtime

Has it really been more than a week since my last entry? It was one of the faster weeks I've had.

I've been busy, immersed in schoolwork and in Orphans of Delirium. Performed Orphans this weekend, Saturday and Sunday. Went very well, especially Sunday. Very well recieved by audience. Dragon Lady in the audience Saturday, Lexicat on Sunday.

Saturday morning I felt like I was starting to get sick. Fought it off, and it left me alone for the weekend and caught up with me yesterday.

Yesterday evening the Orphans cast met at CELLspace, where we'll be performing Orphans for the third and final time this coming Sunday night. Didn't go into ritual space - just walked through it to get a sense of how the layout of the rituals translated into the new venue. Actually, we didn't walk through it, we danced through it - there was a jazz combo playing loudly in another area of the building, so we all danced to the music as we went through the basic motions of the show. Spirits were high, and it was a fun time.

It was exactly four months to the day from the public lecture/demo at CELLspace that was the beginning of the Initiations/Orphans journey.

This Sunday, it ends where it began. Four of us were participants in that demo four months ago, and at least four were in the audience that night, seeing the paratheatrical ritual work for the first time.

Sherpa thinks he's caught enough good video footage of the performances to create some sort of video document about Orphans. Expect it sometime this summer.

Today I'm home sick. Ick, ick, ick. Tomorrow morning I find out whether I can handle an algebra midterm while on decongestants. Ick, ick, ick. Aside from that, I have my permission to just take care of myself between now and Sunday. This is a good reminder: I've been doing this work for four months. I crossed the bloody Abyss, for God's sake. I need downtime.

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While I'm downtiming, here are some quotes I've been meaning to post whenever the proper context arose, which I've now decided to post without any particular context because they don't really need one:

"What is absolutely amazing is that traditional academic psychology and psychiatry has not admitted any evidence from the study of nonordinary states, whether this evidence is coming from history, comparative religion or anthropology. Virtually all of the world's cultures, other than our Western industrial civilization, have held these states in very high esteem and spent a lot of time trying to develop some powerful techniques for getting into them. Our society, on the other hand, has not only pathologized them but outlawed the tools and the context. They have, in effect, discounted the entire spiritual history of humanity."

- Stanislav Grof

 

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is mearly energy condensed through a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, life is only a dream and we are the imaginations of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

- Bill Hicks

 

"Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald