It’s a busy, busy, busy time. Fall has come and much bounty is there to be harvested. Of course, with this bounty comes much work and less time. I become responsible for so many decisions about how to use and store all this bounty and all the work that comes with those choices. I come face to face that ever challenging dance between discerning wether the work is true and good while committing to the act of trusting my work in every moment.
I’m living in the harvest while I can the100 of lbs of apples I’ve been processing in the late nights after rehearsal. I’m living in the harvest on stage with Wilde Tales and in Maleficia’s rehearsal room. It’s good. It’s full. Overwhelming. Unclear. It’s WORK.
I’m in love with the word “work” these days. I’m still figuring out why and where my fascination with the word is coming from, but there will be more on this later…
For now, another full and fantastic bit of inspiration from Mr. Wilde as we work through this full and fantastically mysterious harvest season.
From The Picture of Dorian Gray:
“Dorian Gray stepped up on the dais, with the air of a young Greek martyr, and made a little moue of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he had rather taken a fancy. He was so unlike Basil. They made a delightful contrast. And he had such a beautiful voice. After a few moments he said to him, ‘Have you really a bad influence, Lord Henry? As bad as Basil says?’
‘There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral- immoral from the scientific point of view.’
‘Why?’
‘Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the basis of religion- there are the two things that govern us. And yet-‘
‘Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good boy,’ said the painter (Basil), deep in his work, and conscious only that a look had come into the lad’s face that he had never seen there before.
‘And yet,’ continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his Eaton days, ‘I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought. reality to every dream- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are prohibited for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame-‘
’Stop!’ faltered Dorian Gray, ’stop! You bewilder me. I don’t know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don’t speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think.’
For nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted lips, and eyes strangely bright. He was dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. The few words that Basil’s friends had said to him- words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with willful paradox in them- had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses.
Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivd, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their won as sweet as that of the viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
Mere words! Come check more Wilde out at www.shakingthetree.com
Wilde Tales though November 9th
Fridays and Saturdays 7:30 p.m.
Saturdays 2:00 p.m.
Sundays 5:00 p.m.
