A couple of weeks ago I realized I’m lucky that I’m not living in my car due to the state of this economy. No joke. I often marvel how a bout with cancer eleven years ago led me to a profession I love, and which provides me with some measure of security today.

After my 50+ work week, I often make time to write. Sometimes I do dare dream what my art and craft might be like, if I had more time to devote to them. However my situation is simple. I need to support myself. I live with two dogs, and share some marvelous friends and family. I am surrounded with more love than I can always bear.

Yet I’ve been investing in myself as an artist for over thirty years, and have received no dividends. I haven’t received a cost-of-living increase from my full-time employer due to the California budget crisis for years. However a couple of weeks ago, a two-hour union contract negotiation meeting finally put my economic situation in perspective.

As I began to look around me, I realized that with the high cost of gasoline and groceries among other things, I actually have less spending power now than I did three years ago. And things only look like they’re going to get worse. Yes, I waited a year to purchase a new pair of glasses, but had to buy them on time; as with everything else, I am still hopeful for a happy ending.

So it was an agonizing decision, but we put our home up for a standard sale last week. We are not underwater, but have lost a lot of dollar equity in the last five years. I am holding my breath at the hope of financial freedom that may come as early as mid-summer. However ironically, my need to not be at the mercy of a cruel economy makes me dependent upon home buyers, who haven’t yet called our agent, as they said they would.

We’ve already made an offer on a short-sale, and we’ll find out Friday, if they’re taking our offer to the bank. I’ve got to do my taxes on Saturday to find out, if I’ll get enough back to pay my property taxes. I know that I’m dancing as fast as I can, but I sense that the sharks are waiting for us to drop our selling price, which could affect the extent of my freedom. I prefer to defy them, but must be sensible.

I can’t read the news for weeping; oh Japan. If I write the truth, does it mean that I’m a bitch? What do I have to complain about? On Sunday I finally have time to take another pass on WATER CLOSET. Then I get to visit my mom, who has been shopping for winter clothes for my New York “debut”.

Yet I have still have choices. And that is my point. Don’t be a victim. Don’t wait for somebody to bail you out. While you’ve still got choices, make them. Buy extra water and food stuff, and an emergency kit for your car; whatever it takes. If you’re like me, once I’m over the paralysis, taking action helps me deal with the fear.

A year ago I sat on my glasses at a reading of the first 10 pages of WATER CLOSET, my two-act drama. For the rest of 2010 I drove in fear due to what I have since learned are stigmatisms brought on by my football-shaped eyeballs. See, I really am a Bruin through and through.

However I like my glasses less because their frames are the same name brand as my favorite perfume, and more because not only can I finally see, but I also feel more rested after a nights sleep; strange how that works. Behind me is a bookshelf, what we librarians call a “stack”, holding rows of printed words of the mostly male playwrights whose words I don’t read anymore.

I cite this image because I shot it in February sometime shortly after the glasses and hair, but during the middle of my faculty librarian contract negotiations; Accreditation visit preparations; the usual turmoil associated to a weakened economy and whether or not I could take a trip to LA: the gasoline versus groceries question; sometime before the real tragedy that the people of Japan are suffering through even as I write this; sometime in the little short month of February, I rewrote WATER CLOSET.

This rewrite is not my first. Not my second. Not my third. But the third based upon notes of an intelligent, intuitive, and highly-trained director, who also happens to want to develop female American playwrights writing about the American experience.

I did receive more notes and have a lot of work to do, but I would also like to announce that on 11/11/11 from 7:30-9pm WATER CLOSET will be read in New York as part of the Dramatists Guild of America Friday Night Footlights series. Cyndy Marion, Producing Artistic Director of the White Horse Theater Company, is directing.

After all these years I am finally going to New York City. And even though you may see me taking the harbor cruise and crying at the sight of the Statue of Liberty and the rising Freedom Tower at ground zero, I am not really going as a tourist, but as a playwright; a female American playwright who is damn proud of us all. Go LA FPI!

Isn’t it fun to live vicariously through a fictional character?  But isn’t it more bizarre to think of the human capacity to create and create experiences?

Living vicariously through a fictional character is what story telling is about.  Enlivening the imagination and motivating the spirit to go out-of-bounds with the external reality of our physical plane.  I’m curious about the production and fascination of movies that imbues human characters by animation, and allowing for ultra-human capabilities.  My first memory of super hero movies the featured computer animation was “The Mask”. 

 This image exaggerates the love felt by the hero shown as an oversized heart beating out of his shirt.

A lot of people were thrilled by “Avatar” too.  I was personally surprised that it won the Best Picture in 2010.  The movie seemed to be a collage of story lines from “Star Wars”, “Thunderdome”, “Water World”, plus other storylines and it was packaged with computer enhanced technology. 

Movie has always been a “bigger than life” experience in the beginning because it was literally projecting a story on a big screen.  But with the heavy competition for seducing a more sophisticated and pocket-rich audience the movies has had to compete with virtual reality entertainment:  from games to social networks (like chat lines) then movie makers have had to produce story telling to an ultra-reality edge.  But once the after the credits have rolled by and the people have mozy’ed down the aisle into their parked cars and have made their way literally and figuratively into their enclosed compartments – reality sets in.

 We are entrenched in our own dramas.  And working through our moments is often harder than watching the hero overcome their own trials and go through their transformation.  Our heroes are the archetypes that live in us, and we seek out to identify with characters that make us feel alive.

  “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.  

 “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself”

 – Joseph Campbell

Go to this link for a lot more from this great thinker.  

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/joseph_campbell.html#ixzz1F203bA5v

 Without going to the movies think of these special moments, and wonder… how amazing, how bizarre, and how delicate life is:

And the secret is if we can pull ourselves out of our internal spiral is to be curious.  Just be curious like a child and relive those moments of wonder.  Going back to story, I try to be conscious of the stuff between the beginning and the ending:  What made my hero go on this quest and put himself/herself in jeopardy in search of that thing.

 Every ending of a journey is the beginning of another.  We are our own heroes each day we awaken and create a new day of wonder and wander.  Go out there and get lost for a bit and see where you end up.  It’s not that scary of a world despite what the news say. 

Live to tell the story.

– Analyn Revilla

“Story is a collection of meanings. Nothing is random” – Al Watt.

The following day after my writing workshop with Al, I sat at an outdoor cafe across from an auto-body shop. Emblazoned in bold yellow letters I read: “We meet people by accident.”

If I learned anything from my philosophy class then by inductive reasoning then accidents are not random. Life is not random; it is a colleetion of meanings. What is the meaning of life? One answer I’ve come up with is that story telling is a method of healing. Sharing stories is more than making connections with others about our similarities, but the process of telling story and absorbing the art form (as a play, book, dance, painting, music, graffitti) is also the opportunity to resonate the truths within us.

There were random events in my 3-day weekend that I’ve decided to string together in a meaningful way beginning with Friday night when I gathered things that have become a clutter in my life. I got a box and stuffed it full of things I didn’t have much use for anymore: CDs, clothes, wine glasses, a vase – things that use to carry meaning for me, but their memories have faded, and/or the meaning was too painful to keep around – so I’m letting them go.

I was reminded of when my siblings and I had tried to “clean out” my parents’ apartment after my father passed away. The apartment, in my eyes, was littered with things that have collected dust, and/or were forgotten in a corner behind something else. When this thing was brought out into the light, “Hey what about this? Can we get rid of it?” I had cried out to my mother, she would howl, “NO!!! That’s…” and I’d forgotten what meaning or symbolism she had attached to this suddenly-precious material object. That thing held meaning for her. The whole apartment was a collection of chapters of a novel and its sequels.

The next day, Saturday, in my writing workshop I’m confronted with stories belabored by hopeful writers telling of wounds and intrigues. Al’s method of teaching is to awaken the unconscious of its collection of random memories and bringing them forward to the conscious mind and framing them around a structure. I left class with the mantra: “Story is a collection of meanings. Nothing is random”.

Sunday morning, I brought my collection of “unwanted meanings” to the thrift store. I browsed through the titles of books at the back and by accident found a book by Caroline Myss called “Why People Don’t Heal And How They Can Heal”. (I’m a quarter of the way through the book now.) In my process of shedding a layer of dead things I was healing with letting go. Whenever I’m going through a catharsis like this I also try to be consicous of how it is reflected in my art. If I’m humble enough I can see reflections of where ART illuminates LIFE. (I’ve been rewriting the scene of a dying man who has accepted his death, but an aspect of his reality is his family is not yet ready to let him go.) Thus as it is with healing, we’re probably not yet ready to let go of our illnesses.

In her practice of energy medicine Caroline Myss states that “your biography becomes your biology” meaning that our beliefs manifests in our cells and can alter our DNA accordingly.

“As terrifying as disease is, it is also an invitation to enter into the nature of mystery. Our lives are made up of a scries of mysteries that we are meant to explore but that are meant to remain unsolved. We are meant to live with the questions we have about our lives, even use them as companions, and allow them to lead us into the deepest recesses of our nature, wherein we discover the Sacred. I hope that this book will help you find new ways of framing the meaning of illness and other life challenges and help you move deeper into your mysteries and further along your personal path toward spiritual mastery.” – Caroline Myss, “Why People Don’t Heal And How They Can”. I can see how there are many aspiring writers who want to share their stories because the process of getting it down is therapy. But it’s not whole until it has come alive in its true form: a published novel, a staged play, or recorded music. Ah… I think I should switch to drawing or painting, because it might be easier for me to express the story in an image with lines and light, then framing the picture and putting it up. This writing thing (aka healing) is damn hard. Why would anyone want to do it? That would mean change, which leads to growth, which is then expansion – and POP! goes the balloon; or it can fly away, way up in the sky – free like a bird.

– Analyn Revilla