There are many poems about love, and this one by Kahlil Gibran is among my favorites.

On Love by Kahlil Gibran

Then said Almitra, Speak to us of Love.
     And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:
     When love beckons to you, follow him,
     Though his ways are hard and steep.
     And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
     Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
     And when he speaks to you believe in him,
     Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
     For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
     Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
     So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
     Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself
     He threshes you to make your naked.
     He sifts you to free you from your husks.
     He grinds you to whiteness.
     He kneads you until you are pliant;
     And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.
     All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.
     But if in your heart you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
     Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
     Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
     Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
     Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
     For love is sufficient unto love.
     When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
     And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
     Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
     But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
     To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
     To know the pain of too much tenderness.
     To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
     And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
     To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
     To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
     To return home at eventide with gratitude;
     And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

After writing about hope I was meditating upon faith, hope and love.  Again, among my favorites… with 4 to 7 often quoted at wedding ceremonies.

1 Corinthians 13

1If I speak in the tongues a of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

When I think of my impulse to write, the underlying combustion of the engine (my heart) is love.  Love is the catalytic fire that transforms my being from sleep to wakefulness.  Sometimes, I just want to be closed and sleep.  But even in sleep, love breathes in and out.  Life is love.  I believe that I am still breathing because of love.

It is beyond this romantic notion of sweet words, roses and chocolates, or anything we traditionally associate with Valentine’s Day.  Those things are symbolic of the impulse of love.  What if I couldn’t afford any of these things, and so I am left with words.  I could say I love you.  But if I couldn’t talk, then I could write I love you.  But if I was illiterate then I could just offer my love with my presence.

Again, I lean upon some teachings from Thich Nhat Hahn.  He speaks of love as being present for someone. 

“The true declaration of love is ‘Dear one, I am here for you,’ because the most precious gift you can give to your loved one is your true presence, with body and mind united in solidity and freedom.”

It can be practiced as a mantra, “Dear one, I am here for you,” while thinking of the other person.  A mantra can be practiced not only in speech but in your mind and your body.  

I pause now.  It’s visceral to recognize that just by being in love and expressing the mantra wholeheartedly in mind and body is enough.  I am love.  You are love.  Again, the love I speak of here is not limited to the idyllic romantic love.  I am talking of love that binds two hearts beyond the real and surreal; seen and unseen; waking and dreaming. 

Here are the four mantras shared by Thich Nhat Hanh to cultivate true love.

Dear one, I am here for you.

Dear one, I know that you are here, alive, and that makes me very happy.

Dear one, I know that you are suffering.  That’s why I am here for you.

Dear one, I am suffering.  I need your help.

Now, after pondering upon those mantras, I turn to another definition of love from the book “The Road Less Travelled” by M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist. In the second part of the book, he contrasts his views of the nature of love against common notions of romantic love, falling in love and dependency.  He asserts that the nature of true love is an action, consciously undertaken to “extend one’s ego boundaries by including others or humanity” – a spiritual nurturing that can extend to oneself and to others.

Between Kahlil Gibran, Thich Nhat Hanh and M. Scott Peck, there is this common thread of giving of oneself to the other – a surrender that is beautiful like the symbolism and imagery of the Yin Yang.  The yin surrenders without effort to the yang as the yang surrenders effortlessly to yin. So the sun rises and sets so we can observe the moon wax and wane for 29.5 days, then again the wheel rotates.  What causes the motions and rotations of everything in the universe?

As a teacher of meditation, there is this surrender of the ego to enter into the realm of the pure awareness.  Perhaps it is in the moments when the consciousness transcends the thinking mind and feeling body that we enter the bliss.  This bliss could be love, where every boundaries are suspended and we see the one in the whole, and the whole in the one.

Did you know that you can buy Hope in a bottle?  Go ahead, just Google it. 

My search came up with a whole lot of unexpected results, including beauty products literally labeled “Renewed Hope in a Jar”.

Starbuck’s website has a page for “hopeinabottle”.  I clicked on the link and the page is no longer available (https://www.starbucks.ph/responsibility/ngos/hope-in-a-bottle.  The idea of the “Hope in a bottle” was to provide public schools in the Philippines from the sales of purified water.  Another search on Facebook for “hopeinabottle” defaulted to a page in New Zealand selling beauty products (https://www.facebook.com/HopeinaBottle.co.nz/) – different from the “Renewed Hope in a Jar”.

So I’ve been pondering about hope, a lot lately, mostly prompted by the theme “Hoping for…”, the theme of LAFPI’s micro-reads this past Sunday.  It was really fun.  After we left the Zoom meeting room, I texted with a friend and he was grateful for hooking him up with the micro-reads.  We were thinking of analogies for the micro-reads.  He said, “kinda like coffee shop open mikes… a chance for artists to be vulnerable and lay bare their thoughts, ideas and emotions for an audience in an intimate setting.”  I like it.  I said, “It’s really like a chemistry lab.”  (There’s a framework we work with, and we’re testing a hypotheses as writers, but the outcome is eventually in the hands of the directors and actors.  It could explode into magnificent fireworks, or just fizzle out… no big deal.  The writer can re-evaluate and re-do the tests, and same with the actors and directors.  What worked? What didn’t work?)

So back to hope.  I meander.  

Meandering is good, especially with a good companion, someone who is adventurous, curious, able and willing (maybe not always able, but willing to try) to explore.  On brighter days, “Hope” is a great companion.  If you’re a hiker or any particular activity that requires some planning, a leap of faith and gumption, you’ve experienced that “hope”… like “I hope there’s a good view of the valley” on the other side of the ridge.  Or on desperate moments like,“I hope there’s water beyond that ridge”, when you’re low on supply in your backpack and your legs.  If you were alone, “Hope” is that companion that keeps you moving towards the ridge and to the other side.

Music is abundant of references to hope.  I am aging myself when I refer to Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life”.  She sings “You give me hope to carry on.”  And the Bible, Torah, Bhagavad Gita is rich with references to hope.

In the “Oxford Handbook of Hope”, there’s a chapter on “Hope and Meaning of Life:  Points of Contact Between Hope Theory and Existentialism”.  Freidrich Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”  This quote was often used by Victor Frankl, an existentialist psychiatrist, who was a Holocaust survivor.  “The chapter makes both an empirical and a theoretical case that, linked by an emphasis on goals, hope and meaning in life are closely connected.” (Credit: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199399314.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199399314)

The short piece I submitted for the micro-reads was “H”, and it was a less than cheery scenario of a woman driving around alone with her thoughts and feelings of despair.  Her only tangible companionship was UB-40’s song “Red, Red Wine”, and a $20 bill.  She has a spark of hope to buy herself some flowers and a bottle of red wine to keep her company, in simpatico, as she goes through the throes of a breakup.

I do hope that we never run out of stock!

But I am leaving you with hope with a quote from Thích Nhất Hạnh:

“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear.  If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”

I must also add that he was also quoted to say,

“When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future…Hope becomes a kind of obstacle.” – Thich Nhat Hanh.

Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

In his book “ Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life“, he wrote

“Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment.” 

Not to meander into Buddhist philosophy as I am not fluent in it, what I do recognize is the “The Middle Way”, a complimentary balance of keeping company with hope for a better tomorrow, but not to lose focus on the moment… to keep up the pace of moving one foot in front of the other to get to the other side.

by Kitty Felde

I haven’t been inside a theatre for two years. And I’m not sure I’ll ever feel comfortable enough to return. Does this mean the death of live theatre? Does it mean the end of playwriting? At least for me.

It’s a question I’ve had to ask myself. Why spend my life writing something that no one will see?

Oh, sure. There are alternatives to a black box theatre experience. I myself have written a play that should be performed in a National Park. And I’ve written audio dramas for the Fina Mendoza Mysteries podcast series – plays that are performed inside your head. Others have created plays for Zoom and Instagram and YouTube.

Culture Clash turned its epic drama Chavez Ravine into a video project. Antaeus Theatre Company asked its playwrights to write audio plays about Los Angeles neighborhoods. They were turned into a podcast called The Zip Code Plays. Ellen Struve, a most creative playwright in Nebraska, wrote and produced what she calls Picture Window Puppet Theatre, a shadow play performed from her living room window for all of her Omaha neighbors.

The pandemic has indeed forced us to be creative. But it’s also challenged us to think about theatre itself. What’s the point? How important is it for us to gather together to share an experience? Is theatre just an elitist exercise?

I wanted to be an actor from my earliest days of watching television as a child. I spent most of high school backstage, either performing or running the sound board. I changed majors from Social Ecology to Theatre after one week of college, braving the censure of my mother who always wanted me to be a lawyer. (She surprised me by telling me to go for it!)

I spent my 20’s living on $40 a week plus board at a melodrama company near Pismo Beach, driving to commercial auditions where occasionally I’d get hired to extoll the virtues of peanut butter or play the rear end of a horse, performing plays and improv in tiny theatres where the performers usually outnumbered the patrons. I co-founded a theatre, Theatre of NOTE, where I served as Managing Director for more than half a decade. I rejoiced when I earned my Equity card and performed at South Coast Rep. I wrote dozens of plays, some published and performed around the world. One was even performed in the nude.

But that feels like another lifetime. I was another person.

A few years ago, Stanford political science professor Frank Fukuyama wrote that we had come to the end of history. Have we come to the end of theatre?

Of course, Fukuyama was wrong. A lot of history has happened since 1995. And since theatre has been around since human beings started telling stories around the fire, it’s unlikely the end of theatre.

But for me, for now, that shared experience of sitting together for an evening of theatre is over. And so is writing for that mythical place that filled so much of my life.

I’ll still write stories. Books and podcast dramas and who knows what next. But at least for now, and for the foreseeable future, my life in the theatre has come to an end.

Farewell, theatre.

There was a time when we ignored the cries, silenced the pain, and continued. 

There was a time when the collective would gather together and mourn before they could continue. 

There was a time when stillness answered stale questions and healed old wounds.

There was a time when birthing a child was an honor held in high favor by the entire community. 

There was a time when mothers could lay their heads upon a pillow without fear. Instead…

They now pray for the spirits of their children as they lie in the dark fighting for the light. 

There was a time when we didn’t learn to live with grief – a time when grief wasn’t a disorder but a vessel. 

There was a time when we didn’t speak from grief. A time when we didn’t practice grief.

There was a time when grief wasn’t a gateway to joy.

There was a time when the house didn’t hold our sorrows. Instead… it overflowed with love, laughter, and dreams. 

There was a time when we remembered we could fly. 

As we enter this new season may we individually and collectively make room to heal our bodies, our spirits, our minds for the future depends on a healthy society that moves not in fear but with hope.

By Cynthia Wands

In the past few months, I’ve found a disconnect with revisiting books I loved, movies I remembered, television shows that I thought I liked. The view seems to have changed. Whether it’s this isolation, or my own aging process, or the political and psychological climate, I’m no longer as satisfied with what I thought I liked.

It’s also true that I’m not seeing the plays, operas, dance concerts in live performances that I used to see: my window to live events has closed for the time being.

But some of the artists that I’ve enjoyed, have sparked my imagination to consider them in a new light. One of them is a painter, Andrea Kowch, who came to prominence when she was quite young; she was 17 years old (in 2003) when she started winning awards and gallery shows for her artwork.

I’ve loved her portraits of women, strangely posed, in a natural and disturbing landscapes. They seem to resonate differently with me today. Here’s a bit from her biography:

“We all share a common thread, and as active participants in an ever-changing modern world, the purpose of my work is to remind viewers of these places that we sometimes perceive no longer exist, and to recognize and honor them as a part of our history that is worth preserving.”

One of my favorites of her paintings is this one, titled “Pecking Order”:

Her biography contains a description of her artwork, that sounds very much like magic realism in theatre:

“Inspired by memories, inner emotions, history, and my fascination with nature and the human psyche, the stories behind my paintings stem from life’s emotions and experiences, resulting in narrative, allegorical imagery that illustrates the parallels between human experience and the mysteries of the natural world.”

When I read this, I thought, that’s a brilliant synopsis. It could stand in for a play, or an opera, or a dance performance. And that made me feel somewhat connected to someone’s path in their artwork. Nowadays, that’s a rare treasure.

Here’s a link to her gallery that shows more of her artwork:

So here’s to the magic of artwork. Changing visions. Shifting views.

by Cynthia Wands

This quote jumped out at me this morning:

“True healing is an unglamorous process of living into the long lengths of pain. Forging forward in the darkness. Holding the tension between hoping to get well and the acceptance of what is happening. Tendering a devotion to the task of recovery, while being willing to live with the permanence of a wound; befriending it with an earnest tenacity to meet it where it lives without pushing our agenda upon it. But here’s the paradox: you must accept what is happening while also keeping the heart pulsing towards your becoming, however slow and whispering it may be.”

~ Toko-pa Turner 

I’ve been following the writings of Toko-pa Turner for a while, and I’ve always loved her essays on solitude, healing, and belonging. I’ve reread one of her most recent books a few times, and come away with new insights every time.

Healing from these past two years of isolation and and pandemic fatigue seems to be a lost path for me – I’ll have to continue this dance of protection and longing for the foreseeable future. (Insert screams of frustration here.)

This solitude is a quiet kind of punishment after a while – writing doesn’t come any easier in isolation. I find myself diverted with different kinds of projects to keep my curiosity alive. Baking cakes, fussing over the garden, pruning roses, crafting with silver-plate tea pots. All kinds of diversions to feel the creative pulse.

Today I’m going to listen to the rain (RAIN! REAL RAIN!), and light a fire in the fireplace, and try to feel the hope and healing for this next year. For all the female playwrights listening to the rain right now in Los Angeles, here’s to the recognition of all of our hopes and all of our healing for this next year.

And as an aside…

Ted already claimed the best spot by the fireplace, so I’ll have to settle in next to him.

by Cynthia Wands

December 21, 2021, the shortest day of the year. I’m glad today is here, and will be very glad to kick 2021 out of here, another year of the pandemic. What a difficult year. It’s been exasperating, infuriating, melancholy, sad, briefly joyful, buoyant, hopeful, frustrating, with a sprinkling of hopelessness thrown in.

So here’s a book, HOPE IN THE DARK, that Rebecca Solnit wrote, a few years ago:

I first found a reference to this book by an article written by Maria Popov, and I’m including it here because the entire article is really wonderful:

Solnit herself has written memorably about how we find ourselves by getting lost, and finding hope seems to necessitate a similar surrender to uncertainty. Here is a passage of hers that I find really wonderfully apt for playwrights right now:

“Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.”

But to get back to hope. Hope for what we’re looking for right now. In the book “HOPE IN THE DARK”, here is an idea of hope that I especially loved.

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”

A wonderful idea to consider on this shortest day of the year.

The writings of Rebecca Solnit can also be found at her website:

Essays

I have been agonizing over writing for the past week. What should I say? What am I thinking about? How will it end? And I was no further along. I realize I need to get out more and talk about writing.

A few weeks ago, while doing a check-in with some friends I was newly inspired. Not necessarily by what to write, it was more of the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough. So I quickly did a search and found several classes that were starting within the next couple of days. I signed up for a 4-week class that was just to generate work, get me writing. I also signed up for several free writing prompt workshops, again, just to generate material. It was the best month of writing. I felt like I was getting further and actually accomplishing something. Then I took a day to review what I had been doing. I now had several different plays started.

But that was a month ago. Life got in the way. My daily writing of at least 10 minutes had gone by the wayside as my days were consumed with “my real job”. How do I get back to that place of creativity? You can’t have that many plays going at one time and expect them to be good. But at this point, I just wanted to finish something, anything. It wasn’t until after meeting up with a friend for drinks that I have some focus or even clarity. Instead of overthinking the work, just keep writing. It may be the worst thing ever, but you finished something and you may have even learned something. The next one and the one after that will get better.

You have to have the nerve. You need to muster up the courage or resolve to do something. Easier said than done. Confidence? Courage? To just write? I need to not overthink it. Just write. Could it be that simple?

I don’t know. I’ll let you know next time. But I do hope you are working on something!

Just keep writing!

Jennifer