Happy Family

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

January 4, 2024

 

Live righteously and love everyone,

you will build up around you an aura of light and love

 

—tag on a Yogi Tea bag

*

 

Because you are alive, everything is possible.

Waking up this morning, I smile.

Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.

I vow to live fully in each moment,

and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.

 

—from “Buddha True Meaning of Life by Thich Nhat Hanh,” on YouTube

*

 

Well, it’s a new year. I wish you all an abundance of peace and love and joy. I’m enjoying a quiet morning—quiet outside and quiet within. Looking out the window at the clear blue sky. Drinking coffee. Doing nothing. It’s perfect.

 

For this coming year, I’m thinking of every day as a Day of Celebration. Today (1/1/24), of course, I’ll celebrate New Year’s Day. On Thursday (1/4/24), I’ll celebrate friendship with my weekly dialogue group. On the sixth is Epiphany—when the Wise Men arrived with gifts for the divine child. (Every baby is an incarnation of the Divine!) It’s also Twelfth Night. Shakespeare’s company performed his play Twelfth Night for Queen Elizabeth in 1602. That’s something to celebrate! This coming Saturday, the sixth, we will be showing Bushra’s film A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Prison at the First Unitarian Church. After a Q & A with some of the actors, we will celebrate together all the people who contributed to the success of the film, and of our prison theater programs. Nancy and I will be celebrating Valentine’s Day in Guanajuato. (In Mexico, they have a fiesta almost every day of the year!) May 3rd is Buster Cornelius Day. (Listen to “Buster Cornelius” by The Colorblind James Experience on YouTube.) On May 31st, I’ll celebrate Walt Whitman’s 205th birthday by performing “Song of Myself”—as I often do. These are just a few of the many celebrations ahead.

 

When I’m in need of wisdom and inspiration, I often turn to the great Russian clown-philosopher, Slava Polunin. He says:

 

“I think that theatre was created to open doors and passages in the blind walls of everyday reality—doors that lead into other worlds….

 

The First Door

 

Celebration

 

Look at the crowds of people at a celebration—their faces are beaming with almost giddy smiles of happiness. I love a festive theatre, a theatre of spectacle. I love it when even the most serious matters are discussed—perfectly naturally and inadvertently, as it were—under the cover of some common festive prank. I don’t want to live in the workaday world, and especially not when I’m on stage, because it is a depressing world, painted in grey with a smell of stuffy rooms. I love rich and vivid colors, the kind that children use to paint. I love the profusion of aromas, like you find in Hawaii. I love the lushness of sound, even if it’s only the sound of cicadas trilling in the night…

 

This is the teeming, brimming world of celebration. A world that delights and astonishes, crawls under your skin and haunts you for a long time afterwards—until such time when you finally accept the fact that a life of celebration is far more attractive than the day-to-day routine, and that it only takes a tiny effort to learn to transform one’s daily life into a holiday. The world of celebration is filled with creativity. In this world each and every one of us can endlessly recreate and reinvent himself.

 

I don’t want to do anything that doesn’t bring joy to me, to my friends and my audiences. This is how I’ve arranged my life, and this is how I assemble my team. Any time I see someone who is full of joy, whose life is a celebration, I drag him into my show. I’d rather pass over a brilliant expert, if he happens to be of a different spirit.

 

In general, I collect festive people—they radiate a wondrous light! Such people are few and far between, but they do exist, and they are spectacular. No matter what happens to them, they never lose their spirit of celebration. And I try to learn from them. This is why I do everything I can to have such people near me.

 

Festive people are a bit like ambulance paramedics, because whenever they show up, you feel like you’ve been given a shot of mysterious optimism. Maybe we ought to set up a kind of emergency mental health service staffed with these people. In any event, whenever I have to put together a touring company, I always make sure we have some holiday people on board. It is very important for the whole team to be in high spirits. It is essential to have the walls of whatever theatre we happen to be in shaking with our raucous laughter!

 

Celebration of life is an enormous and very important subject….For now I will only say that I love celebrations. And I can spend a great deal of my time and energy making sure we put on a fabulous celebration.

 

AS A MATTER OF FACT, ALL I’VE EVER DONE IN LIFE IS PUT ON CELEBRATIONS—WHETHER IT BE PERFORMANCES, PROJECTS, FESTIVALS, OR JUST PARTIES FOR MY FRIENDS. I REALIZED THAT MY GREATEST PROJECT IS CALLED ‘CELEBRATION OF LIFE’, AND THAT ITS PURPOSE IS TO TRANSFORM THE GREY WORLD OF OUR EVERYDAY HUMAN LIVES INTO A RICH, COLORFUL, ARTISTIC CELEBRATION.”

 

—from The Alchemy of Snowness by Slava Polunin

 

In the year ahead, I want to gather together often with friends—live or online—to celebrate our friendship, and anything else we can think of. When alone, I want to celebrate the miracle of having a precious human life on Planet Earth.

 

—Johnny Stallings

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Kim sent this:

 

Thought of you when I ran across this little blessing I sent to some youth “offenders” in a California prison a friend was working with…after they thanked me for some poems I had sent them:

 

I am with you. 

What my breath made is for 

your breath. And the silence 

between words–that too,  

is for you. For in silence 

I exchange my sleepless nights  

for your day of release. 

For that moment I chant  

every morning on this page.

 

—Kim Stafford

*

 

The Three Wise Men

 

Maybe

Were not

Considered

Wise

Or even

In possession

Of all

Their senses

At first.

 

Men

Who suddenly

Depart from

Friends and family

Lucrative enterprises

Positions

Of power

And 

Plush thrones

For

Long camel rides

Of indeterminate

Distance and duration

Over forbidding

Foreign terrain

In the

Dead of Winter

Drawn by a

Distant star

Are seldom

Considered

Wise.

 

Mad?

Foolish?

Yes.

But wise?

Not likely.

 

Yet

Wisdom is

Distilled

Drop by drop

Slowly 

Over time

Not manufactured

Overnight

And now

Ages hence

We drink

That intoxicating

Liquor

Brewed from

A

Courageous

Plodding

Humble

Pilgrimage

Made

By men

Bearing gifts

In the

Darkness

To where

And

For whom

They

Knew not

Knew only

To leave

All they

Knew

For a long

Night Journey

Toward a 

Beckoning star.

 

—Will Hornyak