Gnaw off your foot

So here's the thing about organic growth. It's organic.

Low tides are followed by high ones. High tides are followed by low.

Yesterday was a gnaw-off-your-foot day. When every instinct says, "Be bad! Make it worse!" and the instincts are correct. You have to know how bad it is. How bad you are. Letting go of Looking Good is passage through the Gate.

There is no treat or reward.

I felt like a shark biting its own tail yesterday. Trying to pry its jaws off just made it bite harder. Until finally I snapped, "Bite! I'll bite back!" A fierce swift blood-struggle ensued until I could go, "Oh, THAT's what it's about." It's about following the dark to its source. Finding what's under that, and what's under THAT, until you find what's under everything.

It's about, the low tide's got to be low. The dark has got to be dark. This is where art helps. Or any truthteller -- Chekhov, Van Gogh, Beethoven, Rilke, Radmila, Lyon, Kipley, anyone who has become the Search.

Mary Zimmerman had a scene in Metamorphoses where a mortal has been cursed with unquenchable hunger. I'm hungry! he roars, thrashing in a pool of water. He eats all the food. He eats all his neighbor's food. His grandmother brings him more food. Finally, he eats his grandmother. In the last moment, he sits on a wood bench, a fork & knife materializing in his hand, a red-checked napkin and white china plate appearing just in time for his bare shin to land on the plate. I'm still hungry! he roars, stabbing with his fork and knife at his own leg. Blackout.

Only the truth can heal. Only the truth can cure.

-- Chekhov

I once watched Roberta Carerri of the Odin, doing her first improvisation as a character entering a room. It took her full concentration, used all her skill, required her to throw away all her skill, and in that moment of loss, abandon to not-knowing. It was a master, walking into clumsiness and shame, off the cliff. Become a beginner. There is no other road. It never gets easier.

Today, everything's the same except I feel cheerful. Tide's rising.

It's all just tides. The highs are not better than the lows.

The contour of tides is the shape of truth. Like the tide-chart that hangs on my mother's wall. The highest tides and lowest ones come back to back.

"The ding-ding-ding three-cherries of directing," says Bart Sher, "Is when you never see it coming. Yet it's been evolving there in front of you the whole time."