tracking mastery, Jeff Buckley

The first year of theatre, I was soaking & changing beyond recognition -- but it wasn't until a year later, when I began teaching, that anyone could see the change.

Right now at work is like that. Working on a booted team, I am absorbing task and product like they are the hidden word of god. My dreams are changing. My project is changing. My relationships. My perspective.

Alan Watts, one of the first western writers of Zen, says in his autobiography, "I have written 20 books, and they all lead to the same place. Each one starts from a different point on the hub, follows a different spoke to the center."

The easiest way for me to show what I'm learning would be to give examples from my work projects, which I can't do.

What can I tell you.

I work seven days a week. Sometimes I make myself stay away on Saturdays, but when I do, I pace for hours, thinking about work.

I track the work itself. But mostly I focus on the first derivative of the work -- on how the mastery of this compares to & informs the mastery of theatre directing & theCore/bootcamps. Any shift or illumination in one system ripples & radiates through two others. It is these systemic insights that are keeping me riveted.

I love talking to my brother; his masteries are of fishing, boats, wilderness, oceans, and children.

I am reading Jeff Buckley's biography. Jeff's story is like a Greek tragedy or a commedia -- I can scroll backward and forward, from laughing blond child with eidetic music memory, to the man vanishing in the undertow of the Mississippi river. Backward -- silver spandex pants at his first high-school gig. Forward -- renting a Memphis house to write in. Backward -- taking breaks from working at the cafe to get up & perform, crowds spilling into the street. Forward -- Half hour Kanga Roo jams at the end of each concert.

Backwards. Forwards.

My death awaits me as surely as my birth. Between, I balance on this green moment.

Backwards: Working in Carbonated Games, just after she had moved into that new office. Listening to country music that night she was lonely, when Jason, Joshua, Rich, & Brett were out of town.

When Jeff Buckley sings he transfigures, an artist lost in the labyrinth of the song, finding his way inward & upward to the holy end. Lost, lost, lost, true, true, true.

It looks like what I am doing is creating software, but actually I am following a Song as alluring and mysterious as Jeff Buckley's.

It is 1:00am. I am stopping now. I will write two project status reports, a group status, a monthly update, and a project doc before I go home. Today has already had 9 hours of meetings and writing three other docs. Tomorrow begins in 6 hours.

Whatever feels like prayer, I like to do constantly.

On my left hang the Medicine Buddha thangka painting; an iron tibetan gong engraved with conches; a photo of a prayer room with Jerusalem buildings painted on its wooden walls, its crossbeams overhead latticed with wisteria, open to the sky; and a picture of my last bootcamp's v1 painting that looks like primordial interstellar fire.