To arrive where we started...

Sometimes, when we’re away on trips like this, I start to panic. We’re past halfway now. Am I learning enough? Will I produce enough to justify the expense, the time away from family and work? Am I doing justice to this craft and this vocation that I love?

Funny, but for me this obsession with “doing” seems to be the very thing that gets in my way – here (in Feldenkrais, in scene work, in voice work, in improv), but at home too.

I want a dramatic result. I want big, extreme swings to prove to myself and everyone else that something is happening inside this person here, who sometimes feels like she’s just banging her head against a wall. I want to make something that I can stand back and see and say, “There – now that is progress.”

But this morning, I remembered good old Mr. T.S. Eliot. I remembered these words that reduce me to a puddle every time I read them. I have this final part from the Four Quartets tacked up on a bulletin board by my desk at work. I haven’t read it since the end of July. But I think I’m going to put it up here in Chicago, so I don’t forget it for the rest of this trip. And I’m going to just keep exploring.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T.S.Eliot
From Little Gidding V