I love them, here's why I do

The view from the booth. This past week's youth conference was the largest conference of the summer - over 1300 youth.

I was able to put aside my habitual theatrical snobbery on Thursday night and have a wonderful time at the talent show. I was on run crew - meaning I leaped onstage between each act and moved microphones, and for the rest of the time, sat on the floor in the front. The AV/Aud Olympics had gone particularly well (my jump/roll combination to get up on the stage was epic), the night was almost over, and I could suddenly feel the room. My senses lit up; an off-key violin, muddy purple, a breeze, the electrifying tingle of stage fright shooting through my system, and I looked around and thought that there were many "good" shows I've seen in New York without nearly as much life in them as this slightly mediocre rendering of a pop song.

Lots of things are coming together, and absorbing into my body thanks to my continually growing connection with my senses. (Yes, my senses. That might sound crazy, but the senses are actually everything you know. Think about it.) When I was younger, I was super-intellectually based, to the point of denial of the body and the senses. Since being at PHTS, and largely because of the embracing of my synaesthesia, I've started to open up parts of me that haven't been used. (Things like how much I love color, which I completely denied for the six and a half years I wore all black.) I'm slowing down, experiencing more, working to stop rejecting things because I stupidly feel like I'm "above them", because there's something to be learned in everything. People tend to split the world into two kinds of people: people who feel, and people who think. But what I've noticed lately is that the most brilliant people are know both feel and think, and they do it rigorously. It is collaboration within the self. I have some catching up to do, feeling-wise, but I think my sensitivity to sense is starting to get me there.

To those of you at PHTS who are reading this blog: if I ever start to forget why I'm doing what I do next year, please come up to me and smack me. Part of my reason for coming here this summer was to try to figure out the why of what I do, and it is finally starting to sink into my senses. It is not for my glory, but to serve the world, and that is to the glory of God. I do crazy things in theatre school; I roll on the floor, I repeat "huh-hum-mah", I score texts, I analyze scripts, I craft actions, I speak in accents, I train using traditional Japanese theatrical forms, I collage texts together, I make dances based on Cheetoes, I write symphonies based on screams, I haul a suitcase to school, I go to class in pajamas and bare feet as a uniform, I climb on windowsills, I arrange chairs in a room because in the mountains of North Carolina there are 1300 youth in an auditorium who are full of life. And in New York there are millions of people all jammed together trying valiantly to get by. And in the Middle East there are people younger than I am who have constantly see and experience things that are too horrible for me to even begin to understand. And I do this because I am growing to truly love all of them.