Is this real life?

I go back to New York a week from today, and that is very strange. My anxiety about going back is gone, and I'm chomping at the bit to be back again. At the same time it's very strange to think that soon I'll be back in the city. Distance makes me delusional. When I'm away from people and places, my mind warps and twists my memories until a part of me starts to believe they don't really exist. Intellectually, I know they do, but my body has started to forget. I remember details of faces but strain to connect them to a whole. Experiences once vivid dissolve into wisps that threaten to disappear entirely. I first noticed this phenomenon in high school, when, between my trips up, New York would seem like Middle-Earth, not like a place that actually existed and I'd actually visited. Every time I hear from someone from New York, it's a beautiful shock - my senses reawaken, images, sounds and memories come flooding back back, and a part of me leaps for joy to rediscover that this person does exist. Sometimes I wonder if I'll wake up one day, and it will be December 15th, 2006 again and I'll be anxiously awaiting my letter from NYU, this all having been an incredibly fanciful dream. I hope not.

Dreams and delusions aside, one of the things I'm working on this week is creating my prayer ritual. I know I need a rigorous prayer ritual to keep me on track. I've been experimenting with different liturgies this summer, and I'm working on creating my own that includes some from many and a bit of my own. In the book on liturgy I read this summer, one of the author's points was that the words that have been said across the centuries hold power. I completely agree, but I also point out that once, someone wrote those words, and we must keep articulating our own words like they did theirs.

I truly love ritual. That's part of why I attend an Episcopalian church when I'm in New York - the sense of ritual and liturgy is beautiful and is something I really connect to. It looks like my prayer ritual will include prayer in the morning, before meals, before reading the Bible, before class, before rehearsal, and at night. A major goal of mine is to make sure that I'm constantly focusing on God - that there are not the times that I'm "with God" and the times that I'm "without God". I see my theatre work as a calling; God must be first. My morning prayer is going to be somehow combined with a voice and speech warmup, to help align my body and voice and spirit. I see a prayer before rehearsal similar to the prayer offered by pastors before they preach - a reminder that it is not about me, but about God. There will also be a lot of Latin. My obsession with church Latin is related to my love for heightened text as a vessel for that which is more than we can say plainly. I could say, "Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord!" but somehow, "De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine!" expresses it better.

It is my hope that constantly working to check in prayer-wise will help me establish habits of prayer, and help me be more open, loving, curious, and spiritually-driven. One of the things that killed me last semester was that it was hard to "make time for God". I couldn't go to evening worship services, often even Sunday morning worship services, because of rehearsals. While I am taking more of a stand, staking out my church time (which is very important), I will still have a very busy schedule and it makes sense for me to refocus what I'm doing so it is always about communing with God. I can praise God in a rehearsal.

I have the oddest collection of biographies on my desk to read. There's Alice Cooper's autobiography (which I've finished), and also biographies of Lord Byron, Mother Teresa, and the bowler hat. Yes. I did just say the bowler hat. I found it on eBay; The Man In The Bowler Hat: his history and iconography. It traces uses of the bowler hat through culture and art (Magritte, Chaplin, Beckett, just to name a few), and I'm REALLY excited about reading it. I started wearing my bowler hat in October? November? December? Emily, do you remember? of my sophomore year of high scool. It came out of an obsession with Bob Fosse (brilliant choreographer, used bowler hats all the time). I put on a bowler for the first time during one of our rehearsals for Pippin and it was instant love. What I find very creepy is how the bowler hat is linked, in time period, with other things I've loved. I discovered last year that a lot of my interests tend to congregate around 1880-1900. Henry James, Proust was young and observing and largely wrote about this time period, Madame X, Camille Claudel, and the heyday of the bowler hat. Eerie. Very eerie.