Okay, I'm Back

Not very much of a break, maybe. Just a few days. But they were thick days, long hours, with huge meaningful leaps taken in various directions. I've just come out of the shower, with water much hotter than is perhaps necessary or healthy for the skin, but I needed it. I needed to just stand there and stare at my feet. I seemed to have forgotten what that was like.

Kip and I went through a pretty intense crisis. Things were teetering on the edge of ending there for a while. Among all the lessons that I learned in those hours between our initial breakdown and our subsequent apologies and mending conversations, I learned that everyone has these conversations--some people have them every week--but it felt like I'd never had this one before. It also occurred to me that perhaps the fact that I've never had this conversation before is really just the proof that when this conversation comes up, I've steered it, or whoever has steered it, into a different place. And then there was a different outcome.

I have bread in the oven, three loaves that I let rise earlier after having come home from the half-performed Circus AMOK show in Riverside Park--as much of it as we could do before the rain came. That meant, Stilts, Chari, Juggling, Lectures, Interruptions, Singing, Blue Jay, Wire-Walking...and then the sky opened and everything went under a tarp. Well, everything except for us. About 5 hours ago, I was changing my clothes in the ATM area of the Chase Bank on 79th Street. As in, stripping down to the nearly-nothings and putting on whatever I could find in the bottom of my bag that wasn't soaked. As much I love to look fabulous, I just don't have the courage to ride home on the 1 Train in my tutu. (This paragraph is meant to transition into the next one, but also meant to make you excited about seeing the AMOK show--wire-walking? Singing? Tutu? You can see the schedule here.)

So, back to the bread. I needed to do something earthy, something that would feel simple, healing, and also beneficial. I needed to complete something. It's possible that they will turn out terribly--I don't make bread often--but it's more about the process than the product. For me, that's always been the truth.