May Intensive Moment 2: Me no talk so good
One of my favorite parts of May Intensive is the Bardic Dinner. Part talent show, part feast, part extravaganza of general silliness, it gives the members of the community a chance to show off their various skills in all sorts of interesting ways. It's an absolute joy to me to see so many people laughing and joking for most of the night, and also to see the more serious moments that come out of the evening. It helps, of course, that the group is chock full of talented individuals who are, in large part, very happy to show off their skills. Among the best parts, for me, were the mostly-improvised bits that cropped up randomly throughout dinner. We had Lucinda in her hippy alter-ego offering massages for a $2.00 donation "for the environment, man, a number of truly awful (and therefore awesome) jokes, some really amusing alternate scenes from movies using direct communication in place of what really happened (picture Scarlett O'Hara telling Rhett that she was deeply hurt by his suggestion that he just doesn't give a damn and you'll have a good sense of how this worked), and a mysterious Russian seer named Madame Olga offering rather...succinct tarot readings. I don't really know where she came from, but I suspect artemis112 has a guess. She's not talking, though.
After dinner, we adjourned to the barn for the "official" entertainment. As is appropriate for such a solemn occasion, this involved our traditional elements of grounding and casting, invoking the elements...with a bit of a twist. In keeping with the spirit of the evening, these invocations were terribly irreverent and generally funny as all hell. We were then greeted by our hosts for the evening, Venus and Mercury, as interpreted by rain and charles. These two provided one of the funniest ongoing bits I've seen in a long time, involving Mercury (which was - and still is - retrograde) dressed in turned-around clothing and walking backward through the entire 90 minute program. This made even more impressive by the fact that charles managed not to kill anyone by tripping over them.
Now, last year I shared a performance of Tennyson's poem "Ulysses," which is about my favorite piece of verse ever. It was exceedingly well-received and (to pat myself on the back for a moment) was pretty freaking cool. I was noodling on just what to do this year, and settled on Neil Gaiman's poem "Instructions," which I just discovered a few months ago and absolutely love. It fit the bill nicely - it could be performed in the 5 minute time limit, fits in well with Mystery School in general (Gaiman describes it as a how-to manual of sorts, in case you find yourself in the middle of a fairy story), and most importantly it's just awesome. Perfect. What could possibly go wrong?
What, indeed?
To be fair, about 3/4 of it went very well indeed. The sun was setting and kind of in my eyes so I couldn't really see the folks in the back of the audience, but that just added to the storytelling ambience of the poem for me. I felt the cadence of the verse falling into place and I had one of those moments where I could actually see people leaning forward to listen - not because they couldn't hear, but because the words were that good. Clearly, I had chosen the piece well.
Where things started to go a little off-kilter was the moment where I drew an absolute, complete and utter freaking blank as to the next line of the freaking poem. It wasn't that a word escaped me, a whole chunk of the darn thing was just gone from my head.
"Well, that's a little embarassing," I chuckled, and reached back into my pocket to retrieve my copy and take a quick glance. Reassured that I had it right, I folded the opem back up, put it away, and continued without really missing a beat.
...until about 30 seconds later, when I did it again. With somewhat less grace, I repeated the process, losing the battle against the uncontrollable blush that crosses my cheeks when I'm embarrassed or angry. I found myself wanting to mumble the last handful of lines and go punch something, but after taking a deep breath and looking at the traitorous words again, I remembered the reason why I wanted to share this poem in the first place. It is quite beautiful, and it'd be a shame to let the words suffer because of my momentary incompetence. So I paused for a half-second, picked up where the thread had slipped from my swiss cheese brain, and pushed through to the finish. The end, the second part that fucked me up, goes like this:
When you reach the little house,
The place your journey started
You will recognize it;
Although it will seem much smaller than you remember.
Walk up the path, and through the garden gate you never saw before but once
And then go home
Or make a home
And rest
Yeah. Those words really are too good for me to walk away from in a fit of petulance (tempting as it was in the moment).
Funny thing, though. Over the next two days, about 6 different people came up to say that the performance itself - imperfect as it most assuredly was - had added to the experience for them rather than detracting from it. And while the perfectionist voice in my head is very quick to dismiss such things as a placatory gesture, I'm inclined to think well enough of these people that I'm not dismissing the sentiments so quickly. At the beginning of the week at the Grove, I identified that one of my self-imposed leadership challenges was to be more comfortable with visibility in that community, and I suppose that imperfection and vulnerability in front of the assembled group is one way to test that resolve.
After dinner, we adjourned to the barn for the "official" entertainment. As is appropriate for such a solemn occasion, this involved our traditional elements of grounding and casting, invoking the elements...with a bit of a twist. In keeping with the spirit of the evening, these invocations were terribly irreverent and generally funny as all hell. We were then greeted by our hosts for the evening, Venus and Mercury, as interpreted by rain and charles. These two provided one of the funniest ongoing bits I've seen in a long time, involving Mercury (which was - and still is - retrograde) dressed in turned-around clothing and walking backward through the entire 90 minute program. This made even more impressive by the fact that charles managed not to kill anyone by tripping over them.
Now, last year I shared a performance of Tennyson's poem "Ulysses," which is about my favorite piece of verse ever. It was exceedingly well-received and (to pat myself on the back for a moment) was pretty freaking cool. I was noodling on just what to do this year, and settled on Neil Gaiman's poem "Instructions," which I just discovered a few months ago and absolutely love. It fit the bill nicely - it could be performed in the 5 minute time limit, fits in well with Mystery School in general (Gaiman describes it as a how-to manual of sorts, in case you find yourself in the middle of a fairy story), and most importantly it's just awesome. Perfect. What could possibly go wrong?
What, indeed?
To be fair, about 3/4 of it went very well indeed. The sun was setting and kind of in my eyes so I couldn't really see the folks in the back of the audience, but that just added to the storytelling ambience of the poem for me. I felt the cadence of the verse falling into place and I had one of those moments where I could actually see people leaning forward to listen - not because they couldn't hear, but because the words were that good. Clearly, I had chosen the piece well.
Where things started to go a little off-kilter was the moment where I drew an absolute, complete and utter freaking blank as to the next line of the freaking poem. It wasn't that a word escaped me, a whole chunk of the darn thing was just gone from my head.
"Well, that's a little embarassing," I chuckled, and reached back into my pocket to retrieve my copy and take a quick glance. Reassured that I had it right, I folded the opem back up, put it away, and continued without really missing a beat.
...until about 30 seconds later, when I did it again. With somewhat less grace, I repeated the process, losing the battle against the uncontrollable blush that crosses my cheeks when I'm embarrassed or angry. I found myself wanting to mumble the last handful of lines and go punch something, but after taking a deep breath and looking at the traitorous words again, I remembered the reason why I wanted to share this poem in the first place. It is quite beautiful, and it'd be a shame to let the words suffer because of my momentary incompetence. So I paused for a half-second, picked up where the thread had slipped from my swiss cheese brain, and pushed through to the finish. The end, the second part that fucked me up, goes like this:
When you reach the little house,
The place your journey started
You will recognize it;
Although it will seem much smaller than you remember.
Walk up the path, and through the garden gate you never saw before but once
And then go home
Or make a home
And rest
Yeah. Those words really are too good for me to walk away from in a fit of petulance (tempting as it was in the moment).
Funny thing, though. Over the next two days, about 6 different people came up to say that the performance itself - imperfect as it most assuredly was - had added to the experience for them rather than detracting from it. And while the perfectionist voice in my head is very quick to dismiss such things as a placatory gesture, I'm inclined to think well enough of these people that I'm not dismissing the sentiments so quickly. At the beginning of the week at the Grove, I identified that one of my self-imposed leadership challenges was to be more comfortable with visibility in that community, and I suppose that imperfection and vulnerability in front of the assembled group is one way to test that resolve.