I don’t want to write a blog right now I want to write a love letter or meditate on the importance of weird gut feelings and how vital they are, or I’d like to masturbate until I release all of the electricity in me and shut down like an old televisions’s phosphorescent faded glow…  I want to make out, roll around in the hay, hike through the woods with someone I admire, or fall asleep.  I feel too full to function.  I am tired and just want to shut down and die for a week before reactivating to take over the universe.

I woke up this morning remembering how hard the things I love are, and that collision of understanding and a crazy energy to just blindly make is still in me.

An example:  Puppets.  When I toured the country as a puppeteer for a year I was contracted (for very little pay) to work 40 hours a week in a puppet studio when we weren’t out on tour.  It was grueling physically, mentally and creatively, and when we were on the road very time consuming.  I learned a lot by showing up to the workshop, when we were in town, having to make my own plan for what to tackle every day.  Sometimes it was restoration of old puppets, sometimes learning lines and rehearsing a show we were about to take on tour, it was rebuild and design work, research, booking hotels, cleaning, reorganizing, making sense of a very large and chaotic workshop, going to meetings, practicing moves or learning a new puppet’s limitations and finding ways to make it live, load in and out of the puppet van our gigantic sound and light systems and 9 foot tall set pieces…  And then sometimes it was building something from nothing.  Making puppets of my own.  Learning to design, find the tools, structure, create, jury-rig as alternative to a more complicated process I didn’t have the resources for or as inventive solution and artistic choice.

Meet “General”, my first puppet made completely from scratch (yes, those are leather chaps)

I would get tired.  I would struggle.  I would worry that everything I laid my hands on was failure and I that I wouldn’t be able to keep it up long enough to make my mark the way I wanted it.  I would crisis in the middle of this, my own vast fortune.

This perfectly describes the tension I live in.

Tension is probably the most perfect way to look at living a fulfilling existence…  Is this my masochistic theory I wonder?

It is stunning at times; when I look back at those days of struggle, yet I look back and wish I was engaged now in similar ways… and then realize I suppose I am.  My struggle today encompasses writing three times a week and publishing, teaching and promoting myself, keeping a steady job, creating work and performing in shows as a soloist, performing and rehearsing with my troupe, learning choreography and lines for the other shows I am cast in, mediating for the communities I do that type of work with, remaining open to new ideas and opportunities as well as staying rooted and connected to the work I’m committed to, maintaining relationships, learning new things, and still tinkering at my work desk making costumes, props, set pieces, and sometimes just work for me and my brain…

I juggle and I balance.  I fail at being perfect at everything (or anything), but I continue to try and measure my progress in terms of increasing capacity, increasing understanding, increasing skill and POV.  I am a growing organism.  I evolve or I die.  I understand new ideas or I wither and become complacent.

Embracing all the different aspects of my sexuality I see myself challenging the easy unfulfilling modes of behavior I’ve repeated historically, including a strong capacity for self repression.  I am learning new ways to approach the life I have with elbow grease towards becoming the life I want.  The tools I am becoming familiar with are transparency, self-confidence, meditation, and clear communication.  I am blessed to feel this tension in me vibrate, shift, and thrive.

To Breath and Being,
~ Karin

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~Thank you.