I think of a professional athlete - a runner, a sprinter - wedged against the starting block, rubber soles gripping rubber track, fingers ritualistically - superstitiously - aligned like the pool stick midsummer sunrise your best destiny greeting bullseye handshake along the yellow line. How heart rate takes a head start. How listening transcends the ears and becomes an entire body experience. That explosive emptiness, where moving and not moving morph, the moment before...everything.

Pregnant poised potential. This is Chaos.

It is shocking sometimes how powerful we really are. We truly do create our lives. If a week ago I was contemplating Chaos, questioning my systems and dropping my identities, well, Thank You Universe, today I am immersed in it. You see, I have decided to move on from touring with STOMP, place my feet on the ground and claim earth as home. Overnite all my systems of self-definition have dissolved. I am completely unsure of who I am, where I live, what I'm doing, and in that Not Knowing, how all is possible. A rebirth transformation returning, powerfully and consciously created.

Of course I will miss my daily STOMP hyjinx: hot springs in San Francisco, kite flying in Alaska, bar fights in Pittsburgh, dropping pants in our Nation's Capitol. I will miss finding the "sweet spot" on Gerber Baby Food lids and the way, after over 500 performances, I learned how to take exhaustion, anger, depression, and pain, and make each one, in their honest expression, my best show ever. I will miss every nite lying on my back at the end of the show, chest heaving, lights coming up, audience exploding into standing ovation, thinking the thought that never once in 2 years missed a cue; "I'm in STOMP... This is my life." I walk away maintaining that STOMP truly is the best gig in show business - this small town girl's dream come true. And a phrase commonly spoken within the company, sometimes a threat, has now become a reassurance: "you can never leave the family". I see the truth of it all, in my heart and in my art: I will forever be a STOMPer.

So in Los Angeles now, filming a spot in a national Coca-Cola commercial, the Universe seems to be encouraging my journey into the unknown. It dawns on me that the identities I am dropping by leaving the road have much larger implications than I had originally envisioned. You see, now that I can not use tour life as an excuse as to why I "can not" be in a relationship, have deep friendships or feel like a member of this world, I may just have to move beyond my most prized identity, the one I have been using since childhood: Tonya Kay, the Alone and Utterly Misunderstood. And if I do not substitute a system for a system, if I do not create other excuses, this moment in my life may very well be THE opportunity to discover infinite potential - to powerfully Not Know and in that, be anything.

Prepared and poised at the starting line, actively alert and ready for anything. At the sound of the gun, I will leap forth and become. But for now, within Chaos, I could be anyone.

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