So my tour podner, Brendan, says to me last nite, "doesn't Summerfest (our first festival) seem like a lifetime ago?". When in fact it was only six weeks. It's just that so much has happened in the past six weeks neither of us can put the puzzle together. Pieces are missing in my jigsaw brain - in the cracks of the couch with a few copper pennies no one cares about, in the oops-too-good hiding place along with last year's renegade rotting easter egg, loafing around under the coffee table with that unidentifiable crusty hairy something your burnout roomate is about to try to smoke. The colors and half images on the pieces I do have look like Picasso, Klimt and Paul B. Rucker soup. I respond to Brendan, who just started traveling extensively, um, six weeks ago with the onset of our tour, "Welcome to my life."

It has been five years now that I have been gypsying hard: three theatre tours have taken me from Scotland to Alaska, production contracts from San Francisco to Las Vegas, spontaneous vacations from Brazil to Jamaica, and the endless pursuit of love that keeps me roaming, ever ready for a new experience, flashlighting caves, fingering crevices, turning up mossy rocks and exploring deserted graveyards for the mere adventure of it. Is this what people mean when they say "free spirit" along with my name? Is there any other way a spirit can be?

What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. Notice how that piece influences the puzzle.

We are as free as we believe ourselves worthy, able, allowed to be. So now at the end of Brendan and Tonya Kay's raw festival tour which I have officially named the Don't Think This Doesn't Apply To You Tour, I want to thank my Thinker for believing in such lofty levels of possibility that my Prover might have fire spinning in the mud, film shooting in Manhattan, sweat lodging in Ontario, and boating under Nigara Falls to prove. Did I know I would get such joy from being the Pied Piper of Poi at every festival, leading a trail of dancing spinning children everywhere I went? Did I know I would discover ripe wild blackberry bushes while during an emergency roadside pee stop on Hwy 5? Did I realize I would go to that heavy metal show, meet that wild fig forager, have that "un" conversation, witness those two full moons, steel that forever kiss - all of which changed my life. These things we can not plan. And oh, how plans limit the possibility surrender offers. Five Year Life Goals, what?

It is a blur. The past six weeks. My entire life. Our grand purpose. Perhaps these journal entries, email updates and digital photos are just assistants to a brain overwhelmed by experience - a way to remember what would otherwise easily be lost under the coffee table, crusty hairy headache smoke, forever. Or perhaps these writings and images are more accurately the pointless frantic scurry struggle race to see this puzzle come together before I become just one easily forgotten piece myself.

0 comments Links to this post