I woke up and an entire section of my mind previously unfamiliar to me had been activated. Possibilities and impressions that once lived in my imagination surged and dramatically ate away at pragmatic constraints, annihilating what was assumed as impossible.
It’s possible that this project will enhance how traumatologists understand religious vocation and spirituality, and it may open up new ways to think about God. For the women I’m reading, God and/or the devil are holding tanks for the terrible things that somebody else did to them while they were helpless, often over a long period of time. In that way, they use supernatural both to hide and reveal the truth.
Societal norms of success and failure are not valid within creativity and play, and certainly not within skateboarding. In order to learn, one must fall and fail multiple times. Falling uninvited in public becomes a vital building block of anybody’s creativity.
It’s like the seed vault that stores samples of thousands of plant species to make sure the world’s flora cannot go extinct. We are our own vault, and our sparks are one of one. We hold the base formula. Our knowledge of self is singular, unique and vital.
There’s a turning point in rehearsal, and that’s when the real dancing begins: when we don’t have to count to the music in our heads anymore and the movement flows naturally; when each of us has mastered the steps and we are fully in our bodies, moving collectively to form the ensemble.
It’s about giving yourself away to a larger force. It’s about riding intuitive rails of thought and losing yourself in the pure fire of existence. The goal is not the poem itself, but the invention of language, the evolution of the human soul by expanding the realm of emotion. It’s about imagining a style that hasn’t been known yet.
Being scared doesn’t have to inhibit me. Instead, acknowledging my fear and deciding to use it, and then destroy it, is empowering. Jumping in head-first forces me to come up with a solution. It doesn’t have to be the best solution, but it will be at least a stepping-stone.
Auditioning, they say, is the actor’s real job. Performing is the grand prize, it’s what you get to do when you’re lucky, it’s the crème de la crème, and it may not happen often.
The pride I feel for ‘Miles Ahead’ is immeasurable. It’s big and broad. It reaches all parts of me. My director pushed me, leaned on me, challenged me, relied on me to be better. He raised my game as a producer. But as a champion and a conqueror of my fear and anxiety? That was all me.
While I was performing onstage, an aneurysm ruptured in my brain, and when I woke up from my emergency neurosurgery, I had acquired a neurological condition called “aphasia.” At 27, I’d largely lost my abilities to speak, read, and write.
