"Separation" by W. S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

 

— W. S. Merwin, “Separation” from The Second Four Books of Poems

 

The Shame

Dear All, 

 Thank you all for the most incredibly supportive response to the news of my surgeries. I never dreamed I would be so uplifted, for I was certain that sharing would bring about responses of pity and disgust.
 
I have been struggling to confess the full spectrum of this experience for I, like so many people, felt EXTRAORDINARY SHAME. Shame is The Great Destroyer, and Irritable Bowel Disease, or 'IBD' is a disease that thrives on shame; it grows in intensity and strengthens in the darkness-- just like all toxic narratives we foist upon ourselves and project onto others.

As a society we rarely talk about bowel health, and thus bowel diseases (and all conditions like them) take root—and accelerate—in that silence.

I wavered when it came to posting a photo of myself with my ostomy, honestly portrayed. But I realized that the image was powerful, in two ways:
     1. Perhaps someone out there needs to know that ostomy-life is not so bad, it is, in fact, a GIFT.
     2. Although I bid farewell to my bag and stoma yesterday, I felt it was important to hold myself accountable to the shame I felt by posting a photograph of The Truth below my clothing. I had to proudly display my body in an empowered way to prove to myself (above all others) that there is nothing to be ashamed of.

By sharing our truths (however challenging), we shed light upon our shame and it shrinks. It shrivels. We take our agonies and they are identified with, supported, lightened somehow. We are not alone. We do not have to live in the shadows or on the sidelines of this one glorious life.
 
Thus, here I am: talking about it.
Because (as I said yesterday) SILENCE IS SHAME’S GREATEST NOURISHMENT.
Secret-keeping is how shame transforms into viciousness,
isolation,
fear
and disconnection.

Thank you for giving me the gift of feeling less isolated, for your blinding goodness, and above all, for connection. Connection is the great reward of vulnerability.

Onwards with courage and integrity. 💜

© Emma Mead

 

J-pouch surgery news

 [CW: surgery, disturbing images]

After nearly 7 years dealing with severe Ulcerative Colitis, on November 30, 2020, I had my entire large intestine (aka, the 'colon') completely removed.

I wanted to share this news from a more processed  place, with radical honesty.

The last 6 months has been an awe-inspiring *three-surgery process.* It has cured me of ulcerative colitis PERMANENTLY. Though the experience has been psychologically confrontational, horrifying, inexpressibly painful, and awe-inspiring, every aspect has felt truly miraculous. TODAY is the first day of my healthy, ostomy-free, colitis-free, flourishing life.

Here is how is went:

- PART 1 (Nov 30, 2020) — total removal of the large intestine 

- PART 2 (March 1, 2021) — creation of what is called a “J POUCH” out of my small intestine, to ultimately serve the function of a “new colon” 

- PART 3 (May 24, 2021) — the attachment of the J-pouch to the *traditional exit* with the only evidence being a scar. Freedom.

 Science is *AMAZING.*

This procedure is extreme. My medical team and I did not make the decision lightly. Colitis can be a brutal, rabid, greedy, relentless jerk. Mine was the giant jerk-kind. And it was often—though I never ever wanted to admit it to myself or show it to the world—life-destroying.
 

Oh friends, I never wanted to complain. I possess perspective upon the horrors of the times we live in— and acknowledge that SO many fellow human beings are struggling. I wish to be a source of light.

But truth be told, it has been hell. I’ve lost a so much. I’ve also learned and grown and gained a great deal. Wisdom is earned.
Life is both.
Life is all.
I crave, and humbly ask for your shared humanity.

•
 
Today, I underwent my final surgery!
This was a life CHOOSING surgery, as much as a life SAVING one.

Thank you to Dr. Sergei Khaitov, my colorectal surgeon.
Mount Sinai Hospital.
Mama Silbs.
Alec.
And too many close friends to name.

I write this from my hospital recovery bed in floods of grateful tears. I did it.

Onwards with courage and integrity,

Al x

"Tenderness" by Stephen Dunn

"Tenderness," by Stephen Dunn, from Between Angels

Back then when so much was clear
and I hadn't learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
I was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, a husband

in prison for breaking someone's head.
Yelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
I knew
were back seats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
We worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
that to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which led to my body
existing with hers
like rain that's found its way underground

to water it naturally joins.
I can't remember
ever saying the exact word, tenderness,

though she did. It's a word I see now
you must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
it is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
so softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
to me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflexive and motiveless in the high
ignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
a woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us

I had new hands and new sorrow,
everything it meant
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating. 

 

The Art of Play

📸: @themichaelkushner
💄: @perspectivebeats

When we were young, creative play came easily. 

Children are used to looking at objects for what they can be, instead of what they ARE, at face value. 

Think of your inner artist as a child—a child at their best *and* their worst. At their best they lose themselves in play, they look at the world from a perspective of pure possibility, their innocence is a superpower unburdened by failure and fear...

...But that inner child can *also* be uncooperative; it has wild tantrums, gets upset, shrivels under neglect, and thus needs to be shown attention, care and above all: love. Your inner artist needs to bust-out and be silly AND be shown loving forms of structure.

Remember that Play is an essential part of being alive—for all creatures! All animals PLAY as a form of practicing for life’s necessities. Lions “play” at hunting, to be in shape for when the kill is truly on. So too must we!

This bottom-line-obsessed shaming of Play is not only a detriment to the very “productivity” our society holds so dear, but we do extraordinary damage to our psyches, with invisible, but very real scars.

So pick up the paintbrush, journal, craft kit and crockpot; sit down at the piano, or indulge in an imaginary world for a moment or two. Play is part of who we are. And to my theatre-maker pals? Remember: “it’s called a Play for a reason.”

World Theatre Day, 2021

 God, how I miss it...

The Fo(u)r MORE Questions!

This weekend is Passover, 2021. Remember how last year we all said "Next Year in Person" and we were so certain that that precise joy would be our reality? 

Not so for many of us. COVID19 still rages on, millions across our aching planet are dead (many, so needlessly due to mismanagement, denial, and the preposterousness of politics), and many have a tragic (and tardy) new understanding of the systemic racism and inequality that pervades every part of society. Plague and oppression? Several plagues and the evils of slavery? Well it sounds like Passover and all the themes the Book of Exodus offers us, cannot come soon enough to help us to confront, to celebrate, and to heal.

One of the great gifts of this tumultuous year has been the gift of learning that activism, and the fighting of evils, comes in many forms. Well, this year I have learned over and over again that my most authentic weapon against darkness... is light. 

The story of Exodus is about the enslavement and oppression of the Jewish people, but it has served as a metaphor for oppressed people everywhere for countless generations. The year we have spent with the coronavirus has revealed many excruciating oppressions that remain today. The ones that shall always be the most immediate for my existence and safety is the fight against Anti-Semitism, and sometimes, fighting Anti-Semitism is not just about declaring violence and hatred to be evil and wrong, it is equally crucial to be PRO-Semitic, to shed light upon the beauty of the things all kinds of Jews across the planet hold dear, and to do so with passions, joy and the enthusiasm of my whole soul.

And so? I want to offer you all a little Passover gift, from my seder table to yours.

Here is a download of fourteen questions for your Passover dinner table! Passover is all about questions, so I wanted to offer something beautiful and meaningful to keep the conversation going long after the traditional "Four Questions" have been asked. 

- Click the link.

- Download the artwork. 

- Print on any paper or card-stock you desire. 

- Cut down the center, and then cut every "color block" / individual question out (with scissors or a paper cutter)

- Spread them out on your Passover table for all to see, 

     or keep them in a deck to "pick a card any card" 

          or thumb through them throughout the night. 

Use them however it feels fun and meaningful to and for you.

 

Chag Semeach, one and all. May we all know greater freedom in 2021, and may we also be greater liberators of the oppressed who need our advocacy.

 

Stop Asian Hate: a Letter to my husband and Chinese-American family

 Dearest Silver Family,

I wanted to send you all a virtual embrace about this recent wave of Asian violence and hatred. No matter the level of personal endangerment you do or do not feel on a daily basis, it is always horrifying to see and experience hatred toward *your existence* perpetuated. I just wanted to utter it; to acknowledge it as horrendous, and to honor you as Asian human beings who deserve every respect and dignity. 

I feel like all hatred shares a roots of Fear. Which I say because I experience inner rattlings all the time with a constant, still-quite-bad, 4000 year old wave of Anti-Semitism. I wonder if you feel this next sensation too: that the prejudice is “always there,” and then, every once in a while (like the last few weeks) a series of horrendous events occur that make it WORSE and you’re reminded “Oh yeah... people still hate me. And...that....is terrifying...” 

I am not the greatest revolutionary in a traditional sense. I’m not one to burn down buildings and fight hatred with anger. I’ve felt guilty about it for years. I’m quicker to weep than to rage. I’ve often felt that meant I didn’t have a recognizable place in fighting oppression— as if I weren’t “built” to be the “correct” kind of change-maker. 

But for what it is worth, in my experience of fighting evils, I have found that I do have a place! In addition to decrying Anti-Semitism, I can participate in “PRO-Semitism!” Which is a clunky term, but meaning: being a super proud, visible, relatable, and enthusiastic Jewish person, sharing the beauty of everyday progressive Jewish life through my very own proud lens. And that feels good, and gets me excited, and resonates as true to and for me. 

That’s not unsolicited advice, by the way— it is more of a direct affirmation of what each of you already do: SHARE THE JOYS of your cultural reality in every breath you take! And I’m here to declare: that is revolutionary, I think. Well anyway...that’s just my 2 cents. 

The most important message of this email is a huge embrace to each of you today and always. I am so proud to be a part of this Chinese and American family, and bring a little matzah to the dim sum tea room.

All my love 

Al

from "The Four Loves"

 “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” 

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

 

The Impossible Dream

I came to know of and work with The Transport Group at the beginning of 2011 as a cast member of their immersive production of Michael John LaChiusa’s Hello Again—directed by Jack Cummings. It was my first job in New York.

When Jack gives me another chance to write for this newsletter, perhaps I will tell you all about rehearsing this play above the old (sadly now closed) Pearl River in SoHo, the parrot that lived there named Rudy, and the seemingly centuries-old elevator that Nikka Lanzarone (who played The Whore) was constantly getting trapped in. I can tell tales of our 3am tech rehearsals lit by the late night street lights of our beloved New York City.

I can also recount with vivid detail my epic hours-long audition for the project in which I read and sang for every.single.female.character. in the play, and yes, sure, brought little props and different outfits for each (and perhaps more remarkably, that everyone just sort of let me do that…)

I can recount the company’s first publicity photo session filled with a little bit of nudity and a whole lot of laughter, and, I, newly arrived in New York City, wore not much more than Bob Stillman’s arms.

Ultimately I was honored to play the Young Wife amidst a cast of some of our most gifted singing actors—as brilliant as they were brave, and it’s been a joy to see them skyrocket personally and professionally. It has been equally thrilling to still be on the same text thread with all of them 10 years later. It is a testament to the ferociously devoted companies The Transport Group builds, but also to the indescribably powerful bonds the theatre fosters; building families out of an aggregate of strangers.


But I am not going to write about those wonderful memories.

Today I am going to write about a memory emblazoned permanently on my mind as perhaps one of the greatest theatrical moments of my life. A small moment. A moment in which I did very little. Being an actor can be virtuosic, but just like in life, sometimes the magic happens in the silences.

On December 18 2017, I was participating in a benefit concert of Man of La Mancha for The Transport Group— a blinding collection of Broadway’s finest had been lined up to share the leading and supporting roles, and to sing every note of the score with a full orchestra.I was assigned some lovely moments that evening to offer my take on Aldonza — the whore Don Quixote perceives to be not only an angel, but his true love.

None of those moments was more precious to me than the scene leading into the finale of Act 1— the anthem of the evening and delivering the message of the play itself. I spoke a few words, I looked Jason’s Quixote in the eyes, and then? I listened. I bore witness to Jason Danieley singing “The Impossible Dream,” and it forever, alchemically, changed me.


At this time in my life I was rumbling with a crushing experience with a chronic illness (that I have now, gratefully, recovered from and cured). I didn’t know how to operate in the world, I didn’t know what it meant to be well— what kind of healing to ask the Universe for.

Jason (a genius I’ve respected for decades and a friend I’d made my Carnegie Hall debut with a few years before), was facing his own personal “windmills” that frankly, aren’t my stories to write about.

Both in rehearsal earlier that day, and backstage before the scene, we didn’t speak of any of it. We didn’t know the details of one anothers’ struggles exactly, nor do I believe we needed to. But as we stood in the wings preparing to walk out together I felt something connect us—like a chord of light wrapped gently around each of our hearts, not tugging, not forceful in any way, just joined. Anyone who has ever been in the theatre will tell you: there is no breaking-open of the heart quite like those moments silently shared in the hush of the wings.


We strode out and began the scene. Eyes locked, and unadorned. I had been in hiding with so many people in my life during that time, yet I felt no need to “hide” from Jason, no need to protect myself or preserve anything for my dignity. Our actor-selves just asked one another a question:

    “What have you been through?”

Some questions are medicinal, just in their being asked. “What have you been through” is prime among them. It’s transformational to be in the presence of another human being with both a willingness and a capacity to hold space for the truth of another. Even while stuck in the dense mud of our own realities, even as our bodies are “scorned and covered with scars,” may we all endeavor to be the kind of person who says:

     “Though I may not see this experience of life through the same set of eyes, I see you. I hold your feelings, fears, vulnerabilities and recognize our common humanity. I take your concerns to heart. And in remaining here with you for this moment, we are both transformed.”

That was what happened to and for me when I stood beside Jason as he sang “The Impossible Dream.” It is what happens when songs are really prayers.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic I don’t know that the world at large really knew how to listen. Perhaps it didn’t wish to. I am not immune—it is terrifying to really listen—and perhaps part of that culture is what made me ill, and it has only been in this silence of quarantine that I have had a chance to heal. Who knows? After this year I don’t think I know much for certain anymore.

But what I do know is that hurriedness is so entrenched in the ways that we communicate, that when something significant is shared between people it's often not given the proper time to breathe. To settle. To marinate, and ultimately absorb.

What would it be like if we were to normalize long pauses, deep breaths, and unencumbered gazes filled with compassion and without expectation?
What if in our scenes, and pauses, and songs-as-prayers, we could, with our creations, push through the unfathomable cracks, the great gully-trenches and dried-up canyons of every broken heart? And what if in those songs the lyrics were:

“And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will be peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest…”

What if in the making of art we could strive, with all of ourselves, to stand for something good? To tell the truth. To fight evils. And what if our greatest glory isn’t in the winning, but in the striving?

I don’t think that is an Impossible Dream.
Because we do it in the theatre.
When we are brave.
And skilled.
And, as I was that night with Jason, sometimes when we are just so broken open by life’s trials, that we cannot help but listen and get lucky.

The song ended.
The experience of it left me trembling.
Jason turned, and extended his hand to me.
It was a gesture of something shared.
We walked off stage arm in arm.



May we all strive, dear friends— with “our last ounce of courage.”

A Snowy Leap...

I love this Alec Silver human person so much.
So on our 2-year-anniversary, we took a leap.
 
In this era of the Coronavirus— of collective isolation, grief, loss, adversity and hardship—I, like all of you, have been through, and learned a few things. If our shared human experience has taught me anything it is this:

There is only NOW,
 and LOVE (in all it’s forms) is
  ALL. WE. HAVE.

You know? The phrase “This too shall pass” is true of more than just adversity. Joy, TOO, shall pass if we do not seize it and cherish it while it is before us.
 
So Alec and I seized the joy AND the moment.
 
So with three people present, we eloped in a fairy-tale-snowy Central Park, merging two ancient cultures and creating a new one, together.
 
Our friend and Rabbi Samantha Frank, perfectly married us.
One of my best friends on earth, my friend-partner Alley Scott got ready with me before, and gifted us these beautiful flowers by Mimosa Floral.
Our pal Michael Kushner took these fabulous photos (and served as a witness!).
 
And yes, I did: I wore RED.

To anyone out there that is having trouble seizing joy: it’s okay. Life is hard right now. Be kind to yourself. But joy is there to be seized in the large and in the small.
 
To anyone out there who believes that certain dreams are not available to/for them, take heart: stay open; life can be surprising (says this 37-year-old first time bride...well...if you don’t count the 500+ times I “married” Adam Kantor...)
 
I’m tightly embracing you (in this fuzzy red jacket My Mom found—that somehow perfectly matched my dress...)

Alec, oh how I love you. I have never been more certain of anyone or anything. Thank you for being beside me in literal sickness and in health, and above all, for the honor of picking me.
 
From the bottom of my joy-filled heart,  

Al. x

Look for Kindness

This has been an excruciating week.

As we move through these final Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, may we embrace Quiet and pause often. Inside the loud and raging modern world, may we hold that rage but balance it with the noticing of simple joys, embracing natural beauty and the micro generosities gifted to us. May we look for opportunities for kindness and connection.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
 
And, where there is pain; where there is death and anguish and injustice and rage—let us be courageous in humbling ourselves. Be brave in asking for forgiveness, and gracious and expansive in our willingness *to* forgive. Forgiveness sets the forgivER, free.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

— from ‘Perhaps the World Ends Here’ by Joy Harjo