C'est La Vie

Sitting in the dimly lit living room with artwork scattered like pillows on the floor around us, a friend was reading my palm. His dark eyes serious, his lips moving as fast as they could, he told me what he saw in me. “You need to treat your body like a temple. You don’t right now. Because you don’t want to show weakness. You think that to show weakness is to not be strong, and you must be a strong woman. But don’t confuse rest with weakness. They are two very different things. If you don’t rest, you will hurt yourself, many times. And you won’t enjoy it.” I couldn’t maintain his eye contact. With my right hand, the hand he wasn’t holding, I rubbed nervously at my left shoulder, searching to push out the pain that had sprung up again. It was a pain that had haunted me for a year and a half, that had kept me from doing presses for two weeks at necca, a pain that had been diagnosed as tendonitis from instability, a pain that began under my clavicle and radiated through my shoulder. It was the kind of pain that remained as an irritating presence, never enough to really stop me. My left shoulder had, apparently, started to catch up with my right one. Always more confused, it had begun to understand the concept of one arm beats on the straps; Viginie commented with surprise when the one arm balanced more accurately and steadily on my left side than my right. The first Friday back to school I did back handsprings on my own for the first time. My spirits were high. I was doing my stability exercises. I had found power in my straps spin that made one arm lifts even easier. I had added five pounds to my weighted tricep dips (though not to my pull ups; those remain frustratingly weak). I felt strong. I felt excited. I woke the next morning from vivid dreams. Skiing through the Scandinavian wilderness, searching for underground green houses that acted as military bases, to apparate into a theater house, to be attacked by a Colonel and turn into an owl and fly away….I wasn’t fully sure of my surroundings as I rolled out of bed and reached for my sweatshirt. My arm twitched and jumped as a spasm of pain shot through it. I tried again. Same response. I couldn’t move my left arm in any direction without pain in my shoulder. When I forgot, and reached to get a jar from the fridge, it fell from my hands and spilled across the floor. My arms stayed in second position for most of ballet class. I cradled it to my chest as I stretched my pike, my straddle, my splits. I put my name on the left side of the physio sign up sheet, under ‘New injuries/Urgent.” I wanted to ignore it like I had been able to in the past. But I couldn’t—this time, I wouldn’t. “I can’t train straps today,” I told Alanna, my coach, fighting off the wave of worry and anger that rushed through me. I was afraid she saw it, the blood that rushed to my face and made my heart beat like a rabbit. Calm down, I chided myself. Stop being such a baby about it. You’ll figure things out, it will be OK. But I couldn’t believe myself. I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me, an energizer bunny, a tank, the overachiever who always tried for more. “Quest’ce fait, Zo-ay?” Virginie asked, reading the remorse on my face. She said my name as she always does, the way I secretly love, even though I don’t even like the name ‘Zoey”, but she adds a lilting a to the end that rises from her chest and wraps around me, a tender embrace. “Je ne fait pas de les equilibre aujourd’hui,” I told her, and then had to ask Charlaine to translate what had happened, since my words had failed me. A mass of vines had tangled them in my mind, twisting everything, tightening, tightening. I tried to breathe. I went and sat in a quiet corner, attempting to meditate. Every breath felt constricted. Why are you so freaked out, Zoe? I demanded of myself. It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s OK. But I couldn’t hide from myself that I had been lying to myself, about the pain, about so many little things that suddenly tumbled to the surface as I was faced with the possibility that I, whose identity apparently depends on strength, would not be able to use my strength for…who knew how long. . Sitting here, typing this, it all feels like an old photograph, hazy and scratched, as though time has accelerated in the past few hours since I was at school, until each hour was a decade, the night several centuries. I sat the next day in the physio’s office feeling defeated. Mathew opened the door to my knock with a boisterous ‘Zoey!” I hated him for that. I didn’t want his maraschino-cherry voice that oozed a nauseating fake syrup. I wanted him to be even keel. I wanted him to take my arm as though it were an actual piece of me, not a mannequin doll that he manipulated asking if this or that hurt, if this or that could resist his sterile pressure. I wanted, in that moment, to be home where Stefan could be the one telling me what was wrong,; Sefan who I wouldn’t be ashamed to cry in front of. “It looks like you may have had a subluxation during the night,” he concluded. You test positive for a labrum tear, though everything is inflamed so it’s hard to tell. If it is, it’s petite, or else you would be in far more pain. But it also might be OK. Take off until Monday, then we will see you again. Bye bye!” I had never been more relieved for the weekend. Monday. I waited anxiously for the physio to arrive. I attempted straps, handstands—my shoulder wasn’t hurting , but each time my coaches ushered me to my feet, told me to wait. I didn’t want to wait. I knew it wasn’t worth it, but I was mad. This isn’t supposed to happen to me. The physio commented that my range of motion was better, but there was still extreme weakness in some motions. I should take off at least a week from handstands and straps, do physio, rest, and come back to see how things were going. To my delight I was given the green light to do rows, tricep dips, and anything in support position. I feared that the week would be a gray monotonous cloud. In some ways, it has been. Straps became my least favorite class: relegated to the floor to do active flex, watching the world do the things that I would like to be doing, was perhaps more painful than my shoulder itself. But most of my coaches were understanding: Virginie made me try headstands, which I found extremely difficult and rather good handstand-core training. Carolanne, who is probably one of the coolest acro and tramp coaches I know, drilled me on aerials, front tucks, butterfly kicks. Roxanne and Pierre-Luc, the condi coaches, happily substituted all the upperbody things I can’t do for lower body and core. My back, though not my shoulders, felt delightfully sore. Kenneth killed my active flex and middle splits. It’s been, to part of my mental chagrin, a pleasant change to do things other than straps and handstands. I’m scared, I’m frustrated, I’m willing my shoulder to heal as fast as it can, I’m still wishing that Stefan were here to help make things better, but I try to keep telling myself that I’m learning. There are things I can do. I have no appetite, at night I get engulfed by The Sads, and the The Mads and The Fears. I wake each morning hoping that it was all a bad dream. (I know, cliche, but it’s true. There’s no other way to describe it. Like a dream that I can wake from, so it will never have happened. But I can’t). My creativity has gone up, too. In artistic coaching, unable to use my left arm, Julie rigged my straps low to the ground and played various pieces of music which I improved to, finding different floor movements, different ways of interacting with the straps. I was smiling and laugh genuinely that hour, feeling released. I hadn’t touched the straps in a week. The felt like the skin of a long lost lover, known, sacred, comforting. I surprised myself: I simply wanted to interact with them. I wanted to know them, more than just an apparatus, more than just a tool to train my body. I wanted them to become my friend. It sounds a little silly, writing that, but it’s true. My biggest sadness, with Julie, was how limited my ability to explore was. It’s all mental, Alberto told me and Eliana. If you tell yourself that you feel good, and you mean it, it will happen. So, listen up shoulder: you’re going to be OK. You’re going to be good. I’ll give you the time you need, but we have work to do, art to create. And when we get back into action, I’ll have those splits balances nailed.

Handstands...three months late, with a kind of addendum

I have promised you all a few blog posts about handstands, and straps. Here is one of them (and the only reason I found the time to write this is because it is my week off , and I am in Brattleboro, at Amy’s, drinking a cup of decaf and wondering in awe at the leaves that are so much more brilliant than anything I’ve ever seen since last fall here). I was told over the summer by a coach that I will eventually come to hate handstands, but I will love handstands more than I hate them, and that is the reason why I will stay a handbalancer. I told him that I have felt those moments before. But I have yet to feel that here, at ECQ, because holy god I am learning. I have yet to wake up and not want to go to school. I sit outside on my balcony drinking tea (yes, it is cold, but the wind is refreshing and I love it) every morning, and I look at the crown of the school, and I think to myself, “I am going there. In 15 minutes I will be there again, and it is magical.” I still get shivers of joy and excitement. You’d think I’d be over those by now, but I haven’t, and the feeling is still secretly delicious.

While the school itself is churchy and old and very Hogwarts-like, the handstand corner is utilitarian. A giant rolling shelf of blocks and canes dominates one end, while handbalancing benches and boxes stand tilted onto one end, scattered into wherever they fit. Two walls are meticulously kept clear of clutter. The floor is scuffed from use. Tucked out of the way of everything else, hidden by several large pillars and the slackliners, it sometimes feels small and secluded, separate from the rest of the school.

As I mentioned before, I have two handbalancing coaches. Sania (who has also become my straps coach; that is another blog post entirely) is gorgeous. She is from Quebec, but has dark skin and black hair, long strong muscles, and a piercing under her right eye that looks like the diamond of a gypsy. It makes her royal. She did gymnastics as a child /teen, and can still demonstrate most of the handbalancing skills she’s teaching us (including hovering in a one arm press). Virginé is shorter than I am, from France, and speaks very little English. Our attempts to understand each other are often hilarious—they involve miming, the occasional translator, and a lot of being poked in various muscles. Her love of ‘the plank of death’ (La planche du la mort)—a wooden board with eight blocks attached to it in a row to ‘walk’ across—is terrifying. Steve calls her the devil. I call her hardcore. Virginé loves endurance work. On Thursdays, Steve and I are the only two in the class—our last class of the day, directly after straps and conditioning. There is no time for a pause to let our muscles recover. We must dive straight into it. “Dechaufeé?” she asks us as she walks into the handstand nook. “Are you warm?” “Oui,” we respond. “Montegroupe, handstand, dis second, cinqe groupe, montecarpe descent a chaise. Montecarpe, handstand, dis second, cinqe carpe, montecarpe descent. Monte-escart, handstand, dis second, cinqe escart, monteescart descent a chaise. “Due foie.” So we begin, every time: press, handstand hold, five tucks/straddles/pikes, descent to straddle or L-chair, two times. After that, she usually pulls out the Plank of Death, and sets up a block station. She spots the Plank. We struggle on our own for the blocks. For it is a struggle. She works us mercilessly, cycling between the two with nar a pause. I stand in front of her, waiting. “Legs together, avec la descent,” she tells me. I nod. This is the worst of the Plank exercises: instead of just walking from one block to the other down and back, we must combine the walking and the up-down drill by walking into the valleys between the blocks. Up and down, across, up and down, across. She never lets you find bad form. “Hold five second,” she adds. Hold each one arm for five seconds. By the end of the first round—which takes several minutes—you are panting and sweaty. “Good,” she nods. “Stephen?” We switch exercises. The goal, she told us, is to not come down from the solo block exercises the entire time the other person is walking the Plank. Needless to say, this feels impossible. “Petit ecart,” she says. And we do the same thing, again, with a small straddle. And then again in tuck, and again in full straddle. If there is time left, we hold piano fingers or one arms, freestanding or against the wall, until she tells us to come down. By the time I come to the tuck, things are hard. My shoulders burn. Sometimes, my stomach starts to rumble, until the intense training forces it to stop. “Tighter,” she tells me, squeezing my knees into my ribs. I contract my abs, try to hold it. Hold it all together while breathing, while pushing, while extending my free arm. She lets go, and my tuck one arm hovers, suspended, balanced, “une, due, tois..” she catches my hips as they twist out of place. She pushes my knees back into my ribs. “You stay. Stay there.” I try. I keep it, and switch to the next arm. Half way through on the way back my muscles start to fail. My arm is vibrating, floppy, my shoulders don’t engage. She pushes my knees into my chest. I pant, try not to. For a moment, I feel the urge to flee, to run from her hands as my heart pounds and I try, try to push and engage and hold the one arm, and feel my hips twist and be caught by her hands. But awareness is more powerful now: I calm myself, even while transitioning to the next arm. “If I focus on the flight response, I will not get through. But I am safe, almost done, and just need to focus on the handstand.: My heart calms somewhat. My mind snaps to my shoulder, tying to stop the wobbling. My abs engage further. My tuck stays tight. I hold it, “une, due, tois, cat…” She grabs me on the last second. And then I am at the last block. I straighten into a handstand, trying desparately to hold my body together for ten seconds. I sway back and forth, she pokes me in the ribs, in the hips, back and forth. I feel like a beginner again. She laughs. I tumble down, my descent choking and faltering as I try to control it, as muscles start and stop until I half-crash, half-place my feet down on the floor and I stand up. I blink the sparks from my eyes to find her nodding. “Good! Good!” she tells me, claps me on the shoulder. “You feel, the groupe—c’est facile! You tight, c’est facile!” I nod. “OUi,” I say, though it comes out like ‘way’, the Quebecois way of speaking, with a very strong American accent. I pant. I sway. And then, somehow, I manage to traverse the blocks, up and down, twice without falling, my arms steadily getting weaker and weaker. I hear Steve fall, get up, fall again. Until it is my turn again, to do wide straddle, and nothing works. I leave that day aching, exhausted, jubilant, because I did not fall with her once, and I managed to find the tuck one arm, and life is good.

Sania is a lover of endurance in another way: she believes in a long straight body hold. Every day we have her we start with three holds. They have grown over time into a two minute freestand hold, minute break, three minute wall hold, minute break, one minute freestand hold. That is her warm up. She focuses on presses, especially stalders (they call them ‘makos’). We do fewer one arms, but more one arm press work with her. And she loves ankle weights during 100% week. And because I have her for straps as well, it means that every day during 100% week I did three hours of ankle weight work. Let me tell you—leg lefts are easy when you no longer have five pounds attached to the end of your legs. Easy peasy. Sania is less hands-on intense. Rather, she makes you want to push yourself to be intense. Virginé forces you there. The two styles are good to have together—or at least I have been enjoying the variety.

During 30% week, Sania takes our artistic break seriously. “Create a sequence,” she says, “using the box. Thirty minutes, and then you will present.” She comes back around, watching our ideas, helping us, laughing as we fall. “C’est cool, ça,” she tells me as I hop one hand off the ground onto the box before sweeping my body sideways into a crocko. “C’est interesant.” Artistic creation at ECQ can be just as demanding as volume or technique training, but it is wonderful to be given artistic suggestions every week and grow within my own movement style.

OK, blog friends. Stick with me. This is the point at which I left the post, thinking I’d get back to it. I had vague ideas of the direction it would go in and the stories I would tell. Three months later, I have no idea what I wanted to say. I will sum it up with this:

Handstands are hard. I mentally know what my body needs to do to find a one arm. I know what my body is doing wrong. Now I have to find the ways the make my body do the right thing. Welcome to the circus. Petit a petit, les equilibres vienent.

Upon My Return To The Frigid North

I am going to publish my handstand post that's been sitting around soon. I just wanted to get this off first. I am back to Quebec after spending the holidays in Portland. I’ve told many people that I will write more blog posts. “They don’t have to be long!” they say. “Shorter is easier!” Sometimes. Other times I get into the writing groove and then don’t resurface for a few thousand words. Then I think, “I will take a break, edit this, and post it.” Usually this is the point where I forget to come back to it, or procrastinate, or decide to change the ending and then can’t decide and then procrastinate some more until the word document blinking at me on my computer screen becomes part of the background and procrastination has turned into true forgetfulness.

Another question posed to me: “Why do your blogs always have a happy ending? Is the circus life really a fairy tale?” At that point, I didn’t have a response because I was speechless. I just mumbled. But here’s the answer: sometimes that happy ending is real. I feel awesome over my accomplishments. Other times optimism is the only ending I have so I don’t cave under the fears that I Am A Fraud and will never get better (Thank you, Amanda Palmer, for giving me a name for The Fraud Police). In response to that question, I will try to be more honest. I will keep my optimism but not lead anyone astray that this life is a fairytale and easy. Yes, I love this life. I love looking at the crown lit up at night and knowing that I go to Hogwarts. I love the people, the challenge, but sometimes it gets to be too much. Sometimes I hate it, and resent it, and struggle to not compare myself to everyone else around me who is so much better than me…but as Tera once told me, “everyone in the circus, in the arts, doubts it. All the time. Some of the best performers in the world have admitted that they think they just aren’t good enough, ever. But you have a fire Zoe. You couldn’t quit, that would last all of twenty seconds.” Since I have no real desire to quit, I'll just mope, dry my eyes, and give myself a good ol' kick in the butt and get going again. It always has worked.

So, Quebec! It’s cold here. Cold to the tune of -24. Currently it is snowing and it hasn’t stopped since last night around 10pm (might have been earlier than that; I didn’t look outside until then). I went grocery shopping at Accomodation Bio. This little organic store is awesome. It gets veggies straight from Quebec farmers, brings in some organic greens while winter lasts, and has musty hand-made shelves piled with dried fruits, spices, bottles of blueberry juice, and signs made out of beads and shells. Their fridge is packed with home-sprouted greens, cashew mayo, and liters of kombucha. The woman who works the register asked where I was from because of my accent. I suddenly realized that I have to speak in French again, and the old fear of not being able to adequately say all that I want to say, nor understand all I want to understand, resurfaced. Leaving the store I was composing phrases in French to myself that I could have said, but didn’t, because it takes so darn long for me to say just about anything. My go-to phrases are as follows: “c’est froid” (It’s cold) “c’est bon(ne)” (that’s good) and ‘c;est pas grave’ (it’s not a big deal’). Short, sweet, easy. However, in a conversation, non-committal three-worders don’t quite cut it. The cold has brought to life the inherently lazy person inside me. I know that, if given a choice, I would not spend the rest of my life on a couch curled in a blanket with tea and books and hot cocoa, but more and more this is my desire. I don’t want to train. I don’t want to worry that all my pull ups and push ups and handbalancing endurance will go away, or that my middle splits won’t get better if I don’t constantly stretch them. Last night I pulled myself from the couch to go to train for a couple hours, if only to stretch after my long plane flight. The entire time felt like a battle to focus. My handstands were wobbly. I fell constantly. Virgine’s hard-won block-walking endurance had disappeared since I hadn’t done it in a month. I said “fuck” way too many times and stuck with it like an angered bull. I tried my darndest to put in the work. Then I sat an excruciating five minutes with a 50 lb weight on my middle splits and tried to let me hips release the emotions and sadness that they were holding on to: the sadness that I was no longer in Portland. The sadness of missing my friends and my family. The crushing sense that maybe I had reached a handbalancing plateau and may never get a one arm. It didn’t work. My hips stayed locked up. I went home and took a bath. I curled up on the couch, made tea, and read a book.

A brief entry into my first month at school

I have gained another nickname, which I am rather fond of, because it is French. “What is your name?” the black-haired guy sitting on the couch, cuddled between Norbi, the juggling coach, and Ines, a gorgeous handbalancer, asked me. His French accent was strong. A cigarette hung from his lip, his hair was touseled. Classic French. “Zoe,” I responded. “Zoey?” he asked. I shook my head. “Nope. Just Zoe.” “Zoo?” He repeated after me. “Zoe.” “Zo-u?” Ines tried to help, “No, no, Zoe, Zed-O” “Zoe!” I nodded. “Zou,” he said again. I laughed. His gaze was strong. “I call you Zou. Do you speak French.” I shook my head, looking down and making my guilty face. “Not yet,” “I will teach you French. J’m’appelle Zou,” he said. Then he nodded at me. “Repeat after me.” “J’m’appelle Zou.” “J’fait…what do you do in circus?” “Straps and handbalancing.” “OK. “J’fait le sangles et equilibre.” “J’fait le san—sangles et equilibre.” “Good. Now you teach me English.” “OK. My name is…” “Oh, I know that, my name is Louis, I come from France, I do Chinese hoops.” I laughed again. “Zou,” he said in all seriousness, fixing his eyes on mine, “I like your name. We are friends now.” “Oh, good! I kinda hoped so.”

Some of the coaches call me Zou. When we introduced ourselves, standing on the front of the stage with nearly 100 expectant Francophone faces looking up at us from the blue grover, I was very happy that Louis had taught me how to say my name and my disciplines in French. And, I introduced myself as Zou—“J’m’appelle Zoe,” I said, “but you can call me Zou.” Often I will hear Sam yelling from across the room, “Zou Zou Zou Zou Zou how are you Zou?” He is an ebullient acrobat who does partner trampoline with Alex, a guy who’s about my height and hilarious as all hell. The two of them are the most fun to watch, as they run around each other on the trampoline, flipping, twisting, bouncing into and out of hand-to-hand. Sam’s hair is short and fuzzy, like mine, and I try to pet it every day. I am quickly settling into my routine here. I wake in the morning early enough to eat a decent breakfast and sip on a cup of tea on the balcony. Just over the top of the roofs of neighboring apartment buildings I can see the crowned tower of the school. At night, they set it alight. I get to school, I warm up and stretch a bit. My favorite time, no matter how tired I am, is the half hour I have to the school nearly to myself. Then does it feel like a church: blue-domed, lofty, the Scriptures carved into friezes around the walls. It echoes, empty but for a sanctity that still lingers, perhaps because we make art there, because we are intrepid enough to create. I hesitate to turn on music when I do cardio then. I’d rather not break the warm stillness. Students filter in and a cacophony ensues. Three days a week I have dance classes first—two ballet, one modern—followed by music or, unfortunately, a seated class. We take ‘normal’ classes a few days a week, by which I mean classes that we sit around a table and have discussions on the business of circus, what it means to be a circus artist, nutrition, how to create an act, and the like. Sometimes it’s interesting, but I find that dancing and then sitting makes me very tired, very stiff, and a little cranky. In the afternoons my days heat up: handbalancing, flex, condi, and straps. Though we only have half an hour for flex class, I find it helpful. Lisann is a tall blonde woman with crazy active flex and braces. “I lead the stretching,” she told us, “just as I would stretch. So get ready to work.” It’s a lot of partner resistance work, a lot of hip flexor and middle splits stretching. Our class is never in the same place; the eight of us mill around the center of the room like a herd of lost cows, looking for Lizann. When she finds us or we find her, sweaty, covered in chalk or bruises, she gets down to work with leg kicks. Conditioning is much like CrossFit but without the barbells. By the time the exercises are explained our thirty minutes have been whittled down to 25 or 20, and we must push ourselves hard to gain benefits from the short sessions. But I enjoy the time spent in the tiny condi room sweating with the others. The conditioning is sprint- or tabata-style, and often meted out by discipline. As an aerial major, handbalancing minor, most of my condi is centered around core and shoulders, with lunges or boxjumps thrown in. I hate box jumps. In comparison to my peers, who are mostly normal-sized adults, the black cubes of semi-squishy matting dwarf me. They come up to my waist, whereas for the others they reach maybe the knees. “Burpees?” I asked one Friday, exhausted by the week, praying that they would be my respite. I never thought I would beg for burpees. “Box jumps,” the condi coach said, “15, three times, 15 second break in between.” I moaned in despair. Besides the classes in which we only sit and listen, I have not had a class that I do not enjoy. The difference having an instructor for most classes makes is extreme. Rather than guessing at what I am doing wrong technically, or videoing myself and having to analyze a video, I have instant feedback and suggestions. I am continuously amazed and excited by the fact that I am constantly learning. I’m even learning how to make a fool out of myself, thanks to trampoline class. Before starting trampo, I calculated that I had spent an entire 5 hours on a trampoline—in my life. Those five hours mostly consisted of spotted backflips, some jumping, and the occasional seatdrop. Air, height, and the absence of something tangible to hold on to and create a sense of space, all scared me. That being said, all three things are the backbone of being a flyer—something I would like to do at some point in my career. I dropped acrosport as my third discipline in favor of active flex (with André Anne, who, at 50 or so years old, is one of the most beautiful, flexible woman I have ever met, even while wincing in pain while she had us stretch her at the end of class.) and added trampoline with Marco as my fourth. Marco is a bull of a man, with a crazy mohawk, a laugh bigger than my own (which is saying something), and a personality to match. He does not take fear as a reason to not do something but rather breaks a trick down in a way you can handle—or else, if he thinks you can do it, just makes you do it. “I don’t know what I’m doing, honestly,” I told him. “You are going to have to explain everything to me, because I really just don’t know.” “That’s OK,” he said. “That’s what you are here for.” Trampoline class for me is what highschool pre-calc was to my friend Kate—the class in which I learn the most, because it is the hardest for me to understand. Attempting rollers—where you jump on the trampo, do a seat drop and spin yourself once around parallel to the trampo bed—I continuously spun myself vertical rather than horizontal. I couldn’t figure out where my body, specifically my hips, was supposed to be in relation to the rest of myself in space. A week later, reattempting them, I focused solely on keeping my hips up and open while twisting. I landed in the bed horizontal, rather than back in a splayed out seat drop. My legs still went every which way, but I had made it all the way to my back. “You did it!” Marco cried. “Well, kind of,” he added, bursting into a barking laugh. I couldn’t help but laugh as well. “You still piked. But it was the best so far!” Another time, working on dying bug (back bounces), I sat in the bed, frustrated. “I don’t know where my feet are,” I said. “I think they are one place and then you say they are in the opposite.” “They are at the end of your legs,” Marco said in all seriousness. Frustration vanished as I doubled over in laughter. “Yes, yes I suppose they are.” My days are long, and happy. School is like Hogwarts. The weeks fly by, and the weekends are, finally, relaxing. The sun rises and falls across my balcony, and I can sit all day reading, the dappled light falling through the leaves of the trees and freckling my hands. I walk to the market with friends, go on hikes, hang out. I cannot discount the hard times, the sad times, the sore times, but in the end I reflect so far that I am so very, very happy. I feel a sense of fulfillment, and it is good.

Wake Up, Put on Your Riot Gear

Waking up in a foreign country that your cellphone service considers ‘domestic’ is weird. I use ‘weird’ in the full sense of the term: disorienting, a mite surreal, out of the ordinary. When you know that all around you the world speaks French, but when you walk into the coffee shop you will hear only American music; that you will hear the song your friend performed to, and you will think that you are back with her, watching from behind the curtain, waiting for your time to perform: that is weird.The only reason you know that you are in a different country is the language and the metric system. The little things—how much does a pound of meat cost, when the units are measured in kilograms? How many miles away from the market are you, and how long will that take to walk, really? Nobody looks any different than in the States. Well, that’s not true, they look more French. More Quebecois, but whatever that ‘more’ is, you can’t place it. You can’t tell if it is an actuality that they look different, or if it because you know that you are somewhere different and you need a place marker, something to define the differentness. You want to tell yourself that the cars look different. That the way trees grow, and food is eaten, and how bikes are ridden, look different. The bike racks themselves are different (this you know for sure)—rounded triangles stuck into the grass, rather than the cement. They are not part-squares, like in the States. Dogs do not bark any different (their onomatopoeia, for you, stays the same. For the Quebecois, that, too, is different). The squirrels are huge, and many are black—they are like rats, or ferrets, or, when you first see them, small black cats with giant tails. Every day ends in mental exhaustion. You thought that knowing Spanish and Italian you could pick things up. Learn more quickly, understand more. But you did not plan on the accents, nor that the spelling of verbs and the pronunciation are two very different things. You can read the words, but you cannot say them; when you hear them, they sound nothing like the words you have read. Some words are the same—Roller Derby, for example, is still ‘Roller Derby.’ But simple things—the month of august, the word for rain, are completely different. Août. The second one I don’t even know yet. The word for ‘here’, as in “I will drink the coffee here, not to go” reminds me of something Greek, or Latin, a command—‘ici’. But it just means ‘here’. The more I attempted to speak French, the more I spoke Spanish, the more I rolled my r’s. I could help a Mexican family find their way to the old city; I could not even ask for directions myself the first time I labored up the hill to the castle. The Château. “Vieux quebec?” I would ask, praying that I was pronouncing the word right. “Désolé,” they responded. “I’m sorry.” Apparently, I was not. “Vecchio,” I wanted to say. Italian for ‘old’. I could not remember the spanish word, so I combined languages. “La Ciudad Vecchio.” The Hispanic family understood me. The Quebecois did not. Before I left Portland, Tsvi and I rode our bikes around NE together after lunch. “The best way to learn is to immerse yourself, with context,” he said. “I will direct you in French.” Learning the words for ‘right and ‘left’ were the best things that day; I have used them more times than I can count, in the broken way of someone new to a language, where the verb and subject are forgotten. “A gouche,” I would ask, “to left?” I forgot the word for straight; often a kind stranger would have to mime with their hands as I clung to the two directions I vaguely knew, like a baby to a binky, begging, “A gouche? A toit?” And of course, I am spelling these words wrong, because I learned them as they were shouted to me on a bicycle on a warm July day as we sped through the beloved, familiar streets of Portland. Left is really spelled “gauche” (hey! I was close!) and right, ‘droit” (I was nowhere near). The only words I can spell are those I have seen on signs, and more often than not, I cannot pronounce them. I am lost amid a jumble of words that I cannot communicate. The only thing that comes out of my mouth when I try is a mixture of Spanish and Italian. “An orgy of languages!” a friend of mine replied when I explained the conundrum. “How wonderful!” “I just hope that, when French makes sense, it will be like the best orgasm ever.” My roommate and I watched Disney movies and Firefly in French (the former being almost better than the English version, the latter a sad dub of the original TV series, and not as educational as the children’s movies where the language was far simpler to deduce). He tried to resurrect a Quebecois version of ‘woah!’ that no local really understood: “shway!” I didn’t know whether to emulate him or poke him in the ribs. You could not find an Irish Breakfast tea at any of the tea shops. Really, that was the most frustrating part: to desire a taste of something so similar to what you drank at home, and it was not there. Something as simple as a morning cup of tea; the rest could be different—your eggs, no longer from a farmer you knew personally, your vegetables, all imported, ironically, from California, or Argentina, carrying with them a slightly plastic smell. Veal was popular, though I was ever on the search for cheval—horse. Preconceived notions of living in a foreign country were banished after the first day. It was not idyllic. It was no more freeing than living in a US city on the opposite coast than your family. But at least, you reminded yourself as you woke in the morning, it is ‘domestic’. In many ways, life before school starts is the most relaxed you have been in the past few months. Students both in the school and training outside the programs make their way into your life each day, from Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, the UK, Australia, Montreal, and your beloved NECCA (yes, NECCA is like its own country at this point). Every day is different, though I have been to the same pub six out of eight nights. Some nights we watch movies, or fireworks. We wandered around Vieux Quebec or the main downtown, site seeing and eating maple products. They even have a maple tea. You train. You catch three balls while juggling for the first time ever. You play cards and make chocolate covered bacon more times than you can count and you try to not spend too much money on food. And yet: every day, that mental exhaustion hits. The languages start to blur more and more together. You find yourself, surrounded by Francophones, trying to listen, falling asleep, talking to a trampoline coach who sits across from you drinking a beer, his small circular glasses catching the light of the streetlamps, telling you that yes, Quebecois is hard to learn, because five words are combined into one. Yes, it is a hard language, but you will learn it. You have to.

The Continuing Adventures of Copper and Gaby

“If I were the star of a children’s novel, I would be a squirrel,” Copper said. “Gaby would be….what would you be, Gaby? A bear? A baby bear?”

“Wha’?” Gaby asked, blinking, coming out of her hiking reverie.

“If you and Copper had a children’s novel based after you two, called ‘The Adventures of Copper and Gaby,” what animal would you be?” I replied. “Copper would be a squirrel. She thinks you would be a baby bear.”

“But we can’t have a children’s novel,” Copper said. “We don’t have a straight man.”

“I could be your straight man, and make random appearances,” I said. “Or J could be. Or you wouldn’t need a straight man. It’s not like you do in real life.”

“True.”

Copper, Gaby, and I, dressed to the nines in warm winter clothes, picked our way down Mount Wantastiquet. The air was still and quiet. The cold burned our noses as we breathed in and out, sending plumes of steam into the air. Underneath our layers we were chilled with sweat. The evening before, contentedly eating pumpkin apple muffins with date frosting, Gaby had blurted out that we should go for a run to the mountain, bring the muffins with us, eat them at the top, and then run home. Copper and I excitedly agreed—probably just for the muffin-eating.

When we awoke in the morning, the weather report said 6 degrees. Gaby bobbed her head up and down in traditional ‘Gabster’ style, her eyes stuck to the ceiling as she left the room for the moment in thought. “And you still want to run there?”

“yeah….I think it’d be fun….”

“Then let’s do this!”

Pulling a scarf up over my mouth we left through the front door, breaking into a trot, then a jog, as we started down the sidewalk. “You guys are dressed like it’s cold or something!” our landlord, Jim, yelled after us. We just waved. Down the hill we went, gaining speed. Gaby halted in front of the crazy lady’s house, trotting in place. “Hey you guys,” she called, “look! All these bananas…I wonder if we could grab some on the way home?”

The bananas were blackened from the cold. “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “I mean, sometimes she leaves things out for people…but not always. I’d be afraid to encounter her wrath.” Gaby shrugged.

“We will see on the way back?” Copper nodded.

We kept going. Down the hill, through the intersection affectionately termed “Dysfunction Junction” (three lights for eight directions of traffic. We aren’t sure what the town of Brattleboro was thinking when they created it), and across the bridge. The river echoed beneath us, stretching out in its whiteness.

“I can’t believe a river can completely freeze over,” I said, gazing at it in awe. I nearly slipped on the icy bridge. Our strides were slow and cumbersome. Running in slick snow, while manageable, left us placing each foot down with meticulous, trepedatious care. As we crossed the bridge we entered New Hampshire, home of the tax-free alcohol. Fun fact: there are no alcohol stores anywhere near Brattleboro on the Vermont side. Why would anyone pay a 10 percent sales tax, when a jaunt over the river can rid you of it? We loped along the side of the highway. On our right was a railing separating us from traffic, on the left, a peninsula of land covered in dormant trees and old silver snow. We crossed another bridge and turned left onto a gravel road. Jogging uphill our breath came in icy bursts. The condensation lingered in the sky before being whisked away by the bitter wind.

“I hate running uphill,” Copper moaned.

“I love the feeling of having run a hill,” I rejoindered. “I just hate the actual running of it. It’s like…a pure feeling, I guess.”

“yeah, I guess so. I think so, too. I still wish this weren’t much of a hill.” I laughed. It felt freeing to be outside; to not be hooked into a machine of a routine. As we rounded the bend I raced towards the entrance of the Mount Wantastiquet trails. There was only one other car in the parking lot. Everything else was quiet. We dropped to a walk, breathing hard. None of us had run outside since winter had claimed New England.

            The trail was crunchy. Our feet left crisp indents in the scattered snow and buildup of dry, dead leaves and needles. Occasionally birds would chirp. Their voices were forlorn and expansive in the winter forest. As we ascended we hit patches of ice. These frozen rivers cut through our path and we skirted around them, snapping branches as we passed.

            “It’s only going to get worse as we go higher,” Copper said.

            Gaby and I nodded. “Well, we will go where we can and then eat our muffins,” Gaby said. “We don’t have to go all the way to the top.”

            We picked our way up the slope. The only green was the matted brown-green of moss that attached itself to tree trunks and rocks. All else was varying colors of brown, and white, and grey. But the sky above us was blue, and the sun shone and made things sparkle as though we were in a fairy land. I sighed with contentment.

            We hit a patch of ice that spanned the entire width of the path and quite a ways up. Copper started her way along the side of it and Gaby followed. Carefully I inched up the slippery slope.

            “Maybe we should stop here,” Copper said. “It doesn’t get much better around the bend. Gaby and I peered forward while trying to maintain our footing.

            “OK,” Gaby said. “Should we eat the muffins now?”

            “Well,” Copper said, “I was also thinking we could go down to the island, between the two bridges, and eat them by the river.”

            “That’s a good idea,” Gaby said.

            “OK Gaby, my turn!” Yelled Copper. Next thing I knew she had slid on her butt halfway down the ice flow. She scooted to the side past a rock and continued down until she hit solid ground. I laughed. It was a deep laugh, and it felt good. “Copper, you are amazing!”

            “Well, Gaby did it last time, so it was my turn now.”

            We reached the bottom of the tail. Before leaving we stopped to stare at the wall of ice that encased the mountainside. We heard the gentle gurgle of water, but aside from a thin crescent arcing from the hillside near the path, the waters were frozen. The mountain had morphed, shrinking beneath the wrappings of ice. The stillness, the perfection, the cold—all combined in one instant.

As we ran back to the house, we passed the picket fence that bordered our neighbor’s house. Sweaty and panting, I suddenly remembered the afternoon in mid September when I had plucked a peach from the overhanging tree branches. It was still near summer then, when you could walk and work up a sweat (not that you don’t work up a sweat now, but it’s a different kind of sweat, a cold and clammy sweat that thinks it is keeping you warm but really is making it worse), when the crickets sang at night and thunderstorms woke you in the early hours of the morning with their clashing, flickering wars. I felt it hard to believe that one region, one small space in the world could contain so many different weather patterns; that something as mundane-seeming as Brattleboro could house so much variety.

A week later I was outside running around again, this time in a red onesie and hiking boots. With Jay and Megan I cartwheeled across the square at Keene State University. We were there performing ambiance circus to promote Cirque Alfonse, who would be performing at the University theater that Saturday. It was the circus troupe’s first U.S. tour.

Armed with hula hoops, juggling clubs, lumberjack outfits, and my trusty stool, we entered the theater building to meet the woman who organized the show. Shannon was a beautiful woman with short blonde hair and a wide smile. She later encouraged us to sneak fruit out of the school cafeteria, and gave us free lunch. I can only sum up her free spirit by adding that she does Roller Derby. Her partner, Ivan, took photos of us as we went along.

“I get the hula hoops, but why the stool?” she asked when we first met.

“I handbalance on it,” I said.

“Brilliant!” she said. “Wow. You guys are perfect.”

Performing ambiance circus is rather difficult I have learned. Rather than perform a single act you perform constantly, for as long as the employer needs you. I had never done that many narrow-handed press handstands on my stool in a row before, and it was tiring. Jay threw tumbling passes down the main hallways of the student building and cafeteria; in the small aisles we did handstand walks yelling “Cirque Alfonse! This Saturday! Five Dollar Tickets!” I jumped up onto the edges of banisters and did crockos when I wasn’t on my stool. Megan spun her hoops and juggled, sliding into her splits. We had a riotous time. The elation of performing and feeling like a legitimate circus artist drowned out any stage fright or muscle fatigue I may have experienced. At school, there is always someone better than you, there is always that trick you are fighting for; performing ambiance, the students were amazed by a simple press handstand or straddle hold. I felt capable, talented, superhuman. It was a reminder of why I do circus. Silly as it might sound, as Jay threw his tumbling passes it were as though I were in the presence of something magical. It didn’t matter if I don’t have a one-arm handstand that I could whip out and perform for the students. Just being able to do what I do is amazing. Time will bring more gains and advances, but in that moment what I could do was good enough. It reminded me that I am good enough.   

YouTube Family

I have never had a Thanksgiving away from home. Every year since I can remember my mom’s side of the family, the Robertson’s, would gather at one of our houses in the Pacific Northwest with turkeys and mashed potatoes and pie and we would sit around the table and talk. I would see some of my cousins for the first time in ages. We would reconnect.

This year marked my first Orphan Thanksgiving. For the first time, I baked the pumpkin pie and made the mashed ‘faux-tatoes’ (out of cauliflower, because it’s delicious and far easier). For the first time, we had flourless chocolate torte as dessert, and a cup of coffee. Vegan and gluten free mac and cheese, honey baked ham, and deviled eggs were part of my Thanksgiving feast. And, for the first time, I hung out with friends watching YouTube on Thanksgiving.

YouTube was one of the best parts.

While cooking the pumpkin pie, Jessie and I perused the internet.

“We don’t have arrowroot powder…” I told Jessie as I mixed the ingredients for the pie filling. “I think it’s supposed to be a thickener, since this pie uses coconut milk and maple syrup. What can we use instead?”

“To the internet!” she said. “What did people do way back when before the internet?”

“They probably lived in blissful ignorance of the things they didn’t know, because they already knew so many things by memory and passed-down knowledge that they didn’t need the random facts of today.”

“But what if they needed to know about things like what you can replace arrowroot powder with?”

“They probably didn’t need it in a recipe that they found on the internet in the first place.”

“Yeah, well…I’m glad we have the internet.”

“Me too.”

While the food heated up and the Brussels sprouts cooked, Kira, Jessie, Julianna, and I sat on the couch drinking hot cider. “Have you ever seen the video “If your best friend was a dog vs. cat?” Kira asked. Jessie busted out laughing.

“No,” I said.

“Oh my god you have to watch it,” Kira replied, cackling with laughter. “It is hilarious. And a perfect representation of me and my room mate last year. Essentially you can categorize everyone as either a dog or a cat. It’s just about perfect.”

Jessie opened her computer, and the YouTube fun began.

After we had consumed the food (the best Brussels sprouts I have ever eaten, thanks to Jessie, and honey baked ham thanks to Julianna), we sat in the living room on Jessie’s new couch. At that point, Copper, Tetel, Kristen and Edgar had joined us, adding steamed greens and portabella mushroom cap pizzas to the collection of food in the kitchen.

“Have you guys ever seen Jenna Marbles video blog?” Jessie asked.

“No,” several of us chorused. Those who had started to laugh.

Jessie opened up her computer again. And we all proceeded to laugh until we couldn’t breathe.

There is something about watching YouTube videos with friends while drinking red wine with mint tea in it and participating in a blind chocolate truffle tasting contest that creates a kind of family. YouTube has become the movie night of the current generation, where the entire web is at our fingertips. I felt just like when my mom, dad, and I curl up on the couch on Christmas Eve to watch It’s A Wonderful Life, only I was with eight friends and listening to a hilarious rant about sports bras. Thanksgiving, in the end, is about family, no matter what kind of family it is.

Between surfing the Internet for the videos we found funny and desired to share with each other, we talked. I learned, for example, that Charleston has a tea plantation and they sell their green and black teas online; that you can boil and eat green peanuts; we had an in depth conversation about Marvel vs. D.C. comics; and I learned that Jessie had circumnavigated the globe with her parents when she was five years old. The stories, the videos, the food: all came together to create a night where friends are family, and while I missed being with my family, it was wonderful to know that I am creating a family here in Brattleboro. A family created with YouTube. It wouldn’t be the same without it. 

Adelante!

Every year NECCA puts on a holiday circus show called ‘The Flying Nut.’ It is a circus-based Nutcracker, sometimes using the Tchakovsky music and sometimes not. Last year, they did a Tim Burton-themed Flying Nut. This year, we are doing one based on Casse Noi Sette, a French Opera where the son falls in love with his mother. Jamie tried to convince us it was a platonic love. Essentially we are doing an Oedipal French Opera Nutcracker. Sounds fantastic.

I have been cast in the doubles trapeze Russian dance piece, the music of which we are looping so the crazy Tchakovsky music, rather than being a minute and a half, will be at least three times that. We have all agreed that over the next five weeks we are going to go insane from hearing it so often.

The best part about this year’s Flying Nut? There is to be a doubles trapeze-tango piece. This means that we all have to learn how to tango.

Yes, ladies and gents. I get to tango. In two three hour lessons. Adelante!

Our instructor, Daniel, has been dancing the tango since the 1970s, mostly in Buenas Aires. He has milk chocolate-colored skin, with hair that is beginning to gray and a short, trimmed moustache. Heavy set, wearing jeans and a polo, he somehow reminds me of a refined bulldog. His smile is wide and generous, his hands thick but manicured. “To understand the tango,” he says in his rich, sensual voice, “you must go back in time, to the 1940s, the golden age of tango. During World War Two, Argentina as neutral and selling weapons to both sides. There was only one place to party during WWII, and that was in BUenas Aires, and that party was the Tango.

“I am a radical in the tango teaching world,” he continued. “You see, in the 1940s, if you were a man, you didn’t just go out and ask a girl to tango if you didn’t know the dance. No! That would be rude! You would go to classes, where the experienced men would lead you, and the green dancer would be the follow. To learn to tango, you had to learn both parts; the man had to get a feel for what it was like to be the woman. They would practice, three hours a night, six nights a week, for six months before a new dancer would even conceive of going out to an actual malanga—the social tango dance scene. When that night came, he would put on his suit,” he begins to mime the occasion, his voice dropping, “and fix his tie, slick back his hair, and look at himself in the mirror and say,” he pauses and looks at us, “’I am ready.’

And then! when he got there, he’d go up to a woman, and ask her to dance. And she’d say ‘No!’ Getting a woman to actually dance with you, especially a good dancer, could take years! It was not like today, where you ask someone to dance and they say yes, and then you dance and you could both be horrible dancers or good dancers, no! It took practice and patience, and the woman had to see that you were a good dancer before she would dance with you.

Now the woman, on the other hand, had to be 18 before she could dance. But often times at sixteen she would start wheedling with her father, and asking, “oh papa, could I go tango?” and the father would steer her to the living room, put on some tango music, and dance with her, and then say, ‘she is ready.’”

We all laugh. He grins at us and then continues his enacted monologue while we watch with bated breath and smiles on our faces.

“And so, the woman would put on her dress, and do her hair, and when she got to the dance, who did she dance with? A male friend of the fathers; a male friend of brother, a male friend of cousin, a male friend of uncle—all trusted, vouched for men—and after a month, the father would marry her off to one of those men.”

We roar as though he has just released a punch line of a joke. I, meanwhile, am trying to decide if he’s gay, or just that flamboyant of a person.

“So you see, when post-feminist woman come ot class to learn the tango and experience what it was like to be a woman seventy years ago, I say, “No! you are not here to learn what that is like because we are not going to marry you off in a month to a man you meet at the tango. I’m sorry, honey, but that is not how it works. You have a job, an education, you make your own money and do your own bills and have people, men, under you who you can now order around if you so desire—you are not here to become a woman of old. For one thing, you don’t know how! In tango, in machismo, the woman tells the man, “oh, I like it when you do that, do it again,” if he dances right. She makes him think she likes her. And he puffs out his chest and dances around the room knowing that he is in command. He is like the commander of an army. He has the biggest horse and the biggest feather in his cap and the biggest sword and where do you think that commander is?”

“At the front of the army?” we ask.

“Yes! At the front with the entire army behind him because HE is the Man! And when he yells charge—adelnate, in espanol—where do you think he is?”

“At the front of the charge?”

“Yes!” He leans in conspiratorially and whispers, “it shows you that there is a little dumb in machismo, no?”

We laugh again.

“So when we get out on the tango floor, the woman is behind her fan, urging the man on. And if he does it right, the she likes it! Then she moves in close, and makes a little sound, like ‘oh’”—the orgasm noise takes us all aback. Emilie is beet red at this point; ‘so much sex’ she whispers to me. ‘I can’t take it!’ “And when the man hears that, he makes a little noise, like ‘grrrr.’

“So, get a partner. Choose a lead. Steer him or her around the room, and leads, she is your china doll, your porcelain, made of glass—do not bump her! You can be bumped, you can crash, but you cannot bump her! You see, if she gets bumped, if the man messes up, the woman will take out her fan, and give him a slap in the face—how dare you!—the lead is always the one who is wrong if anything bad happens to the follow, if anything goes wrong in the dance, it is the lead’s fault, and he says, meekly, “I am sorry.” So follows! If you get bumped, tell your lead, ‘how dare you!” but if he does well, give him the sound, draw him in, and show him that he is a man. That is your power!”

We spent three hours with this man, as he watched and talked. Aimee was there, helping demonstrate the basic steps of the tango—walking backward, walking forward, the ochos (figure eight steps that the follow does), and the grapevine right and left. I didn’t know that Aimee could tango, and though her biceps are far bigger than Daniel’s, her grace is unmatched by any in the room.

“Practice these steps, “ Daniel told us at the end. “Because Pro-Track is being taught by another friend of mine, Jackie, and we are having a competition to see who can tango the best at the end of the two weeks that I have you for.”

“It’s on!” Someone says. We all laugh, and then disperse. “Thank you, Daniel,” we say as we leave.

“That was some of the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here,” Jay told me as we walked out the door. The cold wind, tasting of snow and wood ash, hits our faces. I breath in—the taste is delicious.

“Dude, we are learning to tango!”

“From the man with the biggest horse and the biggest feather and the biggest sword.”

‘Adelante!”

On Sundays, the Mornings, and Having a Normal Job

Discalimer: the names in the post have been changed for confidentiality purposes. Sundays tend to be crazy in the studio. Kids classes abound. The aerialists run after the single pulley points like addicts after crack, scrambling to rig the lyra or the rope or the dance trapeze before anyone else can claim the space. Those who cyr or train the German Wheel spin their metal circles around and around, daring anyone without shoes on to come close, or else risk their toes. Sunday is a mad dash, a packed house, a bag of tricks.

Except for me, because Sunday is my day off. By ‘off’ I mean it includes no aerials, and I spend an extra amount of time working out the kinks in my shoulders. Sunday is my day to stretch, and recoup, and chat. If I get there early enough, before eleven, I can beat the surge, do some light yoga, and settle in to the space. In the mornings, when the studio is quiet, there is a sense of breath and openness. There is an excited expectation of what the day is going to bring. It’s as though the studio is alive and watches our progress, cheering our successes and crying with us at our failures. I find this comforting. The space is like a dear, dear friend. People often wonder at why I get to the studio so early. My only explanation is that the mornings are sacred; it is when the studio and I get to talk.

Recently, Saturday and Sunday have become busier days for me. Last weekend I started a Normal Job. This seems significant. I am, sadly, not yet at the place where I can support myself by circus alone. I am working towards that place, but until then, I need a Normal Job. And, of course, that job is in food service.

The first weekend that I went to the Farmers’ Market with Emilie, I was buying vegetables and inquiring into market jobs. No one really needed a worker, but a woman behind me in line asked about my work experience at the markets.

“I sold produce for a farm for seven years,” I replied, not fully seeing the woman because I was so focused on the farmer  I was trying to talk to. “And I worked in a crepe cart at the market for about a year and a half.”

“So you cook?” the woman asked.

“Yes. I love cooking!”

“She’s a wonderful cook,” Emilie chimed in. “You ask her to make it, and she makes it delicious.”

“Well, I worked for the Hilltop House, and we are looking for a weekend evening cooks. Could I get your number?”

I scratched my name and information onto a piece of paper that the woman rummaged out of her purse. “My name is Robin,” by the way, the woman said.

“Zoe.” I stuck out my hand. “Zoe Stasko.”

I didn’t hear from Robin for weeks. Then, nearly a month after our first meeting, I got a call. I had completely forgotten about the job offer. I foolishly hadn’t gotten her name or contact info. Walking along the sidewalk past the cemetery, the gold and red leaves dancing in the crisp wind, I scheduled an interview.

Fast forward three weeks, after waiting for a background check to go through (which was, frustratingly, held up by the government shut down. “So the shutdown affected even you?” My mom asked when I told her. “Yup. Even here in Brattleboro,” was my reply.) I walked through the door of the Hilltop House, a bonafide employee.

The house sits at the top of a short hill just outside of downtown Brattleboro. It is over a hundred years old, built around 1850; white with black trim and a picture-perfect dining room with a large bay window overlooking the front parking lot and flower patch. The kitchen, one can tell, is similarly old, but retrofitted with industrial sinks and counters, refrigerators and dishwasher.

Robin is to train me for the next four weeks, and then I will take over cooking ‘supper’ (lunch is called ‘dinner’. It feels so old fashioned!) on my own for the twenty two residents and several staff members.

“I figured you would get here a few minutes early,” Robin said, poking her head from the office. I didn’t remember what she looked like, and I was taken aback by our second introduction. Robin is short as me, but looks like an aging Italian grandmother: stubby legs, breasts the size of basketballs, hairy arms and a chin that droops down to her chest. But she can be witty as all get out and there is an honesty to her that occasionally confounds me. She has spent the past thirty one years married to a man twenty five years her senior, raising five foster children and adopting her husbands five from a previous marriage. She can cook like nobody’s business—though sometimes the things she cooks are reminiscent of the 1950s church potluck, food the senior residents at the House undoubtedly love for its reminiscence. I like her. She brings vegetables from her CSA, so the residents aren't just eating iceburg lettuce, shredded carrots, and cucumbers. She cares about the presentation of the food; she bakes cakes from scratch if there is time and makes real whipped cream, shunning the stuff they have in the fridge that comes out of a can. She brings cans of soup that Roberta can eat because she knows that Roberta doesn't like chicken or tomatoes, and often times meals will have one or both of those. She plays Secret Santa with the residents during Christmas, and brought me a bar of chocolate "just because."

“The work we do here isn’t necessarily difficult,” Robin began, looking at me with closed eyes that fluttered open like a hummingbird’s beating wings, “but it is the details that you have to remember that make it hard.

“Also, we have to wear hair nets. But that makes me feel like I just lost about 50 IQ points, so I wear a bandana. They have to be purple—it’s our color—so here’s one to start the collection.” She hands we a purple bandana. With a grin, I put it on, hiding the hideous hairnet underneath.

On Saturdays and Sundays, from 3pm to 7:30 or so, I will cook dinner and dessert, help serve, make coffee, and clean all the dishes. I prepare the salad for the next day, take phone calls from the residents if they have special requests, and attempt to remember the various likes and dislikes of the residents. Lauren, for example, will always come down to the kitchen beforehand to place her order, even though the menu is posted and her desires are always the same. Hailey, the 103 year old woman, likes to be served first; and Harney, who hails from Norway, appreciates having his sandwiches open-face.

People may find it crazy that I readily enjoy food service. I find the tasks rewarding, the fact that I am doing something for someone (especially the residents here, some of whom remind me of my grandmother) means a lot to me. I look forward to when the creation and performance of my art does the same thing. But for now, I enjoy singing or humming with Robin to the words of pop songs, or getting tea for Jim. I enjoy the simplicity of washing the dishes and of making friends with the aides. It’s nice, in a way, to have a slice of life outside of the circus, for however long it lasts.

My favorite moment so far was undoubtably the day that Alyssa, the hilariously lewd African American resident, made a wise-crack at the hat Robin was wearing. it has a chicken on the front, in celebration of November and the coming of Thanksgiving, Robin's favorite holiday. "You have a cock on your head!" Elsie yelled. The genteel ladies at the next table over tittered.

Who says you can't have fun and a dirty mind as you age?

I know that this is a short post, so in closing I will give you a poem that I wrote recently in honor of the changing weather. It is getting cold here—it smells like snow when I walk out the door in the mornings. If I don’t have gloves, I quickly lose mobility in my fingers. I am excited—snow means snowshoeing weather!

This sky calls to me

Like a child to its mother

Desperate, needy, in absolute love

Under the vast whiteness

Under these clouds that could swallow me whole

Like a lion.

I look at the wind in the uppermost branches of the trees

--they are leafless now, shivering, stalwart—

and I wonder where it has been,

where it comes from,

because the North and the South have other names;

the East and the West are other places

that I have not been to and I do not know if I ever will

though I like to think that I do go there….

When I am old, with long silver hair that swings across my back in a braid I will look back on all the places and directions that I have been swept off to,

and I will be glad that the clouds did not swallow me

that I did not shiver and shake like the branches of the trees from my course

from my life

from myself.

Lessons on the Impossible

I’ve been struggling with what to write for this blog post, in part because there is so much to say and I’m not sure how to say it. I have been reflecting lately on the lessons I have learned over the course of my time here, for what I have learned is vastly different than what I expected to learn; I hope these vignettes can tell the story that I feel I don’t have the words for.

This week was a week of realizations. It was a week of letting friends be the doppelganger of my intuitive voice, and trusting them. It was a week of intensity and deloading; and a week of struggling to believe in myself while ultimately realizing that I can believe in myself.

I think I have talked about Jamie, but I don’t think I have officially introduced her. Jamie is the Intensive Program Coordinator/Director; she is our main coach on Mondays and Wednesdays; and she is the coach who I feel most comfortable with talking to when I need to talk to outside of my peers. I think in part she reminds me of myself—a bit linear, type A, and extremely focused. When we have talked, she seems to just get what I’ve been through and how it affects me; also, she thinks of her demons as lizards, too. She has short hair dyed with henna, and on her right forearm is a tattoo of a Salvador Dali elephant (the ones in his famous painting with the really long legs that are kind of scary looking because they remind me of a elephant-spider hybrid). If anything, I think the tattoo says the most about Jamie. She has a way of telling stories that draws me in, and her drawn out inflections occasionally reveals her Southern upbringing, though she lacks a discernable accent.

“Come with me to my ‘office’,” Jamie said, when I asked her if she had a moment to chat.

“Jamie,” I said, as we walked down the hallway together, away from the main studio. “I don’t want to take a deload week. I know that I should, but I don’t want to.”

“Then that’s all the more reason for why you should,” she said complacently. “If your mind doesn’t want it, than it probably needs it.

‘Oh, hey, look, a couch underneath a sunny window. Fancy that being here. How about we sit?” I laughed at her humor.

“What helps you when you are stressed?” she asked, criss crossing her legs. The sun streamed over our heads, leaving trails of dusty rays through the air.

“Meditating. Journaling. I haven’t been meditating, but journaling has been helping me fall asleep at night. It’s like, I know what I need to do to be balanced and happy, but I don’t want to do it. It feels lazy, somehow, or wrong.”

“Then you need to redefine lazy. Meditating and journaling are just another part of your training—perhaps the most important part, really. If you are going to do this as a professional, you need to be able to work sustainably so your body can last through your whole career. So I’m making that your homework for the week: you are going to journal and meditate this week. Figure out what else stresses you out, how to handle it, the warning signs for your dragons coming out and what helps you.”

I smiled. “I kinda hoped you would give that to me as homework.”

“I thought you would.”

“Zoe, de-rig the straps,” Jay told me as I stood in the middle of South studio on Thursday morning, fuming and raging at the multiple failed attempts to complete a roll up. “You need to work on something else right now. This isn’t a straps morning. Let’s go tumble.”

“But I want the straps,” I said, tugging my arms out of the roll up wrap and dropping them to my sides. I grimaced at the petulance in my voice. But I felt a nagging: he was right. I wasn’t in a good mental head space for the straps. I expected them to work, and they weren’t. I expected to be better than I was, and I wasn’t.

At that moment in time, I couldn’t be OK with that.

“No, you really don’t,” Jay insisted. “Trust me. I can see it in you. Let’s go tumble.”

I sighed.

“But I love it so much,” I continued. A stubborn part of me didn’t want to leave. “Why does that feel so detrimental?”

“Because we are artists,” Jay said. “We are slave to our passion. But we are also slave to our bodies, and they can sometimes only take so much.”

“My old coach,” Peter chimed in, standing in the doorway, “used to say that there is a different way of training for everybody, and for every body. And that might change day to day.”

“I know that,” I said, “but it’s so hard!”

“It’s easy to know if up here,” Peter tapped his head, “but not really know it.”

I sighed again. “OK. Main’s open. I trust you guys. Let’s go tumble.”

I like to believe that there is a reason for things that happen. After I left the straps that morning with a yell of rage and went to tumble, I found that I had two lessons with Sellam scheduled for that afternoon—a handstand private and an extra shared straps private that Joel and I had agreed to spring for, but which I hadn’t realized had been scheduled until two hours before it happened. If I had trained straps that morning, I would have been dead by the time our private rolled around. As it was, I buckled down for my two lessons with determination and energy to spare. The end of the day left me euphoric and exhausted. Joel lay on the ground, splayed out like a formaldehyde frog on the dissecting table, while I gleefully swung myself in looping circles around him. Yenna laughed. “How do you have so much energy Zoe?” She asked.

“Because I am in love with life!” I cried.

And it’s true. My life is one that I love and thrive in. However, the morning highlighted my own need to take a step back from myself and reevaluate. The whole morning I worried away at the questions inside: If I hadn’t gained the ability to do at least two roll ups in a row by the time I returned for Christmas, what would I have to show for all my efforts? What would all the energy and hope and work be worth?

The daftness of this type of thinking is stark to me now. I look back at that morning’s pain and feel a deep sense of compassion. My own expectations and the expectations of others that I left with burdened my heart and my mind. They aren’t gone from my mind or my heart but I woke up to them this week.

I have no right to devalue my own work and achievements. But I have been. I have no right to devalue my own process. But I have been. I was leafing through a book and happened upon the front of a card my mom gave me about a year ago, with a quote that I didn’t quite understand until now:

"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything, live the questions now. Perhaps them, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..."

I don’t yet have the answers. My struggles with straps roll ups reveal this most strongly. With handstands I am fully prepared for the five or eight or ten year timeline to a decent one arm and handstand act replete with all the tricks and shapes I want to eventually have in my repertoire. But straps, in my mind, see different. “You are so strong,” I was told once, “I assumed you would have these things.”

My ‘failure’ to meet that assumption has been my hidden thorn in the palm of my hand.

“Marlon!” I said, exasperated, one day after I watched Stephen, who doesn’t really do straps, do two rolls in a row during their conditioning sessions with Marlon, one of the straps coaches. “Why can’t I do two rolls in a row, when I have been working so hard on them? I want to be a guy, if it comes so easily!”

            “Why would you want to be anything other than what you are?” he asked me. “You are going to be better than the guys. You don’t need to be a guy.”

Saturday my roll ups were strong, even if it was just one at a time. Monday, they didn’t work again. It was hard to hold back the tears of frustration, but instead of feeling hopeless and exasperated, I felt a sense of patience rise up in me. “What can I do to work on them?” I asked. “Are there exercises than can help with the rolls or strengthen the technique that is affecting them?”

The process, I am coming to learn, is just as important as the end point. It’s hard to be patient. It’s hard to look your weaknesses straight in the face and embrace them with compassion. But there is no other way to proceed or succeed. To follow the quote I began with, the work towards the roll ups is like a treasure chest. What can I learn in the time between the beginning of the learning and the end result, when multiple roll ups are routine and easy and beautiful? What journey will the learning take me on?

What else have I learned? There are no easy answers, nor any easy miracle fixes. I thought that perhaps, after my excruciating stretching session with Sellam, I would see immediate and sudden progress with my middle splits. The following day I sat in a straddle against the wall with ankle weights and got my toes to the floor. Despite frequent, patient stretching for the past week, my middle split feels about back to where it was. Was is worth the pain and the panic, if it seemed to have not worked? But in the experience I found consolation in friends which brought us closer; I pushed past the panic—an experience that I was afraid of. I didn’t know if I would make it. But I did.

In handstands, I have learned so much. I have had to relearn things, too, to the point where it feels like I am doing everything I did before, and not much else. But what does it matter? Sometimes the important learning isn’t as visible. “It will take a lot of time,” Sellam said when I asked him about fixing my press, “but you will do it. Consistency, and diligence, and doing these exercises every day. That is all that you can do.”

We all wish for the miracle exercise that will make whatever we want happen immediately. But what do we get from that? We never learn how to persevere, how to dig deep, or even how to believe. We don’t learn how to believe in ourselves. I had a few days after Sellam told me that, when I wasn’t sure if I could do it. During the week I hit The Wall, I wasn’t sure if I was meant to be a circus artist. But there is a power that comes in knowing that, even through the tears and the anger and frustration, you believe in yourself (because for me, the tears and the anger are a necessary part of coming to terms with the process). I have learned, in the past few weeks, that there is a different kind of strength than just that of physical muscle. Nothing has made this quite as clear as the juxtaposition between the two, because I have never been in something like the circus. In a word, I have learned to believe in the impossible.

Most importantly, I realized this week that I have not given up on myself. I have wanted to, but I will not. In the circus, you can’t give up. In the shared straps lesson with Joel we did set after set of conditioning, and it was only at the end that Sellam had us to skinny cats. I did five before I physically could not lift my legs past an L-sit into a skin the cat.

“Do it again,” Sellam ordered. I tried to lift my legs. They didn’t move. I felt as though they weren’t even connected to my body; like they were dead fish glued to my hips that I had no control over. “Do it, Zoey.”

In an act of desperation, I kicked, using momentum to lever myself over.

“No, no, you are kicking! Don’t kick, Kickhead!” Sellam cried.

I was laughing so hard I couldn’t come out of my skin the cat. I hung there, upside down, my belly and legs heaving with laughter. When I did come out, Sellam surveyed me. He seemed amused and serious at the same time.

“In straps,” he said, “you do not stop. You may only be hanging, but you do not come down. That is how you do straps. By not giving up.

“Once you learn that, everything else is easy.”

The Wall and The Panic

For two weeks Jamie has been expecting us to hit The Wall. “You guys are running late!” she said Monday morning. “Maybe I didn’t work you hard enough the first week. I am sorry, oh man. But usually you hit The Wall on week five or six. It’s week seven!”

            Monday morning, I laughed.

            Monday afternoon, I cried.

            Granted, it didn’t happen that fast, but the cumulative effects of the demands that I have been making on my body and mind finally caught up to me, two weeks late.

            “For some people,” Jamie said as she gave us her pep talk, “it feels like they can’t do anything right. For others, life outside of circus just doesn’t work. Some people get angry, some people get emotional, others just want to sleep constantly. But it will happen. Plan a party for it, to cheer you up. But just so you know, it’s coming.”

`            When it didn’t hit in week five, I assumed that I would notice this Wall in week six. When it didn’t hit in week six, but I saw some others in Pro-Track crashing, I wondered if I had been passed by. Maybe (and I crossed my fingers) I had gotten passed over. The Wall would never come, and I would not have to surmount it. When Monday rolled around and I jumped out of bed, bright eyed, ready for my eggs and veggies and green tea and the ensuing stretching session, I thought I was safe.

            I don’t even remember what made me cry on Monday. I just know that I did. And then Tuesday morning was a nightmare. I got up and I went for a run. And then I didn’t want to do anything. I slogged through the day. My brain felt fuzzy, my nerves felt fried and tender as my emotions welled to the surface. But Wednesday was the worst.

            I crawled out of bed. If I hadn’t have felt that it would have been ridiculous, I would have crawled to the bathroom; I would have pulled my clothes on while on all fours and drug myself like a turtle with my backpack on down the street to the studio, and then I would have, somehow, crawled my way around circuit training. Sitting on the floor I wanted to pound my fists like a baby. All I wanted to eat was chocolate.

I arrived to the studio dragging each foot. Jay came up to me warily, making sure that I could see him before he gave me a hug.

“You doing OK?”

My eyes welled with tears. “Damn it!” I spat. “I don’t like this. I almost didn’t come this morning. But that would have been quitting, and giving up, and I can’t do that.”

“I could tell. That’s why I made sure you saw me before I gave you a hug.”

I smiled a weepy smile.

“Thanks.”

We gathered for circuit training.

“We are doing something different this morning,” Jamie announced.

I nearly screamed. “What?!”

Jamie blinked.

“It took so much mental effort to make myself come for circuit training. Oh man it took so much effort.”

“Well, you’ll still be getting a work out if that’s what you are worried about.”

“It’s just…knowing. At least I knew what to expect. Not knowing is the worst,” I mumbled, feeling a bit like an idiot at my outburst. The whiny three year old in me was raising its head. “Sorry.”

Jamie just raised an eyebrow. “Who else is at that point? Anyone else feeling exhausted or out of it or just not themselves?”

Half the class raised their hands. I breathed a slight sigh of relief. I may be near tears, but at least I wasn’t the only one feeling the strain.

The calisthenics that we did relieved the anxiety for a moment. A sweet, sweet moment that didn’t—couldn’t—last.

I battled anger and rage and tears through physical theater. I wanted to scream at everyone, for no reason save their existence and my own. The next second, I wanted to hug everyone and go skipping through the tulips. My mind shook through the entire thing as I clenched and unclenched my fists, confused by the cacophony of emotions that were spiraling through me, barely checked.

I wasn’t hungry at lunchtime. The emotions left me with no desire for anything but chocolate, but after eating a few handfuls of chocolate covered nuts over the course of the morning, I didn’t think that giving in to that desire would help me anymore than holding my breath for a few hours would.

I lugged the three pieces of Grover, the blue tumble track in main studio, into a straight line to make a space to tumble. Methodically I warmed up my core and my back, my wrists and my legs before starting in on the slow tumbling. Front and back limbers felt fine. Back walk overs were smooth. And then I hit the front walk overs, and it felt as though life had fallen to shit. My leg kept bending, my hips kept falling out from under me. A curdled scream came from my lips as I stopped, hit the wall with a fist, and burst into tears.

Emilie happened to walk in right at that moment as I stood with my face to the wall between the office and lobby doors. Snot dripped from my nose and mixed with my salty tears. “Whoa. What. Whoa. OK. What happened?”

I couldn’t speak. I just held up a single finger, begging for a minute. I stood there, scratching at the paint on the electric outlet, trying to catch my breath enough to ask for space, to try to explain, to do anything, but all that came out was a garbled mess of words that I don’t even remember.

“I didn’t catch any of that,” Emilie said sympathetically. I repeated myself.

“Still nothing, sorry honey.” I shrugged. I couldn’t really speak. She stood there next to me for a minute. I was silent.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’m going to go cyr. If you need me, come and get me, but it seems like you need some space right now.” I nodded dumbly.

“I probably shouldn’t play with the electric outlet,” I said.

“I think that it will be fine.”

I nodded, still crying.

I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t do anything but force myself to go back to the tumble track, take a breath, and continue with the walkovers.

Jay walked into the room just as I fell out of another failed attempt.

“I see those tears,” he said. “Come over here.”

I obeyed him. He tried to lead me to the lobby but I shook my head fiercely. “I can’t sit down right now. I can’t stop. I just need to move it out of me.”

“Talk first,” he said. “But we can stand here if that helps. I nodded. “So what’s up?”

“Tumbling last night was horrible and I don’t think I will ever be good at it and everyone always says I have a gymnastic body so why can’t I tumble and I can only think of my coach back home and feel like I am letting him down and I am going to go home and be worse at tumbling than when I left and I will be a failure and never get a job because you have to have basic tumbling skills for the companies I want to be a part of and I am stupid and I feel fat and ugly and just hopeless.” The words wouldn’t stop as they spilled out of my mouth, followed by another flood of tears.

Copper had joined the cuddle circle at the wall. “Hey,” she said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, there is not an end-all-be-all. Tumbling will not make or break you.”

“Besides,” Jay added, “you are far from the worst tumbler that I have seen. And remember how Jamie said that people who are nitpicky do the best here? You are nit picky out of this world and that is both a blessing and a burden, because you expect so much of yourself. Even at your worst and falling you look graceful. I wish I could fall like you do. You make it look good, and I’m saying that as someone who is constantly inspired by you, not just as a friend trying to cheer you up.”

I blushed and gave him a watery smile. “I think you guys are going to make me cry harder because I feel so loved. And I love you guys. Thank you. I do expect so much of myself…and it’s so frustrating when I can’t do it right. But I guess I have to trust the process.”

“Trust the process!” Copper shouted. “Yes yes yes!”

“And don’t forget,” Jay said, “it’s Chai Day!”

“Chai Day Wednesday!” I yelled. “Yay!”

Feeling at least a little rejuvenated, I started tumbling again.

The respite from myself lasted until the end of open studio, but at least at that point I was able to retreat to home. Jay joined me later and we made Chai. Every Wednesday after training we hang out and drink chai at my place, and often times it is the best part of my Wednesday. Trapeze and stretching that night were accompanied by teariness and hopelessness, but I made it through.

If that weren’t enough, Thursday was my lesson with Sellam. I woke in only a slightly better mood, but that was soon dashed. I didn’t want to leave the house. When I worked on straps, it felt as though nothing was working. Roll ups failed, switches were nowhere near the level they had been a few days prior, and I couldn’t focus on what I was doing.

“It took me a while” Peter said as he sat in his splits balancing his contact juggling ball on his dreads, “to recognize the days that weren’t meant for skills building but for play and creativity. That way, you are still doing work that you can use in a piece, but the frustration that comes with trying to learn new skills isn’t there. And then the training session isn’t a lost cause.”

I took the hint.

In case I haven’t mentioned Peter before, I will now. Advice man (on books and relationships, a fact he finds amusing because “I’ve been pretty stupid in relationships.” Apparently, some of the stories that have been passed around in South Studio boggle even his mind. Anytime we need guy-advice, we turn to the only straight and taken, and therefore safe man in the school.), Reed graduate, and singer of Irish drinking songs, Peter has become a fixture in my morning routine. I get to the studio at 9am to do aerial work before the crowds come in; he arrives fifteen minutes later often rocking out to Scottish pirate metal. His dreads are a mohawk and his lunch tin an old eagle scout metal container that looks indestructible. The mornings would be far less interesting and much more lonely without him around.  

By the time my lesson with Sellam rolled around, I could feel the tears pulsing in my eyelids.

“I can’t do handstands with him today,” I told Tetel. “I will cry. And somehow, it seems better to cry in my straddle than to have him see me cry in my handstand.”

“I understand,” Tel said. “I feel the same way.”

With that, I decided to ask to do flexibility work in our lesson.

“What are we working on today?” Sellam asked as he strode over Grover, his knit hat arranged haphazardly on his shiny head.

“Flexibility,” I said before I could change my mind. “I want a rocking middle split.”

“A rocking middle split,” he repeated after me in his Moroccan accent. “We can do that. Go into a pigeon.”

I knew from the stories I have heard and the lessons I have witnessed what to expect, but as with everything, you can’t fully prepare yourself until you have experienced a Sellam flex lesson first hand. For the next fifteen minutes he moved me in and out of my splits and my straddle, twisting and pushing and telling me to relax.

“Don’t put weight into your hands,” he barked. “See how tense your shoulders are? Relax them! Don’t fight me. I balance you. You don’t balance yourself. Let me push.”

The straddle back bend was agony as he gripped my forearms and pulled. “Relax!” he said “One, two, three and relax. One, two, three and relax. Yes, that is right.”

“Oh god,” I called out.

“What?” he asked, his voice soft.

“I mean…”

“God didn’t do no thing to you. That is a mean thing to say.”

“Sorry Sellam.”

He looked at the clock. “OK,” he said, standing up and brushing his hands together. He strode over to the panel mats and grabbed one. “Get into your middle over split on one side.”

I moved my stiffening legs with my hands as I arranged myself into position. “Hips forward a little. There. Now push down. Now tilt your hips back a little. Push down. Push, arch your lower back and bring your shoulders back. Yes. Now tilt forward again. OK.”

He looked at the clock again. “Stay in this and do that for seven more minutes on this side. Then do ten minutes on the other side. Twenty minutes total. I was late because of traffic, and have to leave to my next lesson but we will make it up, I promise.”

I nodded, my face glazed over. “Ten minutes. Right. Yes. Thank you Sellam.”

He tilted his head at me and nodded. “Yes.”

“He hates having to do that,” Yenna said as he left the studio. “Hates having to leave a lesson early because he’s running late. He will make it up to you. He may come over randomly when you are stretching and start pushing, or take a look at your handstands, but he will make it up to you.”

“Ten minutes,” I repeated numbly. “OK.”

Tetel came over and joined us. “I’ll join you in my froggie,” she declared. I could only nod as I rocked my hips back and forth, pushing with my body weight and sinking down, bit by bit, towards the floor. My eyes strayed ever towards the clock.

“Oh,” I mumbled. The feeling in my legs was edging towards a fiery numbness. Sweat dripped down my brow and my forearms propping me up felt weak and rubbery. “Can anyone put on some music?” I whimpered. “Please?” The next thing I knew, tears were streaming down my face. This time they were silent. They felt alien and apart from me.

“It’s OK,” Yenna said. “It’s going to be OK.”

My hips sank lower. The split somehow become more terrible and more comfortable at the same time. “Breathe,” I told myself. “Relax. Breathe into where it hurts. Relax.”

“Is the clock hand at the ten?” I asked Yenna, trying to peer over my shoulder.

“Yes.”

With a groan I began to remove myself. Needles raced up me legs and I bit back a cry as feeling rushed into my joints. I whimpered again. “Coming out is almost worse.”

I moved my legs together with my hands, inch by inch, wiggling my butt and patting my legs. “Apologies, apologies,” I told them.

I stared at the panel mat, realizing that I had to painfully pull myself into the other side. “You can do it!” Tetel told me.

The next ten minutes were even worse. I could feel The Panic rising in me. Jamie had told us one morning as we were stretching that intense stretches can often bring us close to a state of panic, because we are so used to holding things in and as we stretch out the tightness and open up, the things we hold onto so tightly can’t be held any more. Often times, this release is accompanied by a panic. The more my hips opened the more the emotions came to the surface. I wanted to run from them, but I was prone to the ground. I couldn’t go anywhere. I could only feel, and let the panic and the pain hit me in waves as I sank closer and closer to the floor. The power of the situation demanded as much awareness as I could manage. I was hit with a clarity of the moment as the waves rocked me and I stretched.

“Let me play you happy music,” Tetel said, worming her way across Grover towards me.

“Downtown…” the music began. I smiled, laughing at the song. My mom used to sing it to me when we went downtown in Portland when I was young. Then, promptly, the laughter turned into tears. “Oh god, oh god,” I moaned. “Breathe. Breathe. You can do this.”

“Your straddle has sunk so far already,” Yenna told me. “I wish my phone weren’t dead or I’d take a picture. You are almost to the ground!”

The tears dripped out of my eyes intermittently as I sat there, counting the seconds until I was done, focusing on pushing and relaxing and breathing.

“Forget all your troubles, forget all your fears, when you’re downtown…” I sang with the song, trying to do as it told me.

After the ten minutes I lay on my back. I couldn’t extend my legs along the floor and so lay with my heels at my butt and my knees in the air. They shook with a ferocity that frightened me.

“This is normal, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” Tetel and Yenna chorused.

“The hardest part is over,” Yenna encouraged me. “Tomorrow you will be stiff, and you will probably want to gently stretch your legs to loosen everything up, and take a hot bath, and drink lots of water, but then the following day you will have your middle splits.”

“Is it really that easy?” I muttered. Tetel laughed.

“The definition of ‘easy’ for a circus artist.”

 I rolled my eyes. “Right.”

I lay on the ground, shaking, for a good ten minutes before I had the courage or strength to sit up and find my feet.

“Getting. Water.” I hobbled like a penguin to the sink and drank long and deep.

“I think you deserve a sticker,” Yenna said. “And some chocolate.”

We went to the office window.

“Mom, Zoe deserves, like, three stickers. She just had to sit in her oversplit for twenty minutes.”

“Oh honey,” Dana sympathized.

Yenna held out a package of stickers and a bar of raspberry dark chocolate. I chose a sticker of an apple that said “100%” and took a square of chocolate. “Thank you,” I said. “I wouldn’t have made it through that without you and Tetel.”

“No problem,” Yenna said. “We’ve all been there with Sellam.”

“And I get to go through it now!” Tetel chimed in. “I’m going to go find him for my lesson; I think he’s in Two.” She left.

“I think I’m done for the day,” I said. “I’m going to go say hi to Jay at The Works and get lunch. And then go to acupuncture. And then drink a lot of tea and write. But I’m done for the day.”

“Good for you,” Dana said. “You seem to know how to take care of yourself pretty well.”

“I try. I’m still learning. But if I don’t, bad things happen.”

Dana nodded, her gray bangs bouncing. “You take care of yourself tonight, and don’t forget to take a hot bath.”

“Yes!” I said, smiling for the first time since I had gotten out of my middle split. “Have a wonderful rest of your day. And thank you for the sticker and chocolate.”

It was a relief to be out of the studio, walking home under a blue sky with the sun warming my skin. I felt shaky, but also pleased with myself. I had listened to myself and chosen to push myself in other ways than in handstands; I had chosen to leave the studio and give my body love rather than stay and push through it. I was going to see friends and get acupuncture and probably read my book in the sunlight and drink tea. And, more importantly, I had survived The Wall and The Panic.

“You survived,” I told myself. “Yes you cried, but that’s OK. Just remember: you can make it through. You are strong. When the hard days hit, just know that you can do it. And know that here you have friends who give you stickers, and chocolate, and happy music. That is really what matters.

“And, this week is almost over.”

I felt more relief at that thought than anything else. 

Into The Woods

The best thing about getting lost in the woods was Copper.

Copper, Gaby, and I decided to go on a hike as part of our required cardio homework. Mount Wantasticut, New Hampshire, (sounds a little like ‘fantastic’) is a beautiful hike. There are three options of ascent: you can take the path most traveled that gently zig zags up the slope of the mountain until you reach an out cropping that overlooks the West River and, on its opposite shore, Brattleboro. Or you can take the short cuts that race straight up the mountain. Or, if you are more adventurous, you can go off all the paths and climb billy-goat style up and over the rocky ledges that the other paths try to avoid.

            If you do the latter version, remember to wear good shoes, and only go over the first two mountainsides of rock. The third, we found out, does not take you to a path, nor to the overlook. Rather, it leads you up and into the forest.

            In case you haven’t picked up on it already, the third route is not an advertised trail. You probably aren’t supposed to be a billy-goat, considering, after all, that we humans, and not goats. But the three of us are circus people and if there is something to climb we will climb it. So we did. Panting, we stood at the top of the rock face, expecting the look out. Instead, all we saw were trees.

            “Maybe the look out is over here,” Gaby said, pointing upward and to the left. We took off for the pile of rocks we could see. We scrambled over fallen trees and nearly stepped in a pile of fresh animal scat.

            “I wonder what animal it is?” gaby said. ‘Rabbit?”           

            “Too big for rabbit,” said Copper.

            “Deer?” Gaby asked.

            “No,” I said. “Too small.”

            “Maybe it’s Pegasus scat! Or unicorn poop! Or fairy poop!”

            “Pegasus poop,” I said. “Too big for fairy poop.”

            “Maybe they are really big faeries.”

            “Doesn’t that defy the definition of a fairy in the first place?”

            “well…”

            We continued. ‘Uh, guys, I don’t think this is the look out,” Gaby said when we reached the rocks. All we could see were more trees, with the river and Brattleboro somewhere beyond them.

            “Maybe we should back track. I think we were higher than we thought,” I said.

            We turned back and followed the way we had come.

            “We aren’t going to be able to go over the rock ledge that we came up,” Copper said. “It’s a bit too…steep.”

            “Well, let’s skirt past it and go downhill,” I said. “If we keep Brattleboro on our left, and head downward, we will run into the human path eventually.

            We went downward. Gaby led for a while. “I think I’m following an animal trail,” she said as we made our way along a less-wooded track. “Is that a bad thing?”

            “Animals don’t make tracks near humans,” Copper said. “So…kind of.”

            “Oh.” Pause. “Well, it might be a water trail, like where water runs down hill.”

            “Maybe,” said Copper dubiously. “But I doubt it. For one thing, water doesn’t go over things like this.” We stepped over a large trunk, thrashed through some rhododendrons, and sank our feet into thick, water-logged moss.

            The way became more brush-covered. “Copper, do you want to lead?” Gaby asked. “I think I led us too far to the right.”

            “We are too far to the right,” I said. “We need to keep the town and river on our left, or we will go over to the other side of the mountain.”

            At this point, I was getting worried. I like adventure just as much as the others, but I felt a growing fear. It was small but it was there. It was a sense of being lost and alone. Granted, I wasn’t alone, a fact that I was grateful for, but I don’t like not knowing where I am. When I feel directionless, I feel disempowered. When I was in Montreal auditioning for ENC, I spent four days with a bunch of people from St. Louis, wandering around Montreal and training at Cirque Eloise. I was nicknamed “ZPS” because I could always find my way to where we needed to be in the city. But there, I had a map that I had memorized, and landmarks that I knew. When I’m lost, without any of that, it feels like the world is just a sea, and I will be surrounded by sharks, or I will drown. My dirty little secret is that, when faced with being lost, I panic. I cry. I find a determination, or someone to help me, but I lose my confidence in myself.

            I could feel that sense coming upon me, stronger and stronger as we plunged through the woods. I tried to stay optimistic.  

            “Wait, is that the path?”

            We looked. There was a clear, leaf-littered area just to our left. It stretched a ways, and then was hidden by trees.           
            “Path? Path?” Copper said excitedly. We dove towards it, clawing at the branches with our hands. It turns out there are far more little branches that impede progress through the woods than I could have imagined. Too often they swung back and hit me in the face.

            We reached the clear space and looked expectantly to our left and right, thinking that we had found the path.

            To either end of the strip of clear forest were more trees. We had merely encountered a glade.

            “To the left and downward,” I said. “At least we know which direction to go!”

            Stepping over low-branched bushes, and pushing past the flippant twigs of trees, Copper kept her eyes open for interesting things. “Look at the mushrooms!” she called, pointing to a log covered in red-orange fungi.

            “Lobster mushrooms,” I said, sniffing them. “Well, if we get stuck here, I know we could eat them.”

            The thought of staying the night made us shift uncomfortably. “It’s not going to come to that guys,” Copper said. “Besides, you could eat me first. I’m the vegetarian.”

            “So you are giving yourself over to cannibalism?” I asked skeptically. “Really? You wouldn’t eat meat if you were stuck in a forest?”

            “Yes you would, Copper,” Gaby added.

            “Yeah, I probably would. But I’m just saying, you could eat me first.”

            I tried to laugh. It sounded grim.

            It was getting grayer. Not dark, but the gray deepness that hails the coming of a fall or winter evening. I noticed this with worry just as Copper found a nest. She stopped so suddenly that I ran into her.

            “You guys, look!”

            “Come on, Copper, keep going. Let’s just keep going. Let’s not break it.”

            “You can keep going,” she said. “But I’m going to enjoy it.”

            I felt bad about my harshness. I peered at the nest, genuinely intrigued and awed by its beauty. It was almost a perfect half oval, with a deep indent in the middle of it. The small twigs, some of them as fine as cats whiskers, were knit together with a skill that took my breath away. But I was still filled with a hollow sense of being lost. I couldn’t fully enjoy its beauty. Soon we moved on. As we left, I uttered a prayer to whatever goddess or god is in the world that we would find our way back to the main trail, and soon.

            We slipped and slid down an incline covered with dead trees. They cracked under Copper’s hands as she tried to use them to gain her balance. “Copper, the woman so strong she could push down trees with her bare hands,” I joked as another crashed into the brush.

“She’s like Thor!” Gaby called. “Did Thor have red hair? Or blonde?”

            “I don’t know if we really know that for sure…” I said. “It depends on the artists’ depiction. So Copper can be Thor.”

            We stopped at the bottom of it, confused as to which direction. To the right—the opposite direction we wanted—was a clearer trail, probably an animal path. To the left, a wall of brush and small trees. I thought of the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, when they are riding through the Old Forest, and the way they want to go is blocked, until eventually they find themselves by the Withywindle River, and are snared by the Old Man Willow until Tom Bombadil saves them. I wasn’t sure if Tom Bombadil lived on Mt. Wantasticut, but I was, at that point, pretty sure that Old Man Willow, evil magic and all, did. Copper turned to me.

            “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I, I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.”

            “Through the brush, then!” I cried, laughing at her use of Robert Frost. “Robert Frost must be right!”

            “Don’t we want the path most traveled guys?” Gaby asked, following us.

            “We want to find the path most traveled. But we have to take the path less traveled to get there,” Copper said reasonably. Gaby had no response to that. We forged ahead.

            “Look!” Gaby cried. “Trash!”

            “Signs of life! Good!” Copper said. “I mean, not good, because it’s trash, but good for us!”

            Then Copper saw it. A Path.

            It wasn’t the same path we had started on, but it was obviously a man-made trail. Above our heads a giant tree that had fallen had been sawed through, making the path open. Saws could only mean that we had re-found civilization.

            “We did it! We found it!”

            “Copper, if I ever get lost, I want to be lost with you,” I said. “You know your way out of things.”

            “Not always,” she said. “But I’ve gotten myself into enough messes like this that I should know better by now.”

            We followed the trail. The yellow Vermont fall foliage surrounded us, like the outskirts of Lothlorien. Gold was the ground, and gold was the roof over our head. It felt magical. The fear inside me stilled and submerged itself. We were going to be OK. I was grateful, and happy. We talked with more eagerness and had a spring to our step. Soon we emerged far down the main pathway near the entrance to the mountain trail.

            “I thought you were going to hate us, Zoe,” Copper said, “since we kinda drug you into the adventure.”

            “But I didn’t say no,” I objected. “I apologize for being so snappy at one point. I’m just glad that I was with other people, because I probably would have still been trying to find my way out. I get freaked out sometimes.”

            “It’s a physical theater exercise,” Gaby added. “Trust building, you know.”

            “I do trust you guys,”  I said. “And it was so pretty!”

            Still, even when we got to the car, I couldn’t fully relax. I felt like I had lost something precious. I had no idea what it was.

            It came to me the next day as I was working on handstands. I could barely get my mind to focus on anything other than the desire to go back to bed; it was one in the afternoon and I felt like I had just woken up, even after drinking a large amount of tea and working on the trapeze for a couple hours. Everything felt sluggish, slow, and my lack of will and determination made me want to cry. What was the point of it? Why do we push ourselves to do things, and make things, and work towards things? What is the point of human existence, anyway? Does any of it even matter? I felt utterly lost.

            The same hollowness had filled me when we were lost in the woods; the same sense of losing something precious. But this time, I didn’t snap at anyone or chase it away. I thought about it.

            The day before, a few hours before we had left on the hike, I had been handbalancing in the main studio. Fox, one of the residential professionals, was training on the dance trapeze. The music he had turned on was emotional and evocative. I found myself moved to near tears. A sense of spirituality and meaning filled me as I watched him. The trapeze was like his dance partner. He yearned for it, reached for it, danced to it and from it and with it like an animate, soulful object.

            That was the meaning. The sense of oneness and being and fulfillment, and creating such emotional releases in one’s audience. Fox had such a presence about him. He was living in the moment, free from fear, moved by whatever impulses guided him.

            Lost in the forest, Copper had been the same way. She stopped to admire things, to look at things. If she was afraid, she didn’t let it get in the way of the journey. I had forgotten, and in forgetting, I had gotten lost.

            I wish I had had the insight to take a breath and enjoy the moment. With two other people, I knew we were going to find our way out of the forest, but I let the sense of fear override me. I lost of preciousness of that moment of life. I want to go back, and see that nest again, and admire it with full awareness, and be OK with the situation. But at that moment in time, I couldn’t. It took getting lost in the forest to remind me. Maybe getting lost isn’t so bad, after all.

            So thank you, Copper and Gaby, for taking me on an adventure, and for getting lost. And thank you for following the advice of Robert Frost. 

"L, is for the way you Look at me"...and Other Reenactments and Confessions, of Various Sorts

            “As a circus performer,” my trapeze coach in Portland, Daniela, would always say, “you are not just an athlete. You are also an artist. We have to nurture both sides of ourselves.”

            To that end, here at NECCA we take physical theater classes every Wednesday, for two hours. These two hours are some of the most fun—and the most frightening.

            You see, Bronwyn asks us to be vulnerable. She asks us and pushes us and urges us with passion in her voice and tears in her eyes. Her very emotions speak of the love the work that she does, and I greatly admire her ability to be vulnerable—and, I’m a bit scared by it. I’ve been vulnerable before and the release and relief is beautifully terrifying. Every week I both crave and rebel against the work, partly because I don’t know yet if I can be vulnerable here—or as vulnerable s I perceive I need to be to do some of the performance work I want to do. It’s like when Ember and Pokey, from Button Wagon Circus, were here and gave a workshop. Ember made us look into eachothers’ eyes, in silence, and the walls we put up or struggled against were immense. But Ember displayed a subtlety of emotion that could capture so much—but the subtlety itself is so hard to capture.

            However, this past Wednesday was different.

            Normally, Bronwyn starts us with a warm up. Even though we’ve just come out of circuit training and are often sweating and steaming like racehorses after the Derby, a physical theater warm up is always necessary. “we’re walking down the street,” she says, shaking out her hands and trotting in place. “She smiles one of the widest smiles I have ever seen. “You see a friend in the street, and you greet them: “heya!””

            The “heya” sounds Italian, voluptuous and as big as an Italian grandma’s bosom as she hugs you with a wooden stirring spoon in hand. I can never resist adding “Mario!” to the end of the ‘heya!’. It’s just that Italian.

            We all join in on the ‘heya!’

            “And this friend, Bronwyn continues, still trotting, “gives you a new fresh picked apple. And you take a bite, and there’s a worm in it! Blegh! Ptwey! Ew!” The room fills with the sound of curses and stomping feet, as we enact the process of receiving and eating a wormy apple (I say enact, because remember, this is not pretend). ‘But you keep going, and you see another friend, and you say, “Heya!’”

            “Heya, Mario!”

            “And they give you a bunch of sunflowers! So you thank you!”

            “Eh, Thank you, Pretty!” We chorus.

            Bronwyn laughs, shakes her cropped dirty gold hair. “And then, we come to a stand still.”

            Often this trotting, loosey-goosey warm up is followed by vocal games, physical theater exercies, or group dynamics games.

            But this Wednesday, that didn’t happen.

            Instead, we had a Group Check-In.

            “You guys spend nine months together, and often times have no idea what’s going on with each other. So I like to do these every couple weeks.”

            It’s true. We often stay so happy at the studio, so up beat. And we cover all our other issues with physical activity and personal training goals, and homework. And we never really know what’s going on with someone else unless they share. So for an hour, we talked. Whomever needed to had the opportunity to talk. There were tears, and curses, and laughter. More important, there was honesty and vulnerability.

            I raised my hand.

            “If I have seemed…distant, or preoccupied, the past few days, it’s not because of any of you. After my lesson with Sellam, I was euphoric. And then I realized how much I have to retrain my body: with my press handstand, for instance. And it’s frustrating, and terrifying, and what if it doesn’t work? What if I can’t ever do it? So the self-critic in my head is nagging at me all the time, and judging me if I don’t do it right, and telling me that I will never get it. I expect a lot of myself. Often times, I expect perfection. It’s driving my mind crazy and it won’t shut up. So, yeah. I love handstands with every fiber of my being, and the fact that I trained it wrong and have to redo the muscle memory is killing me.”

            Silence.

            Bronwyn broke it.

            “I had a comedy coach in Spain, way back when, who said ot me, “Bronwyn, you Americans are too focused on the perfect. Why do you have to be perfect? We Europeans, we get up on stage, do a show, make a fool of ourself, but meh, who cares, whatever! We go on!”

            Her Spanish coach, for some reason, had a Russian accent.

            I sank into my thoughts as two other people spoke. Then I raised my hand. Bronwyn raised an eyebrow at me.

            “Bronwyn, I don’t get it.”

            “Don’t get what? Cuz honey, I don’t get it either, half the time—I don’t get a lot of things!”

            Everyone laughed.

            “The entire bit about not being perfect. If you’re not, things like one arm handstands just won’t work! How can we not be perfect, if perfection is required of us?”

            Bronwyn thought for a moment. “I think it is less about being perfect than about having the room to fail. Way back, during Vaudeville times, comedians developed their acts show after show, city after city, audience after audience, and at first, their acts sucked. But after trial and error and time, they became brilliant. They learned from their own mistakes. But nowadays we don’t have that space. We are expected to be brilliant or we don’t get the gigs. We don’t have that room—we’re always being watched, or surrounded by people who are better, and we feel we can’t fail, ever. But to become the performer we want to be, we need that room.

            “And not every performance is going to be wonderful. But there are moments when everything falls into place, and we have to learn to appreciate them.”

            Bronwyn is brilliant.

            We followed our hour of heart-to-heart by splitting into four groups.

            “you have to make a song, Bronwyn said. “And choreo-graphy” (she pronounced it like it was two words; a fact that I am still confused by) “An entrance and an exit, a group name, and each of you has to have a solo about the things you love. Oh, and the chorus of the song has to include the words “love it.””

            Physical theater is probably one of my favorite classes, by far. The band names ranged from “Dirty Blues” to “The Mother Cluckers.” We sang about things we loved, from dance, and Mary’s Little Lamb, to the sandwich from The Works, a bakery in town, which Tetel sang about in a seductive voice, telling us the entire process of creating the sandwich and why it was brilliant.

            But each time, Bronwyn wanted us to go deeper. “There’s something more there. You all just scratched the surface. Zoe, you sang about backpacking with your cousin Jason, and cooking-why do you love these things? And Edgar, why do you love that your mom said ‘EEE!’ when you were born?”

            “It was the only thing I could think of that started with E,” Edgar admitted. He and his group had created a version of “L is for the way you look at me,” involving sea lions, ponies, and how Edgar’s mother had screamed ‘EEEE!!!”. The reenactment of that moment was possibly the random-est and most TMI moment I have witnessed here to date (I have never seen a man reenact his birth from the mother’s perspective, spread legs and all. I’m going to leave it at that and let your imaginations fill in the blanks….)

            I was glad, at the end of it all, that Bronwyn had made us sit and offer our issues to the world. She didn’t force us, of course, but she gave us the space. And sometimes, the space is all that one really needs. The space to share, and the space to fail. 

Go Get the Canes

It is officially fall here. The leaves are changing. In the mornings, the cemetery drips with fog and a chill that doesn’t quite leave after the sun has risen.

            Last year, Brattleboro got a snow dump at Halloween.

            Fall is my favorite time of year. It turns the world into Lothlorien. (Side story: Ever since I played hooky (gasp!) for a much needed rest day in high school, when I stayed at my Grandma’s house and we went for a walk in Laurelhurt, and the ground was gold with leaves and the branches were laden with gold, and the trunks of the trees, if not silver, were gray and smooth—ever since that day, Lothlorien has been found on earth.) Fall brings my favorite things: Thanksgiving, squash, falling leaves, damp forests, apples, honking geese.  There are things I love about all seasons of the year, but fall is special. It feels like My Season. And this year, I get to see My Season in New England!

            Fall also means school. I’ve always been one of those weird kids who looked forward to school, and homework, and learning. This year was no different, save that “school” now means training. It means learning about myself in ways I never dreamed I would. It means physically and mentally pushing myself past my own boundaries, past what I thought I could do.

            It means experiencing Sellam.

            Yesterday was probably the most euphoric day in my life that I can remember, in part because I bordered the line of tragedy and comedy for a large chunk of it. Sellam inspires this in people. He, in a way, creates it. You don’t know whether you want to laugh or cry, or both at the same time. You see, Sellam is old-style circus. The only way to get past pain (unless it will injure you) is to push past it. He expects excellence, and if you are in a handstand you don’t come down unless you have muscle failure and you fall on your head. And, of all things, you don’t say “No” to Sellam. He’s a burly Moroccan man whose signs of affection include kicking you (gently), hitting you with a foam roller, and calling you a “good girl” or “good boy” depending on whichever you are.

            You do not say no to him, unless you will injure.

            Oh, and did I mention? We’ve decided that, if we ever do a Lord of the Rings themed show, he is the eye of Mordor. He knows and sees all.

            Emilie and I split an hour long private lesson with him on Saturday. We were stretching and warming up as he walked over to us.

            “I’ve been watching you,” he said to me. Then he pointed straight at my chest. “Your handstand will come. Go get the canes. We start in five minutes.” He turned his back and walked into the office.

            As I said, Eye of Mordor.

            I looked at Emilie. I gulped. “What does that mean?”

            “It means he likes you. He watches the people he likes and knows. And, it means he sees things to fix, because your handstand is not good enough.”

            “Oh.”

            We set up the canes and I grabbed my blocks.

            “Put your belly against the wall, and shrug your shoulders,” Sellam said.

            Emilie stood against the wall and put her hands above her head. I did a handstand.

            “No, upside down,” Sellam said to Emilie. “You are here for handstands, no?”

            “Shrug your shoulders more,” he told me. “More. And again. And again. Again. Again. No, more. Again. Ok, come down.” He regarded us steadily. “What do you feel?”

            “My elbows want to bend when I go down that far in the shrug,” I said.

            “Don’t bend them.”

            “Yes.”

            “Do it again. Go.”

            I went back to the wall. Shrug.

            “Again.”

            Shrug.

            “Again.”

            Shrug.

            “Again.”

            Shrug.”

            “Faster.”

            “Shrug shrug shrug.

            “Faster.”

            I was sweating bullets. I grit my teeth. My shoulders burned.

            “Faster. Again. Again. Again. OK come down.”

            I cartwheeled out of the handstand and looked at him. “Do you feel the burn?” He asked. I nodded. “That’s what I want.”

            We went over to the canes.

            “When you do your handstands, you are not shrugged and extended enough. For your presses, you are not hollow enough. You are not coming from the chest, but from the belly. You need to hollow more. Show me a press.” I did a press. “No, not like that. Chest. Don’t stick your head out. Butt up. You are not thinking of what you are doing. Do it again.” This time, he helped me. “Do you feel that? That is your chest. That is what you need. Not so much leaning forward and just using your stomach. It is using everything, including your chest. Now, do a handstand.”

            We worked our way through several exercises, both on blocks and on canes: a variation of the Shapes exercise Nicolo has us do; walking along four blocks back and forth (we went back and forth at least six times before we were allowed to come down). Finally, he motioned me to the canes. Then, he sat down in a chair a few feet behind the canes, and just looked at me steadily.

            ‘Do a one arm.”

            I nodded. Then, with a deep breath, jumped up to a straddle handstand. We had been training for half an hour with him already. Before that, I had done straps. My arms were getting tired. My will, however, was not.

            ‘Stay in a straddle. Now, extend. Extend more. No, extend.” I shrugged as much as I could. I could feel my ribs popping out a little bit. “No, stomach tight.” He slapped my belly. “Keep it tight. Extend. Extend. Open your straddle through your

thighs. Toes down. Extend. Extend. You are taking too long. Shift to the one arm. Extend.” I felt the balance go as I tried to move to piano fingers and then to the one arm. I came down, panting.

            “Do you feel how your hips are trying to balance yourself? They do nothing. They stay tight. And you are doing this—“ he rasied his arm above his head and squished his cheek to his bicep. “You don’t bring your face to your arm. Do you see?” He did the correct movement for me, his head staying straight between his arms as his shoulders extended up, up, up…. “Do you see how my head does not move? You need to extend more. Let me do a handstand for you. Sit. There. Watch my shoulders.”

            He sprung up onto the canes, nimble, and extended into a one arm. I saw his shoulders move, his entire shoulder blade extended.

            Everything clicked in my mind.

            He came down. “Do you see?” I nodded, excited and thrilled.

“It’s not just the shoulder, but in your back. In your shoulder blade. That makes so much more sense.”

“Yes. Your shoulder blade. It all must extend. Ok, do it again.”

            I lept to the canes, eager to try. But I couldn’t get up. I jumped into a straddle, only to fall back down. My arms shook. I jumped with more force, held it, wobbled, fell. “Fuck!” I cussed as I came down.

            “What was that?” Sellam asked.

            “Fuck?”

            He locked eyes with mine. His head shook slowly side from side. “No.”

            “Muffin?” I asked.

            He shook his head again. “What?”

            “Alternative cussing?”

            Another head shake.

            “You do not cuss. Your mind controls your body. Your body does not control your mind. You chose. And you do not cuss. Why get so upset when you are learning? We are not perfect, we cannot be perfect. But you do the work, and you do not cuss. Now do a handstand.”

            He helped me press onto the canes. Then he stepped back. “Butt first, and use your chest. Now do a one arm.”

            I extended all the way through my shoulder blade. My opposite hand floated off the other cane block; my head didn’t squish to my bicep. My thights were rotating outwards, and my toes were pointing down. I hung there for a brief moment. I felt it.

            And then my hips twisted and came disconnected, and I fell.

            “I felt it! I felt it!”

            Sellam nodded with a small smile on his face. “But your hips were trying to balnce you. They do nothing.”

            “Can I do it again?’

            “No, you rest. Emilie.”

            And so it went.

            My last handstand was a minute handstand hold on the blocks. “For payback,” he said.

“Payback for what?” I asked.

He wouldn’t say.

I was shaking, and panting, but I felt so alive. I could barely extend my shoulders anymore, but I pushed as he told me every time my shoulders sunk, in that quiet, Moroccan-accented voice of his. “Mind over body,” he reminded me. “You are in control. Now extend!” I did, until my muscles reached failure point and I fell face first to the ground, still trying to extend.

“Did I do the minute? I asked, shaking, not sure whether I would cry or laugh from it all.

“The minute doesn’t matter. What matters is that you felt and made the corrections. And you did. Good girl.”

I got a good girl. I got a good girl. The only thought going through my head after that was, I got a good girl.

            I have another lesson with him on Thursday.

            My handstands will come.            

Chai, an Identity Crisis, and Farming

            There’s a big thing around here in Brattleboro: Chai. At the market, in the co-op, at several tea shops. The chai is everywhere.

            It’s amazing.

            For one, Chai Wallah, the compant selling the chai spices, is locally made in Brattleboro. For another, it’s CHAI.

            The only drawback? No hemp, or almond, or coconut milk at any of the beverage shops around town. Even the ‘hipster’ coffeeshop doesn’t beat Portland when it comes to milk substitute options. So, I make my own.

            But sometimes, making my own just doesn’t cut it. I miss my routine in Portland, where at least once a week I’d go to a tea shop or coffee shop and let someone else brew my tea, or make my chai or bitter hot chocolate (shout out to Spunky Monkey, the Tea Zone, and Fresh Pot!), just so I didn’t have to. It felt decadent. So, when I was trying to find places to get such things, I asked around.

            “You should go to Mocha Joe’s,” I was told.

            “Why?”

            “It’s hipster. You’ll feel at home.”

            Sometimes, when I say I am from Portland, OR, people ask me if I am a hipster. “No,” I say. “But I know a bunch of people who were hip before the ster. They predate hipsters, and made the things hipsters thing are cool, cool.”

            Then I get funny looks.

            I have my own identity around being from Portland, around working at Farmers’ Markets, around my finicky digestive system and being Paleo. That set of identity hasn’t changed much.

            My aerial identity however, has.

            I came to NECCA knowing that I would major in handbalancing. I figured that I’d also focus on trapeze, in part because of Aimee Hancock, and in part because in Portland I considered myself a trapeze artist.

            Now, I’m not so sure.

            I’m known here for the fact that I do straps. I have straps arms and shoulders and bruises and badassery. And, I love that. I love that I can do four muscle ups in a row on my own and that I have a solid back planche and how I feel so strong. I love that I can improv on straps, treat them like a very painful rope, and spend time dancing on the ground with my hands tied in the air (let’s ignore that innuendo….).

            But what about trapeze? What about how I feel as drawn to it, but at the same time a bit out of place up there? Like I’m just going through the motions? Who—what—am I, and why must I choose?

            I do feel that I need to chose. I need to focus. I ned to be not just competent at a lot of things, but, in my dreams and goals, really good at a couple things and then able to do others. I want to go as far as I can, and that takes…choices. And I feel I need to choose, because I don’t feel fully at home yet and am still searching for my place. Sure, identities in the long run are inconsequential; they are fabricated by the mind, constructed by one’s environment. Maybe this haunting fear and anxiety only holds me back. But it’s the sudden change of self that frightens me. I am grasping, and curious, and I feel like the choices I make now will have an effect on my career later. I’m afraid of regrets. I am afraid of not reaching my potential, in whatever areas, because of what I decide.

            I’m afraid of being a fuck-up.

            Give me your thoughts if you will. I will gladly accept them. And for now, I will find calm…in transplanting spinach.

            Yup. You read that correctly. Today, Sunday, Emilie and I drove out to Westminister, N.H. (only ten miles away!), to Fertile Fields Farm, to work/intern in exchange for food.

            It was the perfect New England morning for it (Yes, I can say that now. “the Perfect New England morning.” I kinda feel like I’m in a fairy tale). The leaves of the trees are just beginning to turn to fire. The limbs swooped over the pitted country lanes, creating a green and gold tunnel. Everything sparkled with sun and dew. Counting down the house numbers, we craned our heads to look for 916. “There!” Emilie reversed the car. Behind a hedge, a greenhouse spilling into its front yard, a long country house sat on a few acres of land. Flowers and sprouts and wheel barrows littered the front lawn. As we pulled in two dogs started barking.

            “Come through the front door!” a male voice called out. We started, pausing on the brick pathway, looking for its source.

            A man in his late forties or early fifties, wearing jeans that were held up by white twine and a blue-jean shirt opened the door. He had a small beard, almost like a goatee but his moustache was minimal. His eyes were lined but filled with a rough warmth. He looked almost hunch backed in his shirt. The dogs spilled out the door to greet us, barking.

            “Why hello puppy,” Emilie said with delight.

            Another woman came to the door: Lori, the woman at the market who had invited us to come and work. She wore a bandana and a long striped shirt and faded jeans. “Come on in,” she said. “We have some things for you to work on.”

            Inside the breezeway—the entrance space between the garage (which was filled with curing garlic) and their house (which was cluttered with dog food, organic fertilizer, tomatoes, and sprouts)—were piles of drying racks full of onions; a small table piled with rags and a fern-like plant, and, near the windows, trays full of pea shoots grown for their microgreens salad mix.

            “Welcome to the farm,” Lori said. “This is Jim, my husband and the farmer. I’m Lori.” She gestured first to her husband than herself. “And this is Fertile Fields.” We turned to look out the windows. Two green houses flanked a giant apple tree, These in turn were surrounded by maybe four small fields. Each was teaming with green and growing things—I could see pole beans, and chard, something from the onion family (which turned out to be leeks) and other greens. It was quaint, and utterly beautiful.

            “What should we start with?” I asked.

            “First you are going to be trimming onions.”

            We carried two racks of cured onions to the picnic tables outside.

“Oh, here,” Lori said as we stood there with the racks in our arms. “Let me clear the kayaks off for you.” Two bulbous inflatable kayaks wallowed on the table. She moved them, and we set to snipping the dried ends off the onions. When we were finished Jim came up to us.

            “Let me show you something,” he said. “Since we are nearby.”

            Turns out, Jim always has something to show you or tell you. He took us to the vermicompost area, where, beneath a layer of hay, worms seethed. “I’m getting them to move from this area under the tarp,” he said, lifting up a heavy sheet of tarp, “to the compost area. The stuff under the tarp is finished, though the worms really only did 20% of the work.” He lifted up a handful of the earth. “Smell this!”

            I have never known how earth could smell sweet until I smelt this earth. Rich, near black, crumbly in his hand, it smelled like a musk melon tinged with earth. It was a smell I could bury my face in, though I refrained from doing so.

            I felt peaceful. The anxiety that had arisen in me over the past few days, about identity, and training, and my own perfectionism, washed away in that smell. The sun warmed my back. Jim droned on about the worms, about the farm, about the weather, telling us tales. I sank into it. We went from the worms to the basement, where piles of squash of all kinds cured.

            Suddenly Jim turned on an old vacuum and started jabbing at the air. “Gotta get the flies and moths,” he said. “So they don’t get the grain and our cover crops. They get into this shed,” he taped a giant wooden door next to the staircase, “and it’s over.” Emilie and I exchanged glances. It was almost comical and insane, but I loved the farm all the more. Sucking up flies with a vacuum cleaner to save the cover crops. Oddly and intimately fitting.

            We ascended the musty stairs to the backyard tables once again. Jim carried a tray of spinach sprouts to us. “We are going to transplant these guys from the trays they are in now to these pots. Give them more room. It’s a system that we happened on a few years back…” We stood and listened as he explained his system and why it worked for him. We nodded along. “So what do you do in the circus?” he asked us as we set to work using “this fancy little knife that I often lose but is perfect for the job” (it was kind of like a pumpkin carving serrated knife, but without the day-glo orange handle) to unearth the spinach starts from the small rows of plastic trays and put them into potting trays. “And if I hang a rope from the trees can you show me what you do? Oh, wait, this is your day off…”

            “But if we see a rope, we will climb it,” Emilie joked.

            “So I should hang it now, then, at least until November, so it won’t rot?”

            “Sure.”

            “How much does a rope like the ones you guys use cost? With a hook or something so I don’t have to tie it to the tree?”

            “Umm…around 300 dollars.”

            “Oh. I think I will stick to my ropes. At least until they rot.”

He ambled over to a ladder. “Want to see my back stretching exercises?” without waiting for a reply he grabbed on to the rungs of the ladder and hung between them. Doing a skin the cat, he inverted, hooked his boots on two higher rungs, and hung from them, stretching out his back.

            “Does a world of good.” His voice was muffled in the leaf-scattered ground.

            Emilie and I looked at each other again. “I can only think  about doing over splits on the ladder,” she said. “And about leeks. Those leeks we saw were giant!”

            After more stories of Jim’s (involving various topics such as yoga; Serenity and Bill, two of NECCA’s founders; and kohlrabi leaves), we walked back to the garage to wash off our hands.

            “Go cut as many kohlrabi leaves as you want,” he told me, handing me a pair of bush clippers. “And do you have time to make tomato sauce? We have a bunch of tomato seconds. And here are onions. And garlic. Oh, the corn is a few days old but it should still be good. And this melon…well, I think it might be a bit past its prime, but take it, too.”

            Emilie and I just gawked and said thank you as many times as we could as they unloaded several bushels of vegetables on us. “We love veggies! We love good food! Oh boy, oh boy, kohlrabi!”

            Thus was the first day interning at the farm. I felt peaceful and happy, and ready to go home and cook. I was hungry. I felt revitalized, and my worries seemed so far away. Driving back home we listened to sappy love songs and techno. The world’s possibilities seemed endless. Emilie was happy. I was happy. The melon sat in my lap and the smell of the earth lingered, sparkling (literally), on my hands.

            When I left Portland, my best friend and confidant from high school and college, Hannah, reminded me that I need something in my life that I don’t judge myself with. That I can’t strive to be better in. She suggested hiking. And while I want to hike as much as possible (and snowshoe!) while I am here, I think I have found something else, as well, where Identity, and Place and Perfection won’t get in the way: a few hours a week on a farm, with my great friend Emilie and two eccentric but welcoming and sweet people.

            I am content. 

Most of Last Week, All At Once.

This post should be titled “everything I wanted to write about, but then was too tired, and then forgot, and now I am trying to make it into one post.”

Yup. Every time I try to write a blog post in the evening after classes, I fall asleep. Why? Because the work is exhausting. It’s long, and fun, and frustrating, and exhilarating, and who needs coffee/tea when you can do circuit training at nine in the morning with 23 other sweaty half-dressed individuals? No one, that’s who.

            This entire week has been a blur. Most of it has been spent on my hands or in the air.  This process of learning is a constant fight and effort of determination. Yes, handstands are meditative. But they also require constant mental focus. Yes, dance is a release. But relearning how my pelvis works takes a mental strength beyond measure. A change in muscle habits requires constant vigilance.

            The first highlight of the week, undoubtedly, was Donlin. He reminds me of my Buddhist dharma teacher, Robert Beatty, only a tad more eccentric and a dancer. His voice is soft but strong; mystical, almost. “I need to make this absolutely clear,” he said as class began. “That this is not pretend. You got that? This. Is not. Pretend. We who are here did not give up all else that we had to come here and be told that what we do is pretend. This is real.” You could hear the dust particles swirl through the air. I couldn’t breathe. The power of Donlin made time bend and stretch. But then, it was broken. “OK, maestro,” he called out, nodding towards the corner. “On a three-beat waltz.” We all turned: there was no one there. We raised eyebrows at each other as Donlin conducted the invisible piano accompanist and we learned how to properly tuck our pelvis as we danced.

            With Donlin, as with Robert, I felt a moment of reconnection to the more spiritual aspect of this work. I am so physically invested into this art and this life that I can forget that extends beyond the mere physical realm. Maybe it sounds too hippy-dippy, but the poeticism of Donlin combined with his quiet strength left me feeling as though I were on another plane of existence. We cannot quite understand why he commands the respect that he does, no matter how odd he may be. But being there in his presence gave me a deep sense of connection to the spirit we try to tap into as artists. As Jamie, the program coordinator and a coach for the intensive program said, “Donlin is a god.” So maybe he’s not actually the reincarnation of Odin, but I see what she means. He contains something within him that is not of this world. Maybe it is of his art.

            This was also the first week of real classes. On Mondays and Wednesdays, Intesnive Year meets from 9 am to 3 pm, with classes that range from conditioning/circuit training to physical theater. Once a week we have a private lesson. On top of that we have three evening classes a week; I am taking four because I can, and I still want to tumble. So Mondays, after a 6 hour day and a private lesson, I gear up for an hour and a half long handstand class followed by an hour and a half long straps class. Both are with Marlen, who is possibly one of the biggest, most muscley teddy bears with glasses that I have ever met. In some ways he reminds me of Nicolo, in his soft spoken manner and often subtle spotting techniques. But beyond that, he is just Marlen. On Tuesday evenings I have acro tumbling with Megan and Zebb. Zebb is also the main cyr and German Wheel coach, and at 24 he has springs in his legs and a cynical sarcastic wit. Wednesday evenings I have trapeze class with Aimee Hancock. And here is where I pause for breath, because Aimee is just about the best thing to happen on a trapeze. She constantly wears her short red hair in pigtails and has tattoos over her freckled arms of stars and moons. And she demands precision. “Don’t do anything up there,” she said as we started the up-down drills meant to focus on technique and refinement, “that you would not find in a Fine Arts Museum.”

            She was dead serious.

            There are a few things I have learned in the first week: Number One, the body is amazingly adaptable. If you push it in the right ways to change, it will change. Number Two, no matter how much I mentally and physically prepared myself  for this move, I don’t think this is the kind of thing you can ever be prepared for.  I knew I’d miss Portland; I didn’t know that it would show up randomly in spits and starts or hit me randomly during the day. I knew that this would be hard; I didn’t know, until I woke up one day, how sore and exhausted I would be. Because while we can guess and think and dream, nothing compares to actually living the experience. And it’s an experience that I am absolutely loving. 

I Met My Twin Today

Yesterday, the first day of Circus School (Just sayin', I feel awesome writing that!), was pretty ho hum...the first half of the day, we went through the guidelines and rules and homework assignments--yes, homework assignments. I hear we have to write a book report later on--and the other such paperwork and drudgery that you get at an orientation. Then we had lunch. And then they ran us through a two and a half hour assessment that began with as many V-snaps we could do in a minute, and ended with as many climbs on the fabric we could do in a minute. Yup. Two and a half hours of conditioning, basically. At the end, tired and needing food, I tried to explain a straddle up to a tumbler, saying, "It's like a tick tock seeder saw!." I * think * I somehow managed to combine 'tick tock,' 'teeter totter' and 'see saw' into a single phrase. 

The highlight of yesterday (besides the 3:05 belly-to-wall handstand hold that ended in me falling on my face with a chicken squak) was, undoubtably, pie night. Christian, who does no circus but instead raised ducks for a few years, makes pies. I made coconut milk chocolate pudding. At least twenty people arrived to the Stackhouse to eat pie. Six or seven of us did manna and plange practice, cuz why not. Eventually some of us turned it into a cuddle puddle on the floor.  

I'm going to go on a tangent and describe the Stackhouse. Once upon a time, the two-level apartment building housed all circus people; now only the ground floor has NECCA students, but the name remains the Stackhouse. The living room is decorated with a flying whale-boat glass hanging lamp, a giant owl that is also a lamp, and a stuffed-animal pike fish. Whenever I hang out there, which is quite often, Joel is cooking something delicious, Steve is wishing that he knew how to cook whatever it is Joel is making, Thea is reading Ursuala LeGuin, and Emilie is in the midst of it all chilling and chatting. If you can't tell, I love the place. 

But anyway....

I didn't know that I had a twin. But, it turns out, I do. Elsa and I have the same height, hair color and length, eye color, and build; we also both do straps and handstands. We don't necessarily look exactly a like, we enough so that we freaked out a couple people with us in studio two. It's not the Parent Trap, but close enough:

In my own corner doing handstands, I tried to be surreptitious as I watched her practice her one arm. We had been told by Jamie, head of the Intensive Program, to play it cool. To not stare. "It's like if your favorite movie star walked into the coffee shop you worked at and you were just like, "it's cool, I'm cool, I'll just make you a decaf." But...I geek out on handstands. I drool over handstands. I dream about handstands. So I couldn't not stare. And then...she came over while I was doing my ushka rushka and invited me to train handstands with her and a couple other people. I admit, I wasn't very good at playing it cool. I think my smile just about split my face as I jumped up and down on releve. And so, I met my twin. We think it'd be awesome to do a double straps-handstand act. 

Have I mentioned how much I love that I go to Circus School??!

Written in a Cemetary, on my phone: Day 2 (Sunday)

My internal time and geographic clocks are completely off. Sometimes, it feels like I'm in the South. Other times I hear the accent and I know I'm in New England. Most of the time though I feel that I am not in the U.S. at all, but in a country all its own, removed from things. The crickets never stop. Like white noise, you forget about the hum after a while until you realize that it's still going. Then it fades to the background. Time and place feel jumbled together and strewn about like dice. What can I tell you about Brattleboro? It's a place of juxtapositions. A place where shiny new adirondack chairs sit on the roofs of houses with peeling pain and squeaky doors. It's a place where ten or more interstates intersect but the South Main Street that I live on doesn't have a center lane.  It's a place where the meat farmer will talk your ear off--but not make recommendations about what you should buy and will only tell you recipes after you've made a decision and bought it. I thought I'd feel at home at the farmers' market, but the cultural difference there is more palpable than anywhere else. Or maybe, but trying to recreate the familiar associations I knew at home, I only distanced myself more. I am the Other now. And while it's exciting, and new, and wonderful in its own way, it's also bittersweet. I write this in the cemetery, where maple leaves are already turning. The distanced friendliness will take getting used to, and I wonder if I will keep my pacific northwest openness or if I will evolve into a New Englander.

And yet, it's hard not to be happy here. I am surrounding myself with nerds and circus people, glitter and sci-fi and cooking and tea geeks. I am off on an excellent adventure. I can walk everywhere, the main food store is a co-op, and the restaurants I've been to al serve VT grass-fed beef. It is beautiful and foreign and homey all at the same time. My apartment is small, has a rat in the basement, a washer that only works if you fill it less than half way, and a wall in the living room designated for handstands. There are swimming holes along the river, and a house that's always open where friends hang out, cooking and talking. The bar looks more like a coffee shop with dim lighting, there are three bookstores and three tea stores all within five blocks of each other. This place is special. The more I hang out with new friends while training mannas in the living room, the more I walk past the cemetery out to the school, the more I smile and laugh and stay open, the more it feels like home.