Hold on to Nothing

Christmas came with palm trees and more torrential downpours this year: a little disorienting, but we still managed to have a pretty festive celebration at the retreat. On Saturday, I performed a play I’ve been a longtime fan of: a stand-up style monologue by David Sedaris entitled “The Santaland Diaries,” Sedaris’ ode to holiday consumerism and chaotic insanity through the eyes of a somewhat sarcastic elf at Macy’s. I was nervous to perform. It’s been over two years since I’ve been on a stage, trying to hold an audience’s attention. In the interim, my body’s undergone an immense transformation. More nerve-wracking was working solo in a new place where I know very few people. In New York, I’d have had my base of talented directors and designers to collaborate with, not to mention at least some semblance of a stage manager. Here, I was a one man actor/director/designer/producer. Oy.

The night before I was set to perform, I was a wreck. Nothing about the play felt right. I had performed it for several people; it felt dry, contrived and—worst of all—dishonest. If there’s one thing I pride myself on as an actor, it’s being honest. I was anxious to make a good impression on new friends, and worried they’d be bored and uninterested. So I filled my performance with a lot of distractive gimmicks. It was obvious during the rehearsal that all this extraneous work took focus from the heart of the piece; the moments where it really worked had been simple moments when I was just sitting with friends, telling a good story. I went swimming that night. It’s become one of my favorite things to do here. Ear plugs and goggles make me relatively gone from the world, so I glided under the stars and the moon, back and forth, meditating. In a flash, I knew what I needed to do to make the piece work. It was something I had written on the front of the script. “Hold on to nothing.”

The next day was spent turning the performance space, a giant living room-style area in the upstairs of one of the communal spaces, or Hales, into a Christmas lounge. A few good friends and I went out of our way to make it a cozy, intimate lounge with small tables, candles, sofas, pillows, Christmas lights and hot chocolate and freshly baked cookies to boot. When I entered to perform, I grabbed a stool and took it to the center ring. I told the audience what Christmas meant to me. It’s a time of giving gifts of self. The community at Kalani had given me the gift of a place to rest and restore. This story was my gift back. And then I shared, simply and joyfully, the story of the elf at Macy’s. No work, no effort. I stood when I needed to stand, drank water when I needed a drink. I stayed honest. At the end of the night, people left with bellies aching from laughter, and a few had tears in their eyes. The warmth it generated, when I got over myself and decided to share a story out of joy instead of fear, has amazed me over the last few days. And I take great pride in knowing that I had everything to do with that.

Next up: how about a dramatic reading of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” set in this monsoon?

After the Honeymoon

I’m beginning to feel settled into my new home in the jungles of Puna, Hawaii, though not without an unsettling welcome from the island’s grand dame, the goddess Pele. Just this last week, we experienced torrential downpours for four days straight. Nothing stayed dry during the monsoon, and I reluctantly sent a few choice items (read: leather jacket) back to the mainland with my brother Skip, who had helped me move out here. Pele and her unpredictability have a way of whittling down your needs to the basic necessities. I learned this time back to bring only items that, while dear to me, could be sacrificed to the weather—hot and muggy or wet and mildewed—if needs be.

It’s a very different experience to be here with the intention of making this place ‘home’ for the next few years, rather than just passing through on holiday. Before, when I was here for a visit in August, I felt free and open. Now, I feel scared and unsure of who to trust. I’m daunted by how little I know of people and how little they know of me. When Skip departed for Salt Lake City a few days ago, I felt my stomach sink. See, I have a confession to make. I’ve never actually traveled somewhere completely new on my own. I always seem to attract a flock of friends or a comrade or two. This time, it’s only me. What makes the situation even more interesting are the events of the last year and a half. I don’t wear the scars of intensive chemotherapy very visibly, but I ache and yearn sometimes for others to grasp what I have gone through. It is the quiet isolation that comes with this experience: the knowledge that ultimately very few people truly know what you’re going through. It feels as though I spent a year marooned on a distant planet and suddenly I’ve plummeted back to earth, an earth that continued rotating just as always without my presence. I struggle to articulate my experience. On more than one occasion, I’ve sat with people I’m beginning to become acquainted with and flashed back in my mind to moments throughout my treatment: pancreatitis, the painfully long hospital stays, vomiting neon yellow goop into the toilet over and over and over and over again. These moments, painful as they may be to recall, have secured my identity for a while, and oddly enough, I find myself missing the cruel comfort of my chemo routine. I’ve moved somewhere where no one knows anything about my past. My surroundings feel as new as I do.

It is not what I had imagined it would be. I met and fell in love with this place. I spent months building up the fantasy of it all in my head, only to find upon returning that I have no idea what this place is, nor does it have any idea who I am. Our identities are unknown to one another, an exciting but terrifying realization. Truthfully, the only way to change that is to simply get to know one another, the island and me, apart from the fantasy. I wait patiently at the precipice of understanding, waiting to dive in and begin to piece together my new environment and a new identity for myself, to adapt and allow myself to be changed and affected by all of this, in hopes that someday soon I will be able to look around and call Puna ‘home.’