Every Day in May
Week 1
This month I’m doing a little thing I’ve called Every Day in May, where I’m posting and writing a little something over in instgram. I’ll collect the week’s worth and stick them here as well. Since these posts will effectively be up and free for everyone on IG, I’m opening the weekly emails to all subscribers, and will be offering paid subscribers a few extra midweek treats.
May is only a couple days old, so this one is a little short, but here we go!
Thanks for being here.
One of my favorite stories is when Jesus has a dinner party for all his closest friends. The dude literally fills them up with bread and wine, takes them outside in the cool evening to the garden, asks them to watch and pray while he goes off by himself for a bit and then gets so annoyed when he returns to find them dozing off. A belly full of bread and wine is grounds for a nap, full stop, let alone all that plus chilling with your best pals while touching grass during a cool evening with a gentle breeze. Now we’re getting lectured?! Feels like a set up.
I think it was because everyone got played that night. One of the reasons I like this story so much is because it shows the deep humanity of divinity and the deep divinity within humanity. You see, Jesus was waiting too, but he has more context than his friends did. He knew the timeline, which meant he could choose what he would do with the time while it passed. He threw a last supper, called out a betrayal within his inner circle, got so stressed praying his hail-mary-are-you-sure-God-that-we-absolutely-can’t-skip-this-next-part prayer that he sweat blood, and yelled at his friends for not being there for him in the way he wanted them to be.
I can’t say I’d have done much different if it had been me - or when it is me, and I’m stressed and anxious knowing something uncomfortable is about to happen but not being able to do anything to change it or stop it and not being able to explain it to the people around me in a way they could really understand no matter how hard I try.
I’m also really familiar with the friend position; of trusting in Something Greater to guide me, doing my best to follow along and still ending up getting told I’m not doing it right. How often have I been able to look back, smack my forehead, and say with (often misplaced) shame: Of course it’s all so obvious now, I should have known.
Waiting is difficult no matter how much context we hold or how much is missing. It’s often boring, but can also be painful, scary, lonely, and always lasts way too fuc(<ing long no matter how much time does or doesn’t pass. People get annoyed at us if they think we’re not waiting the right way.
When we’re plugged into our centers…the place inside that connects us with our Something Greaters, we can know whether we’re waiting with purpose or not, even and especially when we basically have no idea what’s going on, or when others tell us we’re doing it wrong, or when we’re miserable, looking to escape the inevitable, and so overwhelmed by stress that we’re being jerks to our nearest and dearest.
Wait for what? The illumination of the inner green man signaling our next steps whether we can see them coming or not.
There is route I walk frequently and it gets me from my neighbourhood to the next one over and it takes me through a greenspace lined with trees and benches and flower beds. As I enter the park, there are three choices of path: the first is direct, the second is the scenic route, and the third is the long way, at least if home is where I’m heading. I’ve taken each route multiple times and my choice is always made in the moment, chosen on a whim or by the more mundane necessities of being in a body that needs tending or a schedule that needs minding.
This is a place I usually breeze through, even if I take the long way I keep moving, but today I was invited to sit on the grass under a tree for awhile. I can’t really explain the invitation, but it had something to do with the combination of that feeling in the air right before the rain moves in and the quality of the light in a rapidly changing sky.
I accepted the invitation by lying on my back atop a lush pile of grass, and let the tree branches above attempt to hypnotise me with their back and forth, back and forth movements. Maybe they were successful in their attempt because in a blink, 25 or so minutes had passed and the wind had gone from the warning whips of rain-coming-within-the-hour to the real pushing-you-home-as-it-pulls-in-heavy-clouds type.
Not all invitations from these kinds of intangible places are profound. Sometimes nothing “happens,” and other times “nothing” happens. And we all know the difference between the two even if we can’t really articulate it. It’s always just right now, no matter what else we might be able to make of a moment.
I got up just in time to make it out from under the canopy to meet the first raindrops, and they plopped their soft, fat, selves all over my head and my coat and my shoes as I walked the rest of the way home.
Fringe Cringe Fundraising
I’m doing a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and that means I’ll need to wave this cringy little fundraising flag for the next several months. Since the beginning of time, creatives and artists of all types have been waving similar flags within their communities. If you know any cash-solvent patrons looking for creatives to support with loads of money and resource and connections, I’d be happy to bother them instead of you.
https://www.paypal.me/baerjenna
https://wise.com/pay/me/jenniferlaurenb
Every day (except Mondays) from 8 August to 30 August at 3:45pm I’ll be performing a show at a venue called The Outhouse. I’m pretty sure this is where they put new performers when they’re willing to give them a shot but still think they’ll probably stink.
The working title of my show is The Spider Witches of Appalachia, and it’ll be listed as theatre but delivered mostly in a traditional oral storytelling style due to the fact that the venue is a bar that is willing to set up the barest black box style theatre situation in one corner (this is every Fringe venue unless you’re already famous and can fill an actual theatre).
The story is about five generations of women in my family, and it explores the ways we pass things to and through each other and what happens to those transmissions when connections are broken or fragmented.
My biggest costs now will be for advertising and printing because I am solely responsible for gathering all of my own audiences for 20 performances. Fringe flyers and posters are already starting to go up around the city, just a few here and there for the big names with big agencies and big budgets and big ticket prices. This is not quite the echelon I’m working in yet, so it’ll be up to me to start plastering my own face on any available square inch of city I can find. Then, in August, I’ll be out on the streets with the other thousands of artists, and/or the folks they hire to do the flyering, handing out flyers to anyone who will take them, trying to convince folks to go off the beaten path up to my little venue to hear my little story.
So here I am, posting the QR codes and links to Paypal and Venmo and Wise, and hoping you’ll help me print my flyers.
Isn’t this so insane?! Thank you for being here. I love you.