Last Friday, I sat down and tried to write about the season’s X Page workshop. Our 6th season.
It is hard to pin down the value of this project, this PROCESS. You almost have to live it. It’s the truth of collaboration. It is not a solo journey. We are stronger together. Cliches!!! And yet — have I ever been hugged so fiercely? Have I ever shared such wordless pride? Leaning into Maha as we watched this season’s performers join hands and bow at the end, some faces beaming, others streaming with tears. I was weeping, almost sobbing, like a witness to a holy act.
I know. It sounds like an extreme response. But let me not back away from the ecstasy. Let me not minimize it when it reveals itself.
In that discrete moment, I could see — or glimpse — at last, what I’d hoped to make, something much deeper than I could ever have imagined. It didn’t feel like I’d burdened anyone with a madwoman’s vision (which at times I’ve wondered about!); instead I understood the project’s POTENTIAL for profound meaningfulness in the lives of those who take the leap of faith and join the adventure.
The X Page Storytelling Workshop is a true ART project, truly multidisciplinary, truly ambitious, truly visionary, truly risky, demanding and hard. And. It has a pull, a light. It magnetizes its participants. And we are all participants — that’s the truth of it, and the magic.
What we experience, as participants, is COLLABORATION—messy, risky, inefficient, complicated by conflict, conflicting ideas, competing visions, different ideas about what this all means or what it’s meant to represent and be. And yet somehow collaboration, through the vehicle of this project, also proves itself to have coherence, to be cohesive, durable, bound together by a shared goal and deadline—the performance!
Don’t get me wrong. The PERFORMANCE is not the whole of the project, but it is necessary. It gives purpose to our trials; energizes our efforts; lifts what we’ve tried to achieve into the light. Art wants this. It craves an outlet. It longs to be seen.
As a vision, the X Page workshop has a wholeness to it, a logic that is forceful. Yet its component parts are flexible.
It’s like seeing my self, my freed artist self, embodied in a process or EXPERIENCE that is translatable, intended for others to enter into. It’s not remote, or special, or precious; it’s invitational. Witnessing its phases and stages, its preparatory and planning periods, its hesitance, its fundraising efforts, its nervous energy, its excitement, its delight at welcoming each new cohort, its surprises, its endurance, its changes, its learning … it feels as though it’s given my life coherence. Or that its collective nature expresses a coherence that I can only glimpse with my solo work.
We have to go to extremes to do this thing together—that is the truth of making art. Art-making has its disciplined middle ground where much of the work gets accomplished, but that balanced “healthy” working state is fed by highs and lows (in moderation; too much of either poisons the ground). The middle wouldn’t be tolerable without a dose of both extremities to modulate the flow, and help us to change course as needed, to keep us present to the present moment, the context of the larger environment in which this is all happening. To wake us from being lulled, attune us to the needs of those around us: our collaborators, our witnesses, our fellow artists, our co-creators, our questioners, our allies.
The middle ground is where the work gets done, and the extremes are where we change and grow. Cliches!!! Again, I know!
Upon reflection, I don’t want to live a completely balanced life. I want the challenge of SURPRISE, I want to be off-balance on occasion, so I can strengthen those muscles that keep me grounded; and I want also to feel so much joy and gratitude that I overflow in tears; to feel is a great gift.
Summer holidays are here. I’m sick (again). I’m worn out. In need of replenishment. This summer, I want to dabble with a schedule that invites all the sensations and states, including rest. Focused reflection. Creation. I want the whole of my self, all my parts, integrated, as witnessed through the X Page. I want my life to make sense way down deep, the way that the X Page made sense on Wednesday night—Playfulness. DELIGHT. The power of mingling together grief and joy, friendship and frailty, generosity and autonomy, need and giving.
There are layers of deep structural muscle built and maintained over time that create a framework of strength, patient knowledge, and experience from which to build relationships of abiding trust.
That word! TRUST! Trust the process, we repeated, and in the end, we believed it because it was true.
How can I trust the ground under my feet if on some deep level I do not trust myself?
In abiding trust is love. Judgement falls away. AMBITION becomes collective—ambition for mutual thriving, ambition for forums in which one’s strengths can be used, one’s gifts may shine. Ambition that is not for the self but for the healing of communal wounds, ambition that trusts in the power of story to repair. And story needs its tellers, story needs its voice; and it needs its listeners, its audience; story needs attention and care.
A STORY exists in words. But also in the body, way down deep, and that’s where we’re going when we step into the X Page—underneath, to pause and sense the hum that is crying for attention, and quite possibly inflecting our interactions / lives / relationships with hurt and grief and pain. To repair is to relieve ourselves of suffering by aligning story with its container. Stories can be used for profit, to manipulate and harm, I know, I know; but so can every sacred thing be exploited and abused. So this workshop is a risky undertaking. I know, I know. It can’t be exactly all that I’ve claimed here, not all the time, nor to all.
Like all spiritual undertakings it eludes description. It could go sideways in so many different directions; when I lose trust, others step in because this is not a lonely undertaking.
Trust the process.
I believe. Story heals like nothing else on planet earth. Handled with attention and care, story is holy. I believe that.
xo, Carrie