The daughter of actors

Ever since I was a child, I knew that the inner life was real. My folks, who were both actors, often practiced lines in the living room, talking animatedly to the air and nodding in response to unseen companions. I was drawn right into this. By the time I turned 6, it was often my to job read along with scripts and be sure my parents were saying their lines correctly. I also understood from a very early age that my family's financial security came from my father's ability to captivate people and move them. The crests and swells of other people's emotions were not ethereal, passing fancies. They paid for our home, our cars, and later on, they paid for my expensive college education.

Most performers can feel the emotions of a crowd, and they know clearly when an audience has offered up its heart, and when it bristles with impatience. Even skilled, experienced performers sometimes fail to move their audiences, but my parents could not afford to do that very often. They were not abstract artists. Their success depended on whether people could understand them and feel what they felt. This was perfectly clear to me from an early age.

My first language is still the charged sparks of awareness and emotion, the language in which my father earned his living. In addition to feeling the emotions of an audience, as most performers do, I feel smilar electric movements almost whenever I am able to quiet myself and listen. Mostly, I feel the movement of the Holy Spirit and I feel the almost magnetic awareness of plants, but I know that the world is teeming with more voices and motion.

Listening to those voices is my job. This became clear to me over and over again, even before my faith was deep enough to guide me. In partifular, I remember one night many years ago when I left an audition on a summer evening and found that I had been unaware of a thunderstorm on the horizon. The fragrant air was heavy, and the pink-tinged sky was swollen and streaked with lightning. Nothing was more important on that night than standing in awe of that storm, but I had missed much of it. I knew at that time that if I could not find a way to greater intimacy with the natural world, part of my heart would always be broken.

So I am trying to become a farmer, in part because I don't want to miss another thunderstorm. I am hoping that the disappointments, joys and exhaustion of trying to work with the land will give me intimacy with the fields and skies. It is a messy, often painful intimacy, but I am willing to let it change me, and I am willing to be wrong. I am also willing to be filled with wild, inexhaustible joy, and sometimes, already, I am.

It is becoming clear to me that the other part of my job is to write about my experiences of the Spirit. On a gut level, this feels dangerous. I know that when I write about listening to plants, then many people writes me off as nutty before they understand what I'm trying to say. A voice rises up from the place where my spine meets my skull and shrieks that this means starvation and abandonment! I hush that voice and roll my eyes before lamenting that nobody can benefit from writing that they cannot understand.

When I told these things to my gentle husband, he almost scolded me. “You are having a deep spiritual experience, and you are worried about whether you are being a good enough artist?” he asked, and then he pointed out that arts and ego can be entwined. I knew he was right. In the Bible, too, I found a subtle rebuke as I landed on the passage that said not everyone can understand spiritual messages. It doesn't mention anywhere in there that a message should be silenced because it might not be understood.

I am so grateful that I grew up as the daughter of actors, but I believe God has called me to other work, and so reluctantly, I am opening my tight grasp to let the wind blow away a little bit of what I thought was wisdom. Bit by bit, as I let go, I find myself less afraid.