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Circus Arts, Our Storied Lives, Radical Acceptance, Vulnerablity, and Finding Joy in the Meantime (and “Talking Heads”, too). “Time Isn’t Holding Us.” The Talking Heads And you may say to yourself, “My God, What have I done?” – The Introduction It was close to a year ago, bright and early one Saturday morning, that I found myself standing at a scaffold, or plank, leaning forward over a net that seemed to be thousands of feet below me. I had a tight belt around my waist, which served as a harness supposedly to keep me safe – that was the idea anyway. Some guy I had just met was standing with me on the scaffold, holding a metal loop attached to the back of the belt I was wearing. I was also somehow belayed to a person standing below me on the ground to the side of the net. As I leaned forward, looking down into what seemed like an endless gulf, to a barely visible net, this guy I had just met seemed to be the only thing keeping me from falling to my death. I looked a
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The Whole is Greater than the Sum of It’s Parts: Part II – Kintsugi, Our Broken Parts, Inside-Out and Outside-In Kintsugi (“golden joinery”) is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Wikipedia Kintsugi: The art of repairing metal with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken T he epiphany: It was close to 25 years ago when I had an epiphany that has since helped to guide me in my life. This epiphany came in the form of advice from a man whose identity and name I never knew, until maybe recently. It was a dark night the first time I met him. I started out alone. I was feeling particularly fuzzy this night, as I walked around the apartment I was renting. It seemed as if I was exploring my apartment for the first t
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The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts: Part I - Body Image, Our Thoughts, and the Art of Sculpting

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Fall on the Mountain by Anne Rule-Thompson I recently visited my friend Anne, who is a figurative sculptor.   When I arrived at her studio, she was in the process of sculpting the upper portion of a human figure. She was working on the clavicle, the long bone that runs from the shoulder blade to the sternum. “I hope I am not interrupting your flow,” I said. She responded, “No. Not at all.” She went on to say that my arrival was helpful, because she was really needing to step away from her piece for a moment…that she had been so focused on the clavicle, it was starting to look like part of a bicycle to her. She then stepped back to take a look at her entire creation. “That is the difficult thing about sculpting,” she said. “Sometimes you can get so over-focused on the details that you lose sight of the big picture. As I was sculpting, I kept thinking that this clavicle is really just looking like a bicycle part, but after I stepped back for a minute and looked at t
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