What is real
Connecting through story
I had a lovely walk down the Highline this week, the trees abloom with pink and purples, offsetting the many man made sculptures along the way. The world seems as mad as ever, the talking heads in the little glowing rectangle we carry with us everywhere no longer make any sense. Heal! Buy! Hate! Hurry! Fortunately, I was walking to meet my friend the storyteller Laura Simms, who knows more than anyone, how to pull the soul away from surface madness and into the depths of true meaning and hope. We had a date to look through some of her archival photographs which I added to her interview from February that I am so excited to share with you at last.
During our recorded conversation, we discuss Laura’s childhood in Brooklyn as the daughter of a concert pianist descended from Romanian rabbis and how the influence of jazz during her teenage years, watching Nina Simone play the piano at the Village Vanguard and listening to the sounds of Pharaoh Sanders while working as a rollerskating waitress on the Bowery, led her to seek a life of continual artistic revelation. As a young storyteller, Laura studied dharma arts with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and myth with Joseph Campbell. She has traveled the world telling stories, helping people in crisis reconnect to their souls, by sharing and listening to mythic tales.
We talked about the importance of doing the work you feel called to do even if it makes no sense to anyone else, to follow the song lines of your own life even when the challenges of the practical world are jockeying for attention The art we seek and the art we create is what nourishes. As Laura reminds us “Artists also create the possibility where you can refresh yourself, it’s like a sanctuary. You go into the theater and something happens and when you leave you feel refreshed so that you can go back into the world, refreshed. That is the role of ritual and of the theater, that has always been the role. You reconnect with something.” We are seeking connection, to each other and to ourselves, that cannot be embodied just by staring at a little glowing box which grabs our attention yet does not refresh. We need to see each other and be seen, to know that we are not alone, that despite the horrors on a global scale, there is a heart and a soul in each one of us that will see us through. And if so many world leaders seem divorced from the preciousness of every human soul, all the more important that we connect with ours.
To this end, last Sunday, I spent the day in an anonymous room on 38th street, meditating with a group of strangers, a little power wash for a brain that likes to spin out in several different directions at once. Then on Monday, I spoke at a 12 step meeting I belong to, sharing the tools I use to navigate life’s challenges that no one can escape. Later on in the week, I listened to another person’s story, a grizzled Irish lawyer, who had overcome several traumas and I felt a rush of energy move through me at his vulnerability and willingness to share, cracking open several calcified stones in my chest that I hadn’t realized were there. Afterwards, I felt a lightness of being but also a crackling of new energy, that could easily have been mistaken for anxiety if I hadn’t been here many times before. I can often mistake new energy for fear as my body and mind adjust to a new way of being and thinking, traveling down into a vast internal landscape with seemingly no end. But this new energy brought me to several new helpful realizations about the projects I am working on, leading me in promising new directions. I find that in suppressing emotions, I suppress ideas. If I let the emotions move through me, the sad, the bad, and the good, everything flows betters, my work, my energy, my sense of self.
After the meeting, I wandered through the farmer’s market for a reward. Big fat pinky red radishes were this week’s star and I devoured several of them with butter, thyme and salt, as soon as I got home. This is how we live, sharing our little pleasures and our big, life stories, unseen until their retelling, looking toward each other for inspiration on how to navigate our unknowable future by creating and connecting in the present.
I hope you will enjoy listening to Laura as much as I do. Her sixty year career as a storyteller and her compassionate and thoughtful approach to life is tremendously inspiring to me.