Happy Birthday Teisha

Written 8/4/2010, the day after her forty-first birthday.Three a.m. and I just awoke from the most wonderful, dramatic dream in which I was the actress who now understood the irony of the responses of the other actors because I was one of them and I fit right in and understood why the lines of the movie played by the people who were in them were so, inescapably funny and right on.I was on the inside. I was part of the team that really knew what it was that was happening as we acted out something and nailed it under the pressure to nail it and felt how good that felt.  It was powerful to be a part of something that offered clarity on who we really are through the act of performing something that communicated something about who we are being really good -- at being someone else who was actually ourselves.I was playing the part of a woman who was playing the part of an actress who was destined to win because of the talent she had because she knew she was going to die and could give it all she got and this just fueled each new scene with a sense that it wasn’t a question of how would the story  end just of when. The part about winning the part and the connection to people and the sudden inescapable humor of it all became part of what made it possible to step into the work and play the part. And even though I was going to die in the end, which I already knew through experience, I showed up and nailed it anyway. Out of the park. Into a world that had been waiting for me for a long time. I felt at home. I felt like myself and there was no more question of if and the certain unfaltering affirmation of when and the startling invincible truth that made it possible to shine so bright.In this dream I was right on time. Right on time and on. It felt so powered from inside and so good and I felt so alive as if this was me doing what I was supposed to do and the fact of my coming death at some point did not kill me but made me who I had always been. More of the best of my potential. I was acting but I was not faking it. I had become who I had always been in the scenes that had played out but now offered a steep and stunning insight into the cause of my affliction and my way of using it to become what I already was.There were lines to be delivered that felt eager making their way out of my being, there were moments when I sang what had to be sung and I had the wearwithal inside of me to bring out the vapid emotion because of all I had been through making all that I had been through something that was meant to be for the sake of this moment of true connection to myself. It was a dream of feeling so connected to what I was born to be connected to. In the dream I didn’t feel famous for being looked at but connected to the souls of other people who knew where I was coming from. I was communicating for the energy that was already in the scene. I was sitting inside the vision of realizing the act of being alive with the knowing that it would all be over but still be done. It was a feeling of doing that I was meant to do while I was here on earth and it felt deeply rewarding and relievingly, powerfully true.I was not pushing against anything or anyone I was just being, undeniably, my own being playing the part of someone else. I was who I was intended to become with the words and expectations cured from someone else’s being. Scenes and songs and words and looks and energy cascading through me out into the world and the gentle nodding of heads and I was completely out of myself which made me completely in myself at the same time.The act of playing the part of someone else gave me and indelible sense of being myself. The act of not being me for a moment on the stage was me. It felt so good to be me by being the electric force of someone else. I knew all the lyrics and all the lines and the energy funneled in and out of me and it felt so natural in this dream that came the night of one of the most magical birthdays of my life.