THE SIMPLICITY OF THE OPEN HEART :
I was searching my laptop for a friend’s blog, when I came upon something I wrote many years ago in an attempt to create a blog about storytelling that I never published. I read it over, did some much needed editing and am sharing it here.
When the heart is open, there is a place to return to- if and when the matters of the world confound us. This raw place of no place is a sanctuary where we can trust our perception and solitude. It is a cauldron for transformation, a source of creativity and intuition, and how we access an unceasing response of empathy. it is that which arises through the intimacy of authentic engagement.
When I was twenty years old, quite unexpectedly I retold a fairy tale to an audience in Central Park. I had been asked to fill in time, provide an intermission, for a group of young people who were performing for their parents and random passerbys who often stop when something is taking place. We were near the boat pond in the center of the park, surrounded by trees on an April afternoon, when the sun removes the chill of a long winter. I enjoyed sharing an old Russian tale that I had heard as a child. But something occurred that was unexpected and compelling. An encounter of beingness, shared, and visceral, opened between myself and the audience.
I dropped out of graduate school explore what had taken place. I joined an experimental theater class at the New School. I was good a being a mimic. I could almost pretend a language's rhythm, tone and flow without knowing a single word, I got a role in an Off Broadway show as a roller skating Geisha Girl who went into trance and spoke in Swedish. I was the only non union actor performing eight shows a week. It forced me to give up my waitress job in a Bowery Jazz Club which also included roller skating in order to participate. The director Julie Bavasso, famous at the time for having brought Jean Genet's plays to the US, encouraged me to teach children theater - in order to scrape together a living - instead. Because I had so little training in theater and could never memorize, I told them fairytales. We acted the stories out in my over sized tenement living room. Hence, the performance on April 15th where I discovered that all of our experiments to dissolve the "third wall," in theater experiments, occurred naturally through the telling of a fairytale.
I did not return to graduate schools. Instead, I talked my way into a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History that was opening a People's Center. In both situations I told stories in galleries. I spent months on the floor in museum libraries researching, reading and uncovering hundred year old manuscripts where ethnologists and anthropologists interviewed tribal peoples. I read about shamanic based cultures where storytelling was not for children, but a means of expressing enigmas that were accessed through the vehicle of a narrative; the magic of image and sound. The story was healing and transmission of something sacred. I became obsessed with pouring through manuscripts, unpublished PHd's and collections of stories with commentaries. On the weekends I would perform in galleries at the Metropolitan Museum before Buddhas on the third floor and Egyptian sarcophagi on the first floor. I found stories to illustrate the symbols in Asian, African and Polynesian artifacts.
I loved the stories, and the opportunity to tell them since I was in quest of repeating the experience that I uncovered in Central Park by accident. I went in quest of something lost. I traversed every road that I could from Jungian Symbolism to Hindu gurus. I felt I was getting closer, but still it alluded me. Then two things happened in the same week. A propensity toward dating famous saxophone players that led me to a kind of hysteria of dissatisfying relationships, led me to seek a therapist who recommended I take meditation instruction from a renowned Tibetan Buddhist teacher. During the first meditation session I attended, I met a saxaphone player . However, he was also seeking something .. He took me to a concert of a North Indian Raga singer. After an hour of utter boredom without any understanding of how to listen without words, rhythm or anything familiar, and not wanting to leave since I was totally attracted to my date (who I later married), suddenly, something shifted. I was listening in another way. It was as if I had another kind of ear that I had not used. Again , I experienced the palpable timeless plenty of being that I had felt while telling a story in Central Park.
Engagement is the way to open the heart. There is no map or compass, no outer path that takes us. It is the jewel of an experience of authentic storytelling , or true listening, that is uncovered and known during the event itself. The content is a boat that carries us through turbulent waters. as the images, events, landscapes, and characters keep us engaged at many levels at once in a moment by moment unfolding of irresistible unfoldings. We find ourselves in a storied logic of something happening. And because that happened ,something else happens.
The imagination that hears the word as immediate visceral image, emotion and association weans us further from the tyranny of our logical mind that wants control and understanding more than experience. Until, we are alive with reciprocity. The heart, that is naturally open, within us is felt. This is the the self existing vastness of unconditional heart that has been there all along.
