My Story Of Falling In Love With Acting
My story of falling in love with acting
My childhood was spent in a white New England house on a high green hill above a broad lake.
The violence and brilliance of nature ignited my imagination. It was constant drama…
Not only out of the house but in the house… as my father stormed so did the lake—rising black in the night and silver in the day. Sunsets were long and glowing mauve. In the mist of dawn, we watched for mermaids on the rocks.
The journey had begun.
Stimulated by nature and buried in a family of eight, I found my place through imagining. Dress-up evolved to creating costumes, playing house became creating plays.
Magic was all around.
My experience was full and luscious, abundant and endless. To do anything but imagine seemed to die a little.
Imagining was the impulse to acting… an impulse that had to become.
Acting was a way to discover my own person by re-creating and expressing beyond the expected in a way that gave freedom from confines or limits.
It was boundless.
At periods in my life when I tried to get smaller to fit in, to control the urge that flowed through me, triggered rebellion.
I created plays and built sets everywhere; in the woods, on the porch, in the living room... silky fabric blowing across a make-shift stage… costumes and makeup…
My imagining expanded. In high school I brought huge pieces of plywood from my father’s barn to paint in the art room closet. One of my paintings was a bare-breasted warrior woman storming over a hillside… in high school!?
To combat any criticism or skepticism or judgement of my defiant ways, I kept my head down, hidden under long unkempt blond hair that fell like curtains over my face.
My path was avoidance of the world in order to be in my world, the world of creation.
I tried to steer myself in the correct direction, to get “real”, to attend to how the world seemed to function. I tried. It didn’t work.
But!
Through acting I have learned about science, through acting I have learned psychology, through acting I have learned who I am, and about cultures around the world.
Acting brings the spirit of humankind in all its dimension.
Through acting I have learned about you, how to teach. How to awaken your nature.
Acting is my channel to the heart of things… of life, of love, of truth. And it is what I am called to bring.
Just as the lake swells with the storm… to be in the current of the storm and drift to shore silently, to be alive in what creativity is… life.
Life.
Putting my finger on its precision in order to free something we need to know, we need to feel, we need to become, is my devotion.
Acting is a means to explore the unknown and to free the deep resources in us that want to be expressed. There is no end to this journey.
Thankfully.