being away

No sooner have I arrived home, that I am preparing to leave again.  Work calls!  I feel like a peregrine falcon, or a desert nomad.  How funny it is to prepare a nest for ones absence... I cleaned out my refrigerator, took out the trash, wrote a letter and mailed it.  My little apartment hums with the quiet patience of an old friend who knows another stretch of loneliness is ahead.  I'm sorry to leave her so soon... I have never been more aware that the impermanence of the art an actor creates often seems to parallel the impermanence of home and place.  There's a freedom in leaving that I think I'm acquiring a taste for, though.   It feels as though I'm being kept a safe distance away from the complications New York City has to offer.  And for that, I'm grateful.  I'm becoming good friends with solitude and to be honest, I think it's serving me well.  Perspective, creativity, a healthy dose of detachment and, dare I say, focus, are forming in ways I would not have expected.

So for all of you artists, writers, actors, wayward bohemians, and musicians who have the blues over the pangs of migration take heart in the power of solitude.  The fray, in all its beauty and sobering complexities, will be waiting when you return.