Sunday, July 10, 2016

The Disconnect.

The other night, as we were performing our outdoor show, a fighter jet kept passing noisily overhead, high in the sky over Saskatoon. 
My actor brain: Why the fuck does that thing have to be circling around here right NOW?

Not until later, walking home, does my writer brain kick in: What a perfect analogy for the state of the world right now! 

Here we are: Sum Theatre, doing our free show in a city park. Part of Sum's mandate is to do shows FOR the community, IN the community, with stories about people working together to help each other. We get the kids in the audience to participate during the show: it's ragged and beautiful and funny and corny and hopeful. 

And up there, raking the sky, is this noisy death-machine, making it harder for us to spread our little message of hope and peace. 

What's going in the world makes no sense. Black people are being shot by trigger-happy police and white people keep braying All Lives Matter because for some reason they just DON'T GET IT. Hundreds of people are killed in Baghdad and Istanbul, and the same Facebook friends who couldn't change their profile pictures fast enough to that cute little photo of the Eiffel Tower when Paris was attacked don't seem to be able to muster up a fraction of the same outrage and support when it's brown muslim people who are dying. 

I hesitate to post anything on social media because... oh, for so many reasons. For fear of spreading misinformation and my own, ill-informed opinion. For fear of armchair activism, where posting a meme or changing my profile picture or writing some suitably outraged post takes the place of any real action. For fear of preaching to the converted, because let's face it, almost all my Facebook friends will agree with what I say. They're called "friends" for a reason. And yeah, also for fear of conflict, because unlike some of my social media friends I do NOT relish the idea of an online comment-battle. 

So much disconnect:

I am so very happy here, doing outdoor theatre in Saskatoon, and yet there is so much anguish in the world that my joy feels tainted. It's like last year, when I learned that a wonderful person I knew had fallen gravely ill, and that many of my friends were hurting and scared, and yet the sun beat down and the cherries in the back yard glowed red and lovely, and I could not help my health and my happy life, even though I felt an undercurrent of dread. How lucky I was/am, to have the luxury of joy, a luxury denied so many!  I have seen the incredible moments of (somewhat black) humour that spring up in the darkest moments, and I'd way rather go that route than deny that humour and happiness exist. 

I feel so at home here, but to be at home in many places is always to feel a certain amount of disconnect. I miss my lover back in Vancouver, my friends and life in northern BC, and when I go home I will miss this city and my wonderful friends here as well. But I wouldn't trade that slight nagging sadness I always feel (Fear of Missing Out is magnified the more places you call home) for not having traveled in the first place. Never. 

In the end it's not really disconnect at all, is it?  It's the push-pull of life; it's the luxury and the poverty, the joy and the terror, the homesickness and the absolute certainty of being home. What I know is that I will carry these experiences with me always: love, good work, travel, happiness; and hope that they warm me when life turns cruel or cold.