This Storm Borne Frailty

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!(King Lear 3.2.1)

The rains, as you might have guessed, have continued. The storms that come , now have the cutting edge of colds winds that send the pelting rain in gravity defying directions. When I parked my little car outside of the studio for Shakespeare class last night I was half afraid it swim away on me. Oh but how delicious it is to have Shakespeare and storms together. The night begged for one of us actors to go screech Lear's soliqueys into the roaring storm...none of us did of course, we would've gotten wet, ugh. But the drama of the storm, even when safely indoors, rages on inside me.

I, perhaps sixty years too early, have gone walking in the storm. I have those deep emotional cracks and rages of Lear's storm blowing at me with a force that has torn aside pre-exsisting foundations and confidences. I feel half wild, ready to tear at my clothing and run headlong into the very storms I have spent my life avoiding. I feel dangerous and released...but then I put on my dress shoes and head off to my 9-5.

This is my conflict.

I am quietly raging unsure of at what, or whom, but walking edges of cliffs - silently. My silence comes from the other side of my storm, the warm air, that reminds me to nurture and love, to cling to the responsibility and leadership that I have walked in my whole life. And all of this feels unnoticed -- the glory of acting Shakespeare is that when a character feels something, we see it, we hear it, it is the external and heightened representation of our internal swirling chaos's. While we may think of doing something, these characters do it, they scream, they murder, they betray, they fuck...and occasionally make love. Its raw, its visceral, its the storm inside us.

In the end Lear has walked in the storm, ultimately, to face himself -- "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" (1.4.230), he sees betrayals, loyalties, sorrows, and himself. Now I am not saying my coming of age crisis's is the equivalent of this tragic blind dying man, clutching his dead daughter in his arms, while he howls into the night; er at least lets hope not.

But this passion, this intensity, the high stakes is a storm I -- well none of us-- can avoid. One only hopes that enlightenment and not destruction comes from our journey into night. But, that the pelting pitiless rains expose more than madness allowing us to walk on into morning.