Resilience

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

I went on a long run this past week with a friend, and we took turns sharing stories of people who inspire us.

What surprised me most was how resilience kept coming up. I kept sharing stories of the people in my life who overcame something in their lives and succeeded despite the odds.

I thought to myself - when you see someone bear their suffering nobly - there is nothing in that but good.

When you see someone take on responsibility and decide they are going to aim higher and confront their suffering honestly, they get better, and the lives of other people around them get better too.

As the Buddhists often told me, life is suffering. And it is our job to acknowledge it exists and embrace it. Or the wisdom I received from my Sudanese friend, Peter. In a moment of despair, I grabbed his hand, and we sang a Sudanese song together. He reminded me, “Things change. Life changes.”

So, this week, despite being busier than I have been in a long time, I have been asking myself, how do I reframe this? How do I aim higher? How do I show up despite the long hours?

Perhaps instead of suffering, is it really about embracing mystery? The willingness to accept it, to love it, and to follow it.

Who models resilience in your life? How can you show up like them today?

A CREATIVE TOOL

For the past two years at Theater Mitu, we have been working on our latest piece (holy) BLOOD, which will have its premiere in May at our space in Brooklyn.

Over the next few weeks, I thought I would give a glimpse into our process by pulling out creative tools - and highlight how we make our work.

One of the leading philosophies in our company is making work that is transdisciplinary - meaning we are constantly working outside our creative practice to discover something new.

We started two years ago in our first laboratory figuring out how we wanted to tell the story of the film Santa Sangre (our source material), following an instinct on the puppeteering of objects.

Stay tuned to see how that idea grows and morphs over the next few weeks!

A PIECE OF ART

“Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limon

originally published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Grateful,

Michael