The Light and the Dark

This morning on my cycle ride to work, I saw budding crocuses by the Hackney City Farm, and Hare Krishnas dancing down Oxford Street. I'm in another period of enamourment (is that a word? It is now) with London. On Sunday I spent most of the day in the City with Erin, and it was a lovely reminder of what a cool, beautiful, exciting place this is. We saw a great little clown show at the Southbank Centre. We wandered along the Thames, through Trafalgar Square, and then back to the river via the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Also, Naomi shared Gordon's Wine Bar with us, which was totally amazing. Everyone who comes to visit me will now be subjected to at least one visit to this place. It's beyond cool. Another Sunday discovery of note: a great little vegetarian restaurant in Covent Garden, that I've also decided I love.

I'm especially grateful for all the lightness I've been discovering in London (and the extra time I've had with my new schedule to appreciate it) because school has been getting increasingly heavy. The past two weeks we've been exploring Grotesque theatre, which has actually been quite playful and fun once I finally got the hang of it (stuffing our bodies and going completely over the top with parodying celebrities and social classes), but has gotten consistently darker, particularly this past week when we've begun to "enter the tragic space". We've been asked to explore the darker aspects of humanity (the murderousness, the wrath, the insecurity, the unforgivingness) and to embody them fully, and that makes for some very intense, exhausting, difficult classes. Couple this with recent drama amongst ourselves as a group outside the classroom (social politics to do with the choosing of creation groups), and school has felt more draining than usual this week in particular. I find myself going out more after class because I feel the need to decompress. Really I just need to relax and reflect.

The thing about exploring the darkness in the world and in humans, and being asked to embody it as entirely as possible, means you inevitably touch on the darkness in yourself. That's been my experience of this week. I feel as though I've walked into my home, my bedroom, the den of my heart, and saw the dark and ruthless tiger there that's inhabited some corner all along. That we've locked gazes and just observed each other, taken in the presence of the other, the acknowledgment of mutual existence. Within the first 24 hours of seeing this tiger, I swung from feeling defensive, to devastated, to empowered, to contemplative about this newly recognised darkness in me. It's a new kind of honesty for myself, about myself. That as a person, I am capable of hurting people whether I mean to or not. That humans are human, but, in the purest of terms, we're also animal. That there's a space for darkness in me just as I am filled with light. And that's okay.