saltwater

[a stunning photos of one of my favorite spots in Santa Cruz - West Cliff - at sunset. The sky is dark pink and purple, the ocean is calm and reflective, and in the bottom edge of the photo a cliff with iceplant is visible. This photo was taken by my gloriously talented friend Conner Quinto, whose website can be found here.]

"For whatever we lose, (like a you or a me) it's always ourselves we find in the sea."

-- e e cummings

I am sitting in the airport, heavy with my year of memories and feelings and belongings, waiting to head back to the continent I started on. There is a tight spot in my neck and another in my knee and a big one in my heart, and my newly healing fractured arm is sorely betrayed from the physical strain of getting myself here. My body hurts, but it also feels surprisingly soft and gentle – it trusts me. It has carried me through a year of constant change, and I have more respect for it than I ever have before. Not the same respect a triumphant athlete might have after a tough training season, but more so the kind of respect that you cultivate for the ocean when you grow up near the waves. You come to learn that it can hold you so gently and sway you so beautifully and make you feel glittering and alive, and at a moment's notice it can also tumble you, it can break you, it can pull you under. Perhaps in this way human bodies are oceanic.

Mine does miss stella; I haven't been using my wheelchair for almost a month because of another freaking arm injury. That's been an interesting twist towards the end of this Watson road, because it broke me in a way that previous fractures hadn't. I collapsed in frustration and anxiety; having spent so much of this year learning to be a wheeler and finally finding some freedom, relief, and joy in that, I couldn't help thinking – what if my arms start fracturing and callusing as much as my legs do? Will I have to give up this solution that I'm finally starting to be comfortable with? And what will I find instead? There was about a weeklong period in there where journaling and typing was too painful, so I started doing some audio recordings instead – which you can find here if you're interested – they track that process and the following realizations in quite a messy, intimate way.

I often note to myself with a mixture of frustration, humor, and gratitude that this year has been as much about learning to wheel as learning to improvise. But my wild oceanic body tumbled me to sneak in a super important lesson right at the end here: it's not just about learning to wheel. It's about learning to ADAPT. About learning to listen – to bodies and humans and to myself, learning to be honest, learning to be slow, learning to be open, learning to cultivate comfort and then learning to let it go. Learning not to stock my identity in the specifics – of rolling or walking, improv or clown or illustration – but in the broader strokes: the qualities of being adaptable whether on wheels or on foot, and the principles of being playful, responsive, artful, and alive whether on an improv stage or in a clown hat or in my sketchbook. Learning to enjoy the uncertainty, and with that, the infinite possibility.

THAT is the truest improv lesson this year has taught me, and it is convenient because learning it well means avoiding the biggest trap that you can fall into when you try to be “good” at improv, which is that you do improv but you stop improvising, because you keep narrowing and narrowing the boundaries of what you do and what you are. You follow patterns and forget to break them, you retell the same stories and forget to relive them or reinterpret them. Specializing can be important and structure can be freedom – I've also learned that this year – but too much can prevent you from engaging with the improvisational bit of improv and life.

The twists and turns of this year have broken open those boundaries of what I do and what I am in infinite ways – sometimes painfully, sometimes thrillingly, often both. In retrospect my project looks utterly and completely different from the specifics I had outlined in my original proposal. I feel self conscious about that – especially as I prepare my presentation and rewrite my abstract for the Watson Foundation. But rereading that proposal, which I wrote way back in 2012 (!), I'm struck by how intensely the broad strokes still match – and in ways that I never could have anticipated. I wrote that I valued and needed improv for the continual practice in

'letting go and opening up, creating something from nothing and unfolding possibility in everything.'

And hey, that sounds about right!