All Hallows

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We are halfway through our run of The Sorcerer with the Light Opera of Portland. Next week, I start rehearsals again with In Medio. Tonight is Halloween, Samhain, All Hallow's Eve. This morning the sky was red. Yesterday the wind whipped through the Gorge and tore every red leaf from the dogwood behind my office. Hummingbirds still visit the feeder three offices down. A week ago I watched a bald eagle pull a harassing bird out of the sky and disappear behind the factories along I-84 and the Columbia River.

When I was my son's age, I knew I had a few true loves: music, theater, and books. At 18, was in my first college play, being the church accompanist to Our Town. I hadn't been an unnamed character since my freshman year in high school. This time, 28 years ago, I wanted to transfer, to be a playwright, or something other than what I was: a little college freshman from Chicagoland drowning in Kalamazoo. Soon enough--through choir and theater and the Women's Resource Center and poetry class, I'd find my people. I'd find my church. I didn't transfer; I stuck it out. I found what was sacred and it lead me to Warren Wilson and poetry and a career in Kalamazoo as a professor and singer and single parent. It helped me learn how to build community, which even then I suspected--if there was a god, it was that.

But I'd abandoned theater. My ex wouldn't have approved (singing paid; theater didn't). I was afraid, etcetera.

Then in 2016 a few years after I moved to Portland, I auditioned for the Light Opera and was cast in the chorus. Then in 2020, I volunteered for a search committee. Then, suddenly, I was president and producer.And I auditioned for choirs and got on staff and got hired with professional groups and found myself in In Medio. 

Oh, that's not what I came here to say. What I wanted to say was: this has been a fcking hard autumn. But what has saved me--besides R., to whom I've been married to to for ten years (!!!) and who is my person, my home,--has been music. Has been the community I have found on stage. Which I knew as a teenager, as a twenty and thirty-something listening to the orchestra tune and in my spangled gown,  but could not trust until now.

During tech last week, watching my peers move across the stage in their costumes, watching the director give notes and watching his vision come alive beneath the lights; during our choir concert last week when the first notes sounded across the church--I felt whatever passes for holy in my bones. 

I know. The world is on fire right now. I grew up in a Jewish town and feel the antisemitism that is flowing from both Right and Left like a razor across my skin, feel (because I am a white girl raised firmly Catholic)shocked and surprised at my leftist comrades (there should be no surprise, my friends tell me).But maybe because the world is on fire I want to say: these things are holy. Creating something in community. Faculty leaning on my office door and telling me how their students react, or don't react, to their classes. Students in the halls before classes. My boy changing his life. Watching this opera come alive. Walking onto stage and singing my first recitative. The applause erupting for the director, the sky this morning stained so red I could barely breathe. 

I came home from work, ran a slow five miles in the posh neighborhoods around Mt. Tabor, came home and made dinner with J. and talked about college and art and the future. I lit a candle and said a prayer to my father, dead these two years.  Pulled tarot: Tower, Queen of Pentacles, Queen of Cups, High Priestess. 

God, I miss my students. I miss talking about poetry and writing and literature. I miss feeling like what I do matters. But also, god, I love my people so much.  So much. And I love those moments on stage--the music moving forward, the way theater exists in the moment, how present we must be, how fully and wholly alive, how then it is over and I have existed in that moment, fully present, fully my whole self, fully being in service to YOU, who is god, who is all we have. 

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