Mark Rylance in Twelfth Night.

“Where most of us succumb to the limiting power of self-preservation, Shakespeare rushed toward the enormous freedom that can come with “why”—the spirit of inquiry that jump-starts the imagination.”

Hilton Als, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The New Yorker

I was struck by this quotation in The New Yorker from a review of the current production of Twelfth Night at the Belasco. I got to thinking about the “limiting power of self-preservation.”  What does that mean?  To me, it brings to mind living safe, trying to protect against disaster, loss, injury or heartbreak.  Right away, I can see that I have failed that litmus test.  My particular road is littered with all of the above.  I don’t see them as battle scars, so much as evidence of either rank stupidity (14 years of out-of-control drinking, for example) or the wisdom of putting my heart on the line.  Doing that was when I came out 27 years ago and fell in love with my beautiful wife, Pam.  It was also when I crashed through my fears to adopt our two daughters.  More than “the enormous freedom that can come with why” those were about the  freedom that came with “why not?”  or “yes.”

Saturday I went into my studio with dancer and long time friend Pamela Newell to do some Authentic Movement.  At the end of one time of moving, I found myself lying on the floor, holding my heart.  To me, it felt as if my heart, bruised and  cupped, had migrated to the outside of my chest, and that my hands were needed to keep it from falling away from me.  I knew that movement and the image were connected to my absent, estranged daughter.  Embodying that allowed me both to feel it that hurt and to release it.

Have I felt like giving up?  Of course.  Does that feel like the “limiting power of self-preservation?”  It does.  My broken heart requires me to keep opening, loving, praying.  Not asking “why” – which in this situation creates more suffering – but rather what am I being asked to do, and how shall I do it.  And in those questions I find the freedom to imagine, to dream, to hope.