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Best, Karen
Improvisation: Language Beyond Words
Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!
I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you!
Is that all you blighters can do?
Don’t talk of stars burning above;
If you’re in love, show me!
~ from My Fair Lady (lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner)
Think about the last time you played with a baby.
How enthralled you were. Hypnotized by its cooing, humming and buzzing. By its direct gaze and private language that needed not one iota of your attention and yet held you spellbound.
Baby talk is a vast arena of exploration, curiosity and delight. A universe of tools of engagement – splendid, pure and free. Babies vocalize in volumes, effortlessly sliding scales with their tiny instruments, bending notes up and down, articulating every impulse and sensation as it comes to them. Pure, abandoned, nonsensical gibberish. With no self-consciousness, hence no self-censorship. All this is who we were and what we had at our tongue and fingertips before the first grown-up came along and said: “Ma-ma”, “Pa-pa”.
Can we return to this magical garden?
We can.
We can improvise.
Singer Bobby McFerrin built a career around the use of nonsensical sounds to evoke his thoughts and feelings. His language is beyond words. In a 2012 interview with Omega Institute founder Elizabeth Lesser, he said this when asked if it was his conscious choice not to use words: “When I was figuring out how to perform solo, I wanted to move back and forth between bass riffs, melody, and harmony, so I often used sounds instead of—or alongside—the words of a song. I found that if I sang a line using the consonants, vowels, shadings, and inflection we recognize as human language sounds, people responded as if I were talking to them. There is a human connection even though there are no words. If I sing “you broke my heart, you left me flat,” everyone knows exactly what that means—they know the story. But if I sing a line that’s plaintive or wailing, people can experience their own set of emotions and their own story. Each of us might give that phrase a different meaning. It’s open to interpretation, and one song becomes a thousand songs.”
The word improvise comes from the Latin improvisus (not foreseen, unexpected) and providere (to make preparation for). Improvisation is on-the-spot performance, in-the- moment self-expression. Our improvisers in jazz are like our street and subway musicians the world over. They noodle around a theme or phrase, dig into, dip and bend their melodies in a way that sounds like they’re talking. And they are. Words are superfluous. What matters is feeling. One smile of recognition becomes a thousand smiles of recognition. We all know it when we see it, when we hear it. We’re spellbound.
In my Story Chord workshops, I use improvisation tools to loosen the story from the lips of us storytellers. Okay, minus the baby drool. For a few minutes at a time, we release the limits we’ve placed on our expressions and drop into the wordless realm that we, as master improvisers, have known since birth. Alone in a monologue, in dialogue with a partner, or in a playful call and response with another instrument (like drums, accordion, harmonica), this kind of toying brings a fresh focus to our truth-telling.
Freed from finding the right words, our minds make other parts of us move. We gesture more clearly and boldly. Our posture changes. Some of us uncurl as if from a shell, unwind like a spring, or uncork with a burst. Others find the missing puzzle piece that gives new expression to an old idea, or the permission to say something for the very first time. This nonsensical, sing-songy, grunty babble opens a portal in the brain through which thought and feeling flow first. Words and language come later.
Improvisation uncovers the fears in our hiding and holding back. There’s no right or wrong way to do it; no being good or bad at it. In a flash one impulse is gone and another is at hand. The experience of making something up on the spot, something silly or outrageous, something risky or dirty, is liberating. When did making a fool of ourselves become such a bad thing?
It was German-born jazz pianist and composer, Uli Geissendoerfer, who got me improvising around my songs and creativity. He was my first partner in my cabaret act honoring Marlene Dietrich, an homage for which I had a very particular vision, an exact sense of how to enact each song and awareness behind my gesture. It was all well and good until I’d get myself hung up on an idea, or stuck in a corner of the stage, frozen. Uli would stop and have us improvise the tune. Playing around with melody, harmony and storyline without actually singing words was liberating. I found out quickly that I’m lousy at scat singing. But I could open easily into this abandoned sense of play and call forth my inner goofball. We’d improvise until I could detach from what was sticky and not working, make new choices and re-establish my ground.
This tool has stayed with me all these years, releasing me time and again from the trap of self-consciousness and crafting my work too carefully, too mentally. It’s a powerful instrument in our tool chest as creatives. And, might I say, it comes in handy for living life too. Life itself is one long improvisation. Every moment of every day is unscripted and delivers itself to us while we’re there trying to control events and interactions.
In my book, the tool of improvisation is key to authentic storytelling and stagecraft. It knocks out the finite shoulds and brings in the infinite coulds. Nothing has to happen and so anything can. We can follow this impulse and that one, reach out and catch a notion, let an idea simmer or send it scuttling to the sewer. We can stand in silence, we can lay out loud. We can wait. We can go. We can stay. We can flow.
We can trust that the instant we drop the mask, a clear path emerges that teases forth our intuition, vulnerability, resourcefulness and charm. Our one-of-a kind essence that never really left.
It’s amazing to see the transformation sometimes and the fine focus and emotional resonance that emerges after a session of improv. All at once the truth inscribes itself on a singer’s song, a speaker’s script, or an author’s written word. It’s this element of surprise that opens into recognition.
We see ourselves again.
We see and are seen by others again.
We’re back in the crib, giggling, gurgling, gazing. Bound to enthrall.
Bound to connect.
Oh Sweet Desire, You Know How I Hate to Practice
I’ve never been good at practicing.
I like to be good at something quickly, and if I’m not good at something quickly, I don’t like doing it. So I put it away, for awhile. Or forever. Such has been the fate of tennis, baking, sewing and tap-dancing, to name a few.
The blame seems to fall squarely on the shoulders of desire, but in fact it’s my inner critic who has to take the hit. I blame La Critica for successfully getting me to bail on a bunch of my passions. Back in high school, she convinced me that I wasn’t really any good at doubles tennis even though I was ranked first in my school and she knew how much I loved the feeling of being one with my racket, the ball, my partner and the court.
La Critica has convinced me that my cooking really stinks compared to my husband’s, even though I ace traditional German recipes and bake mouth-watering sweets. She’s even worn down my confidence in sewing, when in fact I made my own wedding dress, several elaborate gowns for the stage, a plush terry robe, and a pair of fancy pants for my guy (discovering all the secret tabs and pockets in a pair of men’s dress trousers). I actually find mending comforting.
Picking her nits, La Critica has been the most persuasive about something I’ve really loved. Dancing. More recently, she’s tripped me up in the luscious tango which I took up with a vengeance after discovering the tango parlors of New York City. Before that it was tap. Not film tap a la Eleanor Powell, but hoofing a la Honi Coles. Last week when I was down in my basement, La Critica stepped out of the shadows and got all in my face saying that I really should give away my tap shoes because the leather is cracking for utter lack of use. “No skin, no lanolin.” Little does she know that I have felt the most profound kinship with the rhythm of this earth while hoofing and actually cracked my leathers because I was dancing so much. Of course, she had a pointe. That was two decades ago in Austin when the exceptional Acia Gray was my teacher at Tapestry Dance. I stopped when I was just getting good (but that’s another posting).
When it comes to singing, it’s been a somewhat similar story. I’ve had little patience for classroom learning and claim only a handful of people as true mentors. The stage has been my teacher for 30+ years and what’s gotten me out there time and again is…desire. Pure and simple, Desire with a capital D. I learned my craft by doing, not by practicing doing. By singing, not by pretending to sing. Indeed, it’s the many different stage partners from whom I’ve learned the most, and the many different audiences in the many different lands. La Critica is multi-lingual, and yet she’s mostly kept her distance here. It seems that opening myself to collaboration had the surest quieting effect on her secret voice.
In truth, no amount of pressure from her or her pal, El Guilto, have gotten me to volley any faster, cook any more frequently or dance any better when my Desire has flown the coop. We say it’s discipline we lack, but for me Desire is the D-word behind my drive.
When Desire comes knocking on my door, I run to answer. Fueled by her, I feel unstoppable, invincible, refreshed, alive and juicy. And she always brings her friends, Acceptance and Surrender, and together they tackle the demons starting with Resistance and lull him into submission. He loves it!
Don’t ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive and go for it!
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
~ Howard Thurman
Following Desire is what it takes and I’ve learned this by her lead. When I burden myself with self-made stories about how passionless I feel, I know I’m really just desiring Desire. And she’s really just waiting for the coast to clear. When La Critica manages to throw my lusty, life-loving, art-priming passion over a cliff, she always climbs back up from out of some valley with a gleam in her eye. “Let’s go!” It may take a few hours, days or even months, but the happiest moments I know are when my Desire comes home.
Wearing many faces, she slips in by day, by night, in wet galoshes and satin slippers. I like her best barefoot and knocking vigorously on my door. Or when she lowers herself down from a branch and breathes herself into me for as long as I can stand it. Bar none she’s been the patient one, as all great teachers are.
Brush step, shuffle, ball change, f-lap
Brush step, shuffle, ball change, f-lap…
Edge Play: Creating Art that Challenges
Performers are revealers; we lay a thing bare.
To cultivate as broad a landscape of potential revelation as possible, we venture from the center of familiarity and recognition to the edge of mystery and uncertainty. Just as there are edges to the stage space, there are edges to us performers too. I consider the edge that place where there’s nothing to hide behind and where I feel I can’t hide even when I want to.
As a woman, I live to take myself from the center of my being out beyond myself. From center to edge and back again. With every exploration in life and every lived experience that has made it into a song or monologue, my center has expanded and my edges have pushed outward.
I’ve reveled in this edge play, in voyaging outside of my known comfort zone into a place of sticky aliveness, like that pup who is well fed at home and yet finds peculiar pleasure in the bone he sniffs out of a garbage heap at the far end of the street.
Through my work as solo singer-actress, ensemble leader and director-producer, I have endeavored to flow between these poles, always looking to push at the boundaries of the form and force the box to be wider. So in effect, my life and my art are dance partners. Sometimes life leads, sometimes art leads.
Historically, the cabaret of the French and the Kabarett of the Germans have used the mediums of music, theater, social and political satire, clowning, burlesque and erotic dance. The boundaries in this artform have been fluid, taken by artists and bent to fit any kind of light. Know where you are, so you can be somewhere else.
Freedom is what attracted me to the cabaret artform in the first place. I felt a spaciousness that I hadn’t encountered in my forays into other musical forms – classical, opera, musical theater, folk, pop. Jazz promised freedom, but only to the singer in me. Jazz didn’t scratch my acting itch. Cabaret did.
With this freedom has come the opportunity to play with the boundaries, and the responsibility to break them up. Cabaret has taught me that while something solid may frame my work, like a wall or a shaft of light, the real boundaries are imaginary. The genre itself is a challenge to existing forms, and so everything and everyone inside it is too.
As a cabaretist, I feel free to stage something known alongside something unknown, something secure behind something dangerous. To express pretty songs and ugly ones, bring comforting messages and distressing ones. As muse I may interpret, I may echo, I may rally.
One of the great benefits of daring myself to make challenging art and take challenging art is that I come through on the far side with always a greater feeling for my craft, for myself, and for my audience.
I have always respected my audience’s intelligence. Humor may vary from one culture to another, but intelligence is universal and I feel a responsibility to that intelligence, mental and emotional, in myself and in my audience. I try to be sincere in my work and that means pleasing and entertaining myself first, and challenging myself first. For when I am willing to risk my own sensibilities and expectations, I create the opening for my audience to do the same. And the circle is made.
My job as a theater artist is to remind people of what they’ve dismissed, forgotten or buried. Performance is not about only pleasure. It’s actually about ritual and sacrifice. You have to go through something as an audience member. It means you will be uncomfortable and that’s okay. You’ll also be taken care of.
– Taylor Mac
I’ve been fortunate to have producers who have given me a job and a stage, and then stepped away. And I’m excited as hell to work with these people, because they don’t know what they’re going to get. They’re going on a hunch with me…”give it to Kohler, she loves that shadow stuff.” Their trust is immensely empowering and freeing. They’re the brave ones, and immediately the collaboration feels honest and promising. It’s the only way I really like to work, really can work. I have to have that liberty or it becomes about pleasing someone else and that necessarily entails self-censorship. Feeling beholden to someone puts a sure brake on the vehicle of art.
It’s a similar thing when I am in the producer’s chair. If it’s the Kabarett Kollektif I’m leading, I will come with a vision or a theme because in a group setting we have to feel our common thread. But as soon as possible I want to step away and prepare to be delighted, surprised, challenged, and moved. Directing another artist is about stewarding their vision. I grasp it, they trust me to hold it. Should they wander, I nudge them back. Mostly I witness. I am a hard boundary, a buoy, in their sea of possibility.
We players, venues, producers and patrons are all in service to the call of art. Where it’s the other way around and art is made to serve our needs, where a producer or venue sets limits on what can be expressed, all that is a set up for a slow death for everyone involved. It’s suffocating, and we all know the feeling when the oxygen is scarce. It sucks.
Art must be free. Engagement and connection happen when art is free – free to soothe and free to challenge. When its edges serve as pointers to the centermost place in each of us that we all recognize.
Art is there to be spoken.
Rules are there to be broken.
Create by rules alone.
Your art sinks like a stone.
Goodbye Jikan
~ for Leonard Cohen
(1934-2016)
I am not sad today
Goodbye Jikan
To hear you’re on your way
Goodbye Jikan
You took your life and modeled to me living, loving, dying
If I said that I was mourning now you know that I’d be lying
What singer mourns a poem anyhow
You are my tower of song
Goodbye Jikan
Your words inside of me will carry on
Goodbye Jikan
There is no end to love, we know, no end to any dancing
Promise you’ll send word about this latest great romancing
Your finest verse perhaps, my dear Jikan
And so I am not sad today
I’m really rather glad today
The sea has freed a sailor, yeah
Godspeed Jikan
Message in A Bottle – “Don’t Put Anything Off”
“Don’t put anything off,” is the advice of a dear friend who recently lost his wife to cancer after a long battle. Together they had been grand patrons of art in my community.
I pause to assess my life. It’s rich with all that I hold dear – my marriage, family, singing, directing, coaching, traveling, gardening, reading, learning. Still, I hear his words and follow them straight into my heart and to the place where the kernels of my being lie dormant.
What am I putting off?
My friend was not referring to the little things, those sometimes appetites, spied upon pipe dreams, and fast flirtations with purpose. He meant the meat. What part of the sirloin steak of my existence have I not cooked up yet, let alone bought…into. What delicious dish have I seen in a display window and decided, ‘oh no, that’s really too rich for my blood.’ Somewhere in these shadows, my once-dreamt-of ambitions slumber and in the light of my openness and attention, they begin to stir and whisper:
A return to India.
An arts residency in Japan.
A crew spot on a high-seas sailboat.
Reviving my Spanish.
Little Death as an album.
My poetry published widely.
My songs in my own words.
That mascara-less confession with my priest, the mirror.
That radical, no holes barred, blink-and-you’ll-miss it baring of my soul.
Sure, I’ve got my share of put-offs and beneath them all is a safety net. My fear of falling and failing. My fear of gambling away the good. My fear of becoming really good. My fear of indecision. Wait…as I write these words here in my corner coffee shop, over the airwaves Sting sends out his SOS to the world.
I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world
I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle yeah
What message hath my bottle? What is that thing I tell myself I can leave behind me only to find it eternally floating by from upstream? What advice have I got for the young ones in my life who haven’t yet risked big, and lost? And found?
Does someone have to die for the truth to sink in or can we bring the wisdom of those at the edge who turn back with the words “don’t put anything off” to bear on our lives this day? What does it take to put something over? Especially a high stakes something?
It takes an in-breath. The inspiration is all that’s needed for the out-breath to follow. One step. One conscious, directed next step is all that’s ever needed. And what better time is there, what other time, than now?
Isn’t it astounding that we wake up every morning with a head full of dreams and with hands ready to grasp any lever that would shift everything? Isn’t it a daily miracle? Every minute we are dying to ourselves and being reborn. In this particular minute, we might actually wake up to that fact and shepherd our deepest yearning into our next becoming.
Living and dying, inspiring and expiring, breathing in and breathing out. That’s all there is to it and has ever been. Spiriting in the next kernel of destiny. And following it downstream.
That’s the message in a bottle.
On Integrity: Scaling Rocks, Rocking Scales
One of the first really conscious tastes I had of being fully aligned and integrated as a woman occurred during a wilderness training exercise when I was 39. I had opted into the challenge of scaling a 40-foot high rock face with many purchase points, both real and deceptive. Safely harnessed and belayed from below with lots of eyes on me, my aim was to work my way up this wall of stone with my bare hands and all the wits I could summon.
Others had gone before me and I had watched as they slowly and successfully navigated the terrain. I began where they did, but soon my own experience and choices personalized my path. My journey took roughly 45 minutes during which time my mind tried to psych me out several times, my body began to feel heavy and tremble, and my heart skipped a few beats. As each step distanced me further from the ground, I began making more calculated and deliberate decisions as to where to place my hands and feet and whether to move upward or sideways or both. And gradually I became aware of my heart’s intensifying commitment to the climb and my mind’s ever more calming instructions to my body.
I made the last exerted push up and onto the top of the rock and came to my feet. Stretching out before me was a glittering valley at the dusk of day. A rush came over me that ignited my whole being and I felt as though I, Karen Kohler, began somewhere far beyond the top of my head and ended somewhere far below the soles of my feet, deep inside this slab of stone and earth. I had tasted the joy of integrity, of being perfectly and wholly one with myself – mind, body, heart and soul.
It was not long thereafter that I experienced a very similar and powerful episode on stage for the first time. Then too I was in complete mental, emotional and bodily alignment, in harmony with my purpose, my voice, my songs, my story and history. Though I’d been singing since I was a child, I felt then that everything had come together and I was finally born as the artist I was capable of being. I had arrived as myself on the stage of the theater with my whole life in my possession.
Everything before that memorable stage turn had been preparation for it and everything since has been practice of it. Today I’m like the surgeon who knows how it’s done and does it again and again, always a little bit differently, always following the silent hand (and voice) that is leading and, with few exceptions, always coming to a deeply satisfying conclusion.
Integrity is pure bliss. Like scaling rocks, it’s rocking scales!
Integrity is a state of being and allowing, not an act of overdoing. I have learned to allow my thoughts, feelings, and intention to be unified rather than to actively try and steer them. When my thoughts wander, I notice how I gently nudge them back into alignment. When a feeling comes like a wave, I breathe it down to a ripple. When my will expands, I talk it into a whisper. My body follows. My movements, gestures, carriage and silhouette are the external conveyers of the inner life around my songs. The more I allow both inner and outer worlds to merge, the more integrated I become and the more compelling is my creative expression.
Integrity is the reward for the work we do on ourselves, beginning with the will to claim ourselves as artists, to accept the call, and to own the life in and around the art. All of it. Art utilizes all of our disconnected parts in service to itself.
Integrity is inner peace. Integrity is world peace.
Unfold your purpose now and begin your grand ascent.
For Anneka
Life really is a song. Sometimes it hits you from behind.
The first Basic Course of PSI Seminars that I staffed was in January 2003, right after my husband and I had been through the many advanced courses of this self-development training all within a 6-month time.
In the small group I was leading was a girl named Anneka, a very beautiful and very challenging young woman who was resistant to the exercises, quite shut down and obstinate. Fearful really. Something in her reminded me of myself and I didn’t give up on her although I wanted to heave her across the room at times because her manner was affecting others in the workshop. After that weekend, I never heard from her or any of the other attendees again until 10 years later, 2013, when out of the blue came a note to me from Anneka. She had found my website and wrote to let me know she’d made something of herself, that PSI had been huge for her and my staying with her especially. It was quite a beautiful note to get.
Two nights ago with the Basic upcoming here in New York in July, I thought I’d reach out to her to see if she might come and staff or re-audit. I had no email for her so I plugged her name into Google. Instead of an email I found an obituary.
Anneka Foushee died a year ago February from a rare kind of cancer that one gets from asbestos poisoning. She was 41.
I was up for many hours the other night. Here’s a website I found, a fundraising site to help her Mom recoup some of the costs of having her in treatment for several years. It closed only a few days ago. There are also several sites where one can purchase her work.
Until the other night I was on the fence about whether to commit to staffing and leadership or to just attend as a re-audit. Finding this news helped decide it. It was Anneka’s call from beyond…”staff, please staff…”
I’m happy she took the time to write to me. I’m happiest that she found her voice in art, her purpose and quite a bit of love. She sure burned fiercely for a time…unforgettable.
Seed Your Soul
If you search for your soul you won’t find it.
Search for anything — power, talent, time, romance, riches, God — they will elude you. Instead evoke them. Call them forth. In the case of your soul — recall it and then seed it. Uncover who you already are. Bring forth who and what you already possess.
Who you are at birth is given. There is no going after it. The path leads back and under and over and through as you birth yourself again and again to this already established fact.
True artistry is a pure kind of channeling and emerges from trials endured, from deep engagement, and from recall. Recall is remembering what you know. Recall is deep listening. As soon as you know, you go. As soon as you learn how to let go, you find.
What comes effortlessly to us has significantly less meaning than what comes with effort. This is true of a lot in life and in the arts too. We see it in raw talent that doesn’t come close to realizing its potential, or in the effort expended in the name of talent without any real investment in self.
It is not a given that a performer will display their interior life. They put up a flag that points to it but their work does not come from the riches they hold, and so the performance feels needy, grasping and flat.
You have to make the effort. The onus is on you — then it will have meaning for you. Then it will seed your creativity. You can learn technique in schools and workshops and from books and coaches all the live long day, but what will eventually come out of your throat, eye, hand and foot that is of any real resonance is that which flows from your own experience and from the integration of your life fully lived.
Talent seeded with courage and curiosity will always come to something. Messing around in the roots of ourselves, breaking up our entanglements and watering our ground will allow the old spent shoots to die off and the new ones to come through. The elation, satisfaction, confusion, anger, sadness, doubt and ennui that this probing and examined living engender are what it means to be human. And they are the essential ingredients and fodder for our craft.
Something old is constantly dying in you and something new is taking its place. It takes guts to live and breathe from your depths and use the highs, the lows, and the illusive in-betweens of the performing life as fuel to get to the core of your artist heart. Happiness and suffering are equal and necessary parts of the drilling in, the sifting through the patterns, the confronting of demons and shadow play, the affirming of divine energies and illumination. Until you are accessing the whole of yourself, true art expression will not come forth.
So at regular intervals, stop. Stop and express right where you are. Produce something, say something, move someone. Yourself. Once this is played out in you, a new time of probing will set in. You will call it to you in some way — an event, person, triumph, struggle, illness, journey — some play with fire, some transformative agent. This will be followed by the gestation, by the new seed anchoring in the new ground.
And that’s how it goes — this tilling, planting, reaping, planting, tilling, reaping — throughout your life and career. You seed your soul to the end when, in having recalled your nature and shared the truth of who you are and what you know, you’ve connected others to the truth in themselves. That fuels the world. That is immortality.
Leave Breadcrumbs
I believe in breadcrumbs.
Since the night I snuggled up to my Oma’s bosom to hear her read Hansel and Gretel for the first time, breadcrumbs have fueled my imagination. Haunted and yet mesmerized by this tale of witches and evil stepmothers, it was the breadcrumbs I remember most. And I began leaving them too. I didn’t do it consciously, but then neither did Hansel (they fell from his hands as he walked). In writing and documenting my feelings since the days of my teens, it turns out that I too have left myself a trail of tender bits of nourishment that have guided me home when I’ve been lost in tricky passages, grasping for clear direction.
They say the itch comes in cycles of seven; for me it’s longer. Ten years ago I was in a similar place, and ten years before that. I yearned for a deepening of the path each time, filling journal pages with my questions, enrolling in workshops, and gathering my most trusted peeps together in support of my molting. I’m in such a transition again today, feeling that the path is either deepening, veering off into a brand new direction, or both.
My fiery Sagittarius (Rising) is ready. In the early morning, I hear her stamping her hooves to prepare the ground for new adventures that will rattle my cage, reset my marbles, and bring in the next stellar thing. My earthy Virgo (Sun) is all in her head. She knows vitality is essential to her heart and change to her soul. What’s vexing is that we’re presently in the in-between place where one foot is happily tapping away on the known ground while the toes of the other foot are already dipping the new waters. Cue the breadcrumbs.
These notes to myself prove to be treasure-filled. In a journal from 2006, I find an entry where I envisioned meeting my future self 20 years anon (which is only 10 years now). I wrote out in detail how my future self looks, how she will greet me, what she’s up to, and what advice she will have for me. It’s a poignant read, inspiring enough to lift me from the goo of my current ambivalence and place me expectantly on the back of my patient Sag.
As in any good fairy tale, there are demons all over these writings. And history shows me that the ones we come into this life with are the ones we’re fated to fight. The same menahudi that tried to trip me up a decade ago are back in full force, which is depressing except for what I’ve learned about that: demons are our teachers and the level of our resistance to them is equal to the size of their gifts. In my last blog posting, I sent a love letter to fear and in that same spirit I acknowledge these others, some of whom I’ve endowed with names, descriptions, habits and skills in an effort to understand them better and win them over:
Missy Incompetence is mousy, prim, and whiny. Her strengths would be persistence and soft-spokenness if she had a better message, but it’s all about “not enough” for her. Grim Reeper Mama is steely, cold and deadly. She insists that time is running out and barks “Why don’t you quit art and go back to a real job before it’s too late?” I gotta hand it to her, she’s the very spirit of clarity and confidence. Greener Pasture Patsy misses a lot and is obsessive, always looking for something other than what she has. But she still has a killer bod, can seriously multi-task, and is light-hearted and spontaneous which makes her adorable too.
Argh! Fighting these three is futile. I’m better off getting cozy with them over cocktails and dinner. (Mata Hari: I totally get what you were onto in choosing to sleep with the enemy.)
My breadcrumbs are clues that help me see the oh-so natural struggle that is the artist’s life and how well things have actually worked themselves out since the last time I was drifting. I see how life and craft are richer and more fulfilling than anything even my Grimm-trained imagination can ever conjure up. Knowing that is a real blessing.
Leave breadcrumbs. Not only is writing a cathartic activity no matter how scratchy and haphazard it may feel in the moment, but it’s cheaper than therapy and a huge vote of confidence in your inner guru. Keep those scribblings near your passport, will, marriage license, bible and whatever else you’d grab in a fire. You’ll find that these testaments to your vulnerability and longing, as well as your hopefulness and gratitude, will provide ample direction should you one day find yourself in a dense forest at night with a wicked stepmother in tow. And if there’s a budding writer in you, you’ll have the seeds of your memoir.
I’m reminded of a tender tidbit from the life of Goethe, my fellow Virgo who shares a birthplace with me and whose poems have reliably lit my path. He lived to spend his 82nd (and last) birthday in August 1831 in the mountainous region around Ilmenau surrounded by his grandchildren. There in the woods he’d visited often in his youth stood a tiny wooden hut. He came upon the hut while out walking, and on the wall inside it was a poem written 51 years before. As he recognized his own handwriting, he wept.
Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, (Over all the peaks there is peace,)
In allen Wipfeln spürest du (In all the treetops you feel)
Kaum einen Hauch; (Barely a breath;)
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. (The little birds in the forest are silent.)
Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch. (Just wait, soon you will rest too.)
Karen Kohler
Singer Actress Director Coach
THE ART OF THE BOARDS 
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