About Me

Magic has been calling me for a long time. The magic first started calling when I was about 13. We were studying an Alfred Noyes poem in school and the teacher had one girl read a portion of it out loud. The girl read it very well. So well that I wanted to do that too. At home I recorded my voice reciting the poem and then eagerly played it back. Big disappointment. My voice sounded dead, devoid of any of the emotions and pictures the poem gave me. I didn’t know what to do so I gave it up.

A few years later I was at work standing around the coffee urn with some other employees. One man who was studying opera suddenly said, that if someone took speech lessons they would never recognize their voice. That comment slid right into my mind and stayed there. I moved to another city across the country shortly after that and the first thing I did was find a speech teacher. Up in Canada they weren’t that hard to find, somewhat like a music teacher with graded lessons and exams after each grade.

Magic reappeared. The teacher opened a whole new world for me, the world of voice, drama, and literature. I posted tongue twisters on my bathroom mirror, practiced deep breathing, slowed down my pace of speaking, dove right into famous speeches from plays and learned poems that expanded my heart with their beauty.

Drama at the University of Calgary gave me a mysterious glimpse of the magic that took me years to get even a glimmer of understanding. I had the part of Antigone in the Greek play Seven Against Thebes. It was the day of opening night and the director told me that my acting only reached soap opera level. He said he’d try to give me some help before the evening, but he never found the time. I was devastated because in those years, acting meant everything to me. I didn’t know how to improve. Then I remembered the strangest thing. Several times during the past rehearsals as I had waited in the wings to go on, I noticed a mist coming in from the stage. It had this Greek essence to it. I just observed it but felt no big interest or alarm. The idea popped into my head to inhale the mist as I went onstage that night. That’s what I did, and the world changed. The stage, my voice, even my body disappeared, and it seemed as if I, as awareness, was at the place where the real play was going on. My attention then became focused on the center of where I felt myself to be. In that core was this love that reached out to touch each one in the audience. It felt as though one feather-touch to this core could change it into another facet of love. That was it. I treasured the experience even as I had no understanding of what had gone on. I received many compliments on my performance, even a nice write up in the local paper.

I’ve read about actors, professional and amateur, who have experienced moments in a performance where it seemed that something else took over. A magic something that took their performance out of the mundane or rote to a new level of experience. It seems to me that it’s an escaping from the gravity of our normal human awareness into a freer, more expansive atmosphere.

What is that magic? Where does it come from? Does it come from the words that are spoken and the emotion the words evoke? Or is it a certain something that energizes those words and emotions? I’ve read many books of spirituality, mainly from the East—Buddhism, several types of Vedanta, both duality and nonduality and every book I could get my hands on that dealt with sound. The main trail I’ve been following deals with the creation of the universe through sound and how that initial sound blossoms into the magical essence that all life contains. We can access that magic through words and even through silence and that magic bubbles up in the very heart of our being. I invite you to share my trail through story, through poetry, even doggie cartoons, and my blog.