Summer was like bamboo. Vibrant in the rain, resilient green sinew, thirsty and alive. Crank the heavens shut, crack the stems, growth halts and hollows what had grown.
I was approached in late April with a job opportunity at theWELL, a local rockstar church on Poyntz Ave in Manhattan. The fledgling community needed a teacher, and I was intrigued.
I had already purchased round-trip tickets to Hawaii and was planning on 3 months of surfing, sleeping, and reading on the beach with my brother and his fiancee. I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the prospect of losing my money or ditching my closest friends right before the great world-reclaiming project sandwiched the earth between us. Discerning God’s Will for a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time is a daunting proposition, and the cons outweighed the pros, but I decided to give God a go.
JOURNAL EXCERPT: “I have to lead with integrity, I can’t fake it. I never want to be accused of shifting into showtime. Yes, I have a showtime gear. I know I do. I think the performance repertoire and improv champ golds conditioned my core not in common cultural duality but instead in quantum existence. Instant emotion. All things simultaneously, all states at once, the gamut of expression at my finger tips. Who wouldn’t use that?”
I almost dated a girl named Amy several years ago. She was the best tap performer on campus. She told me she would never date an actor. I asked why. She said because she would never be able to tell if he was telling the truth.
This summer I attempted to embody the ideals I taught, and to do that, I peeled the onion, stripped myself to the core. No lego identity walking around in front of me. Nothing but me. Scary as hell. Like trading Kevlar for eggshell.
Holding the tension in a room. Seeing what others miss, as Allison does. Living love, as Timothy does. The biggest thing I learned? That just under the surface of every human lies incredible pain. You don’t have to go very far, just scratch the surface really. We’re all broken, bleeding, don’t have it figured out. Last year I knew I had to go to Fuller, but I didn’t know why. There were hints, like Andy Arana and the blonde girl from Moore, but now I understand the local stage and the world stage and how they dance in perfect tandem.
Bamboo survived the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and provided the first re-greening after the blast in 1945.
With tensile strength superior to mild steel (withstands up to 52,000 psi) and a weight-to-strength ratio exceeding graphite, bamboo is the strongest growing woody plant on earth. There is a suspension bridge in China 250 yards long and 9 feet wide that rests entirely on bamboo cables fastened over water. Not a single nail or piece of iron.
Bamboo is the fastest growing plant and provides the best canopy for greening degraded lands. (Some species of Bamboo grow as much as 4 feet a day). Its stands release 35% more oxygen than average tree stands.
Bamboo is harvested and replenished with no impact to the environment. It can be selectively harvested annually and is capable of complete regeneration without replanting. Bamboo is an enduring natural resource and provides income, food, and housing to over 2.2 billion people worldwide.
