Bridging Worlds.

I have a friend who is living in LA and trying to make a living as an artist/actress/writer. She’s living the all-too-common experience of working crap jobs while trying to keep her dream alive. Which just adds to the frustration, because who really ever wants to be a cliché. Especially when it comes to your dreams.

She is standing in one world in order to pay the rent and eat, while trying to get at least one foot planted in the other. It isn’t that she doesn’t have the required courage to make the leap: she regularly jumps into the water to navigate her way across, but inevitably hits an eddy of some sort that throws her back to the shore she came from. It isn’t that she lacks depth, either: she has plenty of real life experience to make herself interesting (she lived in a commune until age 7, she was directing plays by age 21, and now she’s a bartender in LA, for starters). Nor is she unrealistic about her talent (she has plenty) or the odds of making it (if any artist thought too much about this, there’d be no art).

She’s sized up the river as many ways as she can think of, but can’t get across. And she’s starting to wonder if she has the fortitude to keep trying. Or if it’s even worth it. Worse still, she’s looking down the road at what happens if she’s still doing this in ten years. Or twenty.

For all of us who have, are, or will wrestle this same oily snake, there’s also the problem of how to stay present while working towards a dream. How do we live where we are, how do we stand in the world we’re in, while always looking across the river? And at some point, we’re bound to doubt everything we’re about. We can’t help but eventually look ourselves in the mirror and think: You are a joke. Stop it already. Grow up for fuck’s sake. If you were going to make it, you would have. In the meantime, you’re wasting your life wishing you were somewhere else.

Here’s the deal. This life is about bridging worlds. And not just in this way. The whole universe is made up of energy and matter. And the bridging of the two. Life happens when they meet. Literally.

The whole point of this website, as well as virtually every word I scribble down — electronically or on a wadded up post it that’s been living in my pocket for days — is also to bridge worlds. Between the genres. Between the sensual and the spiritual. Between dogma and apathy. Between poetry and fiction. Between the sap and the rough cut. Between whatever place the words come from into some sort of form that will get them read in this world. Between the unpublished and the published. Between the unknown and the mainstream. Between the unheard and the podcast. And between the I wish I were and the I am.

So instead of banging our heads against the walls, contemplating walking into a tree shredder, or falling into a prolonged, deep, boozy, coma, we need to know – not intellectualize, parrot, or hope, but know — that this is what we are doing. We are playing God. Whether we know it or not. We are bringing together particles and waves. We are bridging the worlds. And sometimes a bridge takes a really long time to build. Especially a good one.

For love and money,

TQ