I am a stereotype.

I am thinking that maybe my ongoing bodily practice has something to do with telling the truth. 

I am wrestling with incomprehensible linearity of time; seeing nearly everyone you know in one place to (ostensibly) celebrate you can feel quite overwhelming, the "I've known him since before he was born" people commingling with the coworker I met two years ago. Weddings are weird, but they are also catastrophically life-affirming. I am jumping ahead, but there is something about destroying the object that is my cynical isolationism in order to grow for someone I love.

At my wedding I spent a lot of time thinking about emotional truths, and the weapons I and my brothers have developed to stifle feeling too much at any given time. This weaponry led a good 90% of my acting teachers to tell me I was "mysterious" which is another way of saying "you're closed off," though some people said that, too.

In the aftermath of this (truly) wondrous occasion, we huddled inside a cabin in an absurdly remote place, taking mushrooms and confessing our deepest truths. Some were so monumentally gratifying to realize that I broke down in tears as my brain convinced me the color of my new wife's skin was indeed purple, and some truths were so deeply painful we had to separate in the blackened night. And in the end I decided I had to commit each day to telling the truth, even when I wasn't sure if it would be useful to do so.

I'm also quitting smoking.

- Greg

Comments

  1. Ethan PhilbrickOctober 13, 2022 at 11:07 AM

    thanks greg (and congrats on the nuptials! :)

    it's interesting to think about the various smaller rituals that might take place after the big ritual of the wedding... the gatherings that happen after the gathering... the ungatherings after the gatherings... rituals of continued gathering, rituals of ungathering...

    i'm curious if you might be able to come up with a little procedure for yourself around this practice of truth-telling... a repeatable score perhaps... what might the instruction be? how might you perform the score regularly?

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  2. ChipOctober 13, 2022 at 11:42 AM

    congratulations! and thank you for sharing these intimate details of this large life transition. I'm curious how rituals that are personal open up to include others, or don't - the temporal shifts in peoples knowledges of each other, the rituals we have shared to create bonds. and then rituals that bring those various repetitions into collision, or coalescence. also, what is truth!? and lies? it seems to be a thread in various posts.

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