I arrive early. The moon is half-full and the darkness laced with twinkle lights. Conversations in Spanish and French gently move through the temperate air to where I sit, back pressed against the turquoise bungalow.
At first, I hesitantly open the unlocked front door and end up standing in a room that I then realize is someone’s bedroom. I stand in silence, catching on that this space is not just someone’s personal bedroom, but multiple people’s bedroom.
I recall the email from the organization’s ESL coordinator – explaining that these days, the shelter is overcrowded and the living room areas have been converted into bedrooms for new alyssum seekers. There are backpacks and shoes carefully tidied into corners, and on top of the metal folding chairs stacked in the corner. A lone cell phone rests on a futon.
I slip back outside and take a seat in a row of chairs positioned by the front door.
Nerves are restless for a distraction, and I double-check my phone, and then realize I’m being offered an unexpected moment of aloneness to relish the splendidness of this moment. So I place the phone away, and let my breath find me, here, in the time before the start of an improv workshop with refugees and alyssum seekers.
This is a date with destiny first glimpsed in the kitchen two years ago.
I trust my feelings to design my outfit – cranberry velvet boots, high-waist pale jeans, a light blue sweater tucked in, and a blush-pink jacket to cultivate a confident ease in my skin.
I drink a green tea, hoping for a rekindling of energy, as I reread the email on directions for tonight’s improv workshop.
The past two years leads me to tonight.
My improv journey begins because I learn of a life-coach in Germany teaching refugees improv. As I stir pasta and listen to the students share their improv-initiated epiphanies on NPR, I simply decide, “That’s what I am going to do.”
There’s a heart-humming curiosity circling the change-making power that is creativity. College and my early professional career teach me that I need creativity and to be of service through creativity to feel purposeful, aligned in joy.
I spend my early 20s out-of-balance, pressing creativity to the back burner and collapse into lack luster living.
I move to Austin with a core intention to nourish my creativity, and in the nourishing of creativity, I want to harness and share it with the collective, for higher healing and consciousness raising.
So all this yearning is with me in that kitchen two years ago when I see the path and choose that path even though I don’t know the HOW, only to trust the YES.
AND that same feeling emerges when I receive her email. The initial inquiry is about teaching yoga for my yoga student’s work place, a nonprofit that focuses on the resettlement of refugees. Spontaneously, she adds a flyer for a workshop she’s teaching on trauma and refugees, and though there’s an expense attached to the training, there is is an instant, fire-fierce YES.
In my response, I decide to share, a vulnerability dare, that a passion project of mine is teaching improv to refugees, and that’s when the stars rocket the forward movement and what follows are introductions to another nonprofit, a shelter on the east end, hosting theater and improv workshops for their residents.
I’m ablaze to connect and be warmly welcomed to attend and participate in the workshops taught by two separate groups. And tonight’s workshop will be led by University students who improvise on campus and next week’s workshop will follow, led by theater education graduates. I’m all eagerness to witness, to participate, to just be.
And in all my wide-eyed marvel and heart-rushing gratitude, I also note that I feel a tiredness that irritates and concerns me. I resist this exhaustion, especially on an evening enlivened by fate. And yet, I know that the tiredness also is teaching me – “Don’t try so hard.”
My life in Austin constantly teaches me the dance between effort and ease, grit and grace, doing and being. The tiredness empties me out into pure presence. I’m not facilitating tonight, I’m not even performing, I’m here to be, to receive the teachings and the aliveness of the people around me.
So as I wait in the company of a moon and a house that is a home to numerous stories of bravery and resiliency, I retrace the steps to this heartbeat, this breath of time, and I relax in the currents that always were cradling me and carrying me to where I am suppose to be.
And that is this community room with glass paneled doors – this garage converted community room that after the workshop will becoming the living space for several families.
For now, the garage transforms into our stage.
Joy-beaming toddlers run throughout the boisterous circle of families from Africa, Central and South America. The University students facilitate games, take turns explaining directions in English and Spanish, and though I don’t speak Spanish, and some people in the room do not speak English, we all are speaking the same language of laughter, fun-spiritedness, connective play.
We speak the language of presence. Let’s see and honor the aliveness that is and is in each other, especially through a game of kitty cat careers.
The ending is applause, the ending is handshakes, hugs, and thankfulness expressed in eye-contact, and talk of what’s next, what is to come.
The ending is aloneness, again, under the half-full moon, a promise about to be reached into fruition. The tiredness coats my bones, and a thrill, an amazement of a life that now holds this forever memory of a radiant gathering of global citizens playing together, laughing together.
At the start of my time here, that November night where I cook pasta and listen to the NPR story that changes the direction of my life, I debate staying.
Give Austin two years, a fellow Kentuckian-turned-Texan counsels over a dinner.
Give it two years, a poetess instructs while we walk around a lake.
Two years to let your system readjust, to root, to establish a community, to create a course that reflects and rejuvenates you.
This November marks two and a half years, and proves my Kentuckian and poetess soulfully right. Two years to find home here in Austin, a current of belonging, of homecoming I hope and pray that everyone in that improv workshop tonight gets to deeply feel, too.