The art of Plate Spinning

I lived in New Zealand for a very long time. I lived in a tiny little village on the South Island surrounded by green lush hills, fat and happy sheep, turquoise rolling seas and eccentric souls. I ended up there because of the sheer limitations of my fitness at that time of my life and looking at myself now from 15 years down the road, I was lonely. I had been biking through the country alone for weeks. I wanted deeper conversations then what I was getting when checking into a campground or over my mini gas stove while cooking noodles. I wanted characters, I wanted to hear stories of heart break and defeat, of glory and desire, and I was craving sinking my teeth a little deeper into the kiwi culture that for the most part had simply been passing me by at about 15km an hour from the seat of my touring bike. I pulled into a hostel, with a yellow picket painted fence, a quaint wooden welcome sign swinging in the breeze, hanging to the right of the entrance gate - everything about the place was dripping in the very thing that made me fall in love with that town and ultimately made me feel like I was suffocating and drowning at the bottom of its valleys, but of course I did not know that then. All I knew was I had a reservation and I needed a bed instead of the ground and my tent after that grueling ride of the day to get over the ancient volcanic rim and into the town of Akaroa. My bike barely fit through the gate, I struggled with its heavy panniers and the awkwardness of my tent strapped to the back in order to get my body and the bike through without banging one of us up. I parked it around back of the hostel, slapped a lock around it and went to check in. That bike had been my constant since landing in New Zealand. I had developed a deep love hate relationship with it, the metallic blue paint beautiful to me on good days and shockingly chipper on bad ones. I never did hit the road again after that day. I never reloaded my panniers, I never felt the feeling again of biking on the open roads in search of my next new town, new campsite, next pot of noodles. I fell in love shortly after arriving in that little town, both with the town and a man and as it has been written, the rest is now history. But that is not really true either is it? History is so much more then something that lives in the past. History can feel so vivid and present, it can feel both breathtakingly close and like a dream that happened to someone else. History is a confusing companion we forever carry with us. Sometimes we carry it reluctantly and sometimes with pure joy, but most of time from what I have learned about life so far, carrying our history is both joy and sorrow, angel and devil, light and shadow.

We must be careful in life what we wish for. It was characters that I wanted, vivid stories and rolling conversations. I got this in spades over the next decade of living in that town but I also sometimes got deep insights into the human condition that I was not always ready for. I saw how difficult it is for a soul trying to have a full human experience in life try to do this in a fish bowl of a small town. Small towns are safe warm baskets for the youth, children get to roam free and wild under the watchful gaze of the community that knows enough to know who’s who’s child and who to call should there need to be an adult called in. Small towns are easy and slow and idle and safe. Small towns can make you feel secure in your place in the world, rooted and steady. Small towns can also leave you short of breath and longing for a place of anonymity. They let you set your roots deep into the ground but then they deny you water and sun to grow taller. Small towns want you to stay the same because that is how a small town keeps its fabric stitched together so tightly. If you find yourself in a small town and you are trying to have a full human experience I suggest living a soft double life. Have a van and get out of town whenever you start to feel your roots stressed, have a holiday home somewhere else that you frequent often, have an apartment in the city that you rent. Seek and retreat to your own world that is not touched by the small town. Here you will find the best of both worlds. The safety, love and security of a small town with the joy, freedom, and the possibility of being able to screw it all up, blow it up and then try again. I think the perfect life has both of these things in it. It has a small town full of faces that know where you buy your milk, they know the gate of your walk and the limits to your social functioning, they know some family secrets, and too much about things they really actually know nothing about. And then you have your secret nest. The place that you can go to and be any version of you that you want. You can try new things, be with new people, re invent, rewind, re upholster and begin again if you want to without a second or even a first thought. I watched creatives, squished and squashed in the rumor mills of that town, as they tried to spread there wings to create yet at the same time stay small enough to fit in with the expectations of the town. I watched peoples addictions play out in a cat and mouse type of game with either everyone knowing and allowing for it or everyone pretending not to know and allowing for it. I watched affairs percolate and bubble over to a boiling point and I watched the aftermaths of heart break and the inevitable re imagining that happens when the life that you thought you were going to live out simply blows up.

I am so entirely made up now from this small town and all of its charms, characters, secrets and lies, I am thankful for this. It was a true gift. One man that I spent a lot of time with was named Mark. He looked like a wild artist who spent too much time on a farm. His hair was always fighting with itself to try and stay on his head and his beard had enough grey running through it to make him seem older than he was and wise enough to listen to. He was a self proclaimed plate spinner. He had so many things that ignited a spark in his heart that he wanted to do them all and he wanted to do them all at once. He started project after project exhaustive in his efforts to do it all and experience it all and to love it all. Although this way of living was of his own design he seemed trapped in the constant juggling of it all. He seemed both miserable and half happy as if happiness was just over the next hill but forever out of reach. It was a hard thing to watch and to try and understand what his version of a happy life looked like. He liked to be busy and be in the doing of life but he spoke often of this longing to slow down, to have more time for his heart to be creative and his creative process seemed to need the quiet spaces of a slow Sunday afternoon in order to flourish. He never allowed time in his life for quiet which meant he never felt truly connected to his creative heart. From one project he floated to the next often at the same time in this desperate balancing act of yes’s and insufficient nights of sleep, punctuated by an endless array of riotous happy hours and gin and tonics on the back patio. I loved this man. He was so full of his own humanness that when in his presence I felt this intense need to sign up for anything and everything that I had ever wanted to do and to do it with an extreme urgency. One day when I was over at his house he walked into the kitchen, his shoulders rolling inwards towards his barrel chest, his hair disheveled to the point where it no longer looked like his hair but a wig of a mad scientist, he looked defeated and deflated. He sighed as he entered the room and so the conversation began. ‘Mark, how are you, whats going on in your world today, I said from the bar stool at the kitchen island’? ‘Erin, I am tired, I am tired of being tired, I am tired of being pulled in so many directions. I am tired of not doing the art projects that I want to do because I am spending so much of my time doing all the other bullshit that I keep saying yes to doing. And yes some of this stuff has to be done but some of it is just exactly what I just said it is, absolute pure bullshit. And I do it I think in part to avoid doing my art. But why? Why would I do that when doing art is all I ever think about doing, its all I ever talk about doing but when given the choice between saying no or saying yes to bullshit projects and jobs I always say yes only to resent them later when I am doing them because I would rather be doing my art. And so it continues and I get so frustrated with my self I want to crawl out of my own skin or just run and hide somewhere so that I don’t have to face the fact that I am a living goddamn walking hypocrite’. He just laid it bare like that at my feet this diatribe of his inner workings. I remember that he stood in shadowy profile behind the kitchen island as the sunlight poured in through the window behind him. ‘I am that guy at the circus’, he continued, ‘ the guy, the plate spinning guy. I am the guy who starts with some sticks and plates, he starts with one plate and spins it on a stick on his left shoulder, then he adds another one to his left knee, and then his toe and so on until he is standing there with so many plates spinning it is almost unfathomable that one does not break. But he keeps going around frantically re spinning the plates to keep the momentum going and he has this exhausted, panicked and excited look on his face as he desperately works to keep the plates spinning and it works. It works for a short period of time but you know what inevitably happens if he tries to keep spinning the plates for too long? He gets tired, he looses his focus and invariably the plates begin to crash to the ground, smashing into a million little pieces one loud bang at a time. This is why you always see the plate spinner stop his act at the circus, he can’t very well let his plates crash to the ground or else what would be the point of his act so he goes right to the edge of his ability to keep it all balanced and then he gathers the plates up just before they start to wobble. I am a plate spinner only my act never stops. And so here I am - my plates are starting to crash around me and I no longer have the desire to frantically try to keep spinning them anymore. I do not even have the desire to think about my art or to worry about not doing my art because I have been plate spinning for so long it all just seems so desperately exhausting’. He stopped talking then. He took a sip of his water and a breath that sounded like a sigh from a year of holding his breath.

I left his house later that afternoon and as I walked down his long gravel driveway, past the creek and over the bridge under the willow tree and past the small guest cottage at the bottom of the drive, I could not get what he shared with me out of my head; the image of the plate spinner lodged forever in my brain. I have tried to be a professional plate spinner in my life before, I have walked into rooms of friends with my shoulders rolled into my chest deflated and defeated with exhaustion from trying to keep my plates spinning in the air knowing intuitively with a deep dread that soon the plates would start to crash to the ground- it was only a matter of time. I have tried to add more plates when I already had too many spinning and I have tried to add plates that did not even match the other plates in my life only to see if I could keep them all going. In my effort to be a professional plate spinner I was also choosing to enter into the ‘I am busy culture’, the frantic chorus of my friends and family running past me all with their own plates madly spinning only to stop briefly to tell me how many plates they were trying to keep going all with the same wild eyed look of madness that rivaled that of the plate spinner at the circus. A few years back I let all my plates crash to the ground in a spectacular display of surrender. I got really quiet, I got really still and I got really un-busy. The silence almost killed me at the beginning and I spent most of those early days trying to prevent myself from frantically re adding plates back into my life, it seemed to me at that time a whole lot more comfortable to be distracted with plate spinning then to sit in silence with myself. Truthfully looking back now that would have been easier. But luckily I had just enough faith, naivety and hope to continue to be quiet - one needs these three things to be cocky enough to attempt change I think. I remained un busied, I stayed un frantic, my social calendar was mostly blank white spaces between black lines. The days began to turn into weeks and my spirit started to be able to hear itself again, my deep knowing got its voice back. I started to look at the plates I used to spin all the time. Which ones did I want to keep, which ones did I want to let remain smashed on the ground at my feet? How many plates did I want to spin at a time? It was not a smooth transition at all, although it seems that nothing worth doing ever really is. I added too many and had to let some smash, I added to little and felt unfulfilled and deeply lonely. Today, it is still a forever changing conversations with times where I feel the need to spin freely away and other times when I put everything down gently and just sit, I no longer get to the point where my plates crash to the ground and this is the biggest change. Now my time is thoughtfully designed, intentional and for the most part beautifully full filling.

I no longer live in that little town nestled under the rim of an anciently wise volcano, but I think of Mark often. I wonder if he put his plates down voluntarily or if life somehow forced him to let them all crash to the ground which life has a tendency to do to those of us who have been practicing spinning too hard for too long. I wonder if he ever got around to his art projects that he dreamed of doing and if he still looks like an artist who spends too much time on a farm. Mostly I think of him and that little town and all the souls I loved dearly and I just smile.