Throat Chakra

This week my Yoga teacher is focusing on the throat chakra and all it encompasses including those yoga positions that encourage voice and expression. Until recently, I haven't given my throat much thought. But last month, on my way to Chicago for a photo shoot for the upcoming play, my voice went out. And aside from a few days of gruffness, it hasn't been back.

Secretly, I was hoping the trip to Chicago would jolt me out of my pre-production despondence. For a year, the final draft of the play had been waiting on my laptop and although I had a vague sense that there were things that could be done, proactive things such as marketing, facebooking, producing something new, nothing felt do-able. For one thing, my life wasn't turning out the way I expected. Case in point--for nearly six months now, my mother has been asking me what my "back up plan" is.

"My own back up plan," she proudly asserted, "was seamstressing." I asked her what she meant. "I always knew that if I couldn't find a job as an Urban Planner, I could make clothes."

It seemed irrelevant to state the obvious--I was an architect with over ten years experience. Architecture WAS my back up plan. Yet here I was, trying to navigate the tide of the neo Great Depression. Brilliantly unemployed. Who expects their back up plan to break? Each week, I send out well crafted resumes and abridged portfolios into the black hole which envelopes the hopes of so many disgruntled workers. And each week, I await calls that never come. Meanwhile, the pass time that I pursued in the thick of the night, investing in as one might a child for whom nothing more is expected other than the hope that it might grow up one day to achieve a measure of success, was all that was keeping me afloat. And the maturation of this hope was a terrifying prospect.

Throughout my life, usually at those junctures where I was in transition from one state to another, I have lost things of great importance to me. For instance, after spending a year trekking throughout southern Africa in a well worn pair of Birkenstocks, I accidentally left them under the bed at a bed and breakfast in Grand Haven, Michigan. I was on my honeymoon, and I rationalized that the loss symbolized the setting aside of my childhood for more grown up pursuits.

As I've grown older, I've come to find symbolic meaning in the loss of valuable things. And so I've given a great deal of thought to the loss of my voice; to what it might mean, on the cusp of such change and transition, to be forced to express myself through the written word. To be conjoined, by circumstance, to the passion I've nurtured in silence for so long.

And most surprising of all--in losing my voice, I may have actually found it.