Tracy Lord helps me come to grips with myself.

Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord and Cary Grant
as CK Dexter Haven in 1940's The Philadelphia Story

I have gone back and forth a lot this week. What should I say, how should I say it, or should I just keep my mind to myself and say nothing at all? I've started and stopped, erased and rewritten, tried to reframe bad feelings and amplify good ones, and still, I'm here, professing my confusion but hoping it will disappear before I publish this so I can take it all back again. To be both an artist and confused is a terrible plight. I have set myself up to be a confidence factory, certainty factory. Pumping out the short and the long of what is True and Right and Worthy. The public sphere is no place to air out your confusion, I'd think. Keep that in your journal, I'd think, away from the eyes of those who wouldn't care, or worse, understand.

There's a character in film history who has been coming to mind these last several days. Tracy Lord. Do you know her? Katharine Hepburn incomparably brought her to life in The Philadelphia Story. For all of her grace and beauty, charm and intellect, Tracy Lord had a kind of unconscious loathing for the weakness of the human mind. A self-loathing, in fact, which propped her up very strong and tall for all the onlookers, but deep inside she was just like everyone else: small, sometimes; scared, sometimes. Her transformation from statue to woman makes The Philadelphia Story one of the best-written screenplays of all time, and I recall it to myself whenever a crack appears in my own marble veneer. Uncertainty isn't a poison or a dagger to the heart, but a chance to see it for what it really is: an opportunity to choose certainty all over again, to appreciate the very choice that lies within. Flesh may be fallible and inherently weaker than stone and bronze, but the Goddess has no heart like the woman has, or the man. Tracy Lord learned this at the crossroads of her life, but who's to say that every day----every moment----mightn't be a crossroads for living; a chance to choose left instead of right, yes instead of no, love instead of hate. 

When Tracy and her ex-husband, Dexter (played by Cary Grant), reminisce about their honeymoon boat, The True Love, Dexter declares, 
“My, she was yar.” 
"She was yar, alright,” Tracy replies. “I...wasn’t, was I?" 
Their time spent together on the wonderfully lively, responsive (“yar”) True Love was perhaps their chance preview at living out their true natures, carried equally as secure over waters choppy or calm. In their marriage, though, she had been intolerant of his weaknesses, unfeeling when his flaws required compassion. Maybe I'm both Tracy Lord and C.K. Dexter Haven in one. Without loving the parts that make the whole, honest-to-goodness loving the flaws and fallibilities, there can be no True Love, neither ship nor sentiment.

I know we have much to learn and much to achieve as a planet. In my own life, love is still revealing itself to me in all its many and beautiful forms. Sometimes it feels far away from me, or I forget about it altogether. Though maybe you might come to the end of this post and picture the bride standing with the groom, side by side beneath the canopy of birth and change, no maps in hand for how to proceed except in the love they have for one another, which, in its purity of spirit, its utter and complete humanness, could only have come from the very certainty of love for the imperfect parts that make the beautiful, glittering whole.