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barakha

Thanks for visiting our blog. Please bear with us while we restructure our various sites and pages. We'll be posting stuff as regularly as possible while we continue to work on it.


You've stumbled upon my blog which is the companion to my website Ishah 'El. This site is intended to track my progress in starting a new multi-cultural theatre arts company and bring updates to devoted supporters and curious by standers. Check here regularly for posts on what I’m up to and how it all is faring, and you can join me by posting comments & encouragement. With that I invite you to become friends and enter into my world of art, faith, life & passion. Shalom.

P.s.- This is actually 4 blogs rolled into 1... why? I don't really know. Some sort of strange urge to make it multi-dimensional caused me to lay it out this way, yet people seem to never realize that there is an index at the right which will take you to other interconnected pages. Feel free to explore and share with others!

Monday, May 01, 2006

The Patience of the Bricklayer

New post. May 1st. Two months since the last one. Almost. Right on schedule.

I'm in the next phase of launching the theatre project, which is to begin doing something instead of lots of clerical paper shuffling, organizing & imagining. Not that this phase is all that different, it just involves so much more actual contact with people and self-promotion. We are awaiting word back on our non-profit/ tax exempt status- no real sense in when that may actually come through- as well as a decision about a grant, which we were expecting to hear from "by the end of April". I decided I should contact them just to check in, keep abreast of the process and remind them that we are still here. They responded very nicely and appologetically that their board will be meeting tomorrow evening, May 2nd, and will contact me about their decision. So- still waiting.

I seem to do well at waiting. Most people believe this about me & are impressed by the ability to be patient, still & to trust. We all know that waiting is an excruciating excersize in suspended animation, each episode comprising seconds of infinite length making up something akin to an historical epoch. It's surreal & not very entertaining. It's boring & it sucks, but wait we must. Fortunately there are other things to do and this is why we have hobbies & avocations. So we wait & busy ourselves with other things.

I'm in a bit of a quandary with those three topics: non-profit/ tax exempt status, grants & waiting. The initial grant will help me to better determine what I do next & what scale it will involve while the status determination will help to receive firther funding with other grants. The next phase will depend upon doing a production so that I can demonstrate, or prove, that we are worthy of some major risk brokerage & backing. Meanwhile there are stones to be hewn, landscapes to be surveyed, mortor to be mixed, workers to muster & ground to be broken. "The patience of the bricklayer is assumed in the plans of the architect". That's a line from a poem I read decades ago, the only line from it that has stuck with me. I've long forgotten who wrote it so excuse me for not giving credit.

Last Wednesday we had our first board meeting & celebration. Three of us went to a local upscale restaurant, Food 101, & enjoyed a wonderful dinner while I reviewed the process accomplished & plans for this next step in developing the organization. I had prayed the week before & felt that I wasn't to be too concerned with the non-profit status & grant determanition, which I mostly had managed to be concern & worry free, and that I should begin focusing on mounting a production & shooting for our first performance in September/ October.