Sometimes the muscles in my face tremble.

It usually starts with a smile.

Have you ever held a smile for so long that when you finally stopped, the muscles in your face didn’t know what to do?
For me, this feels like a rippling of exhaustion, and an embarrassing realization that ‘I’ am not in control.

It happens to me at auditions – specifically during the ‘slate’. It happens to me when, despite the conniption fit of fear taking place inside of my body, I’m trying to look okay. I’m trying to look okay with being the sole receiver of your attention. Because I want to be seen. But I’m also afraid that with your eyes only on me you’ll see everything that I have ever believed about myself. I’m afraid that you’ll see something that I’m not… or worse, you’ll miss what I am because I’m too afraid to show you.

I listened to Abraham Hicks this morning, and she talked about the experience of ‘love’ as being one where ‘two souls resonate with one another.’ What a beautiful thought. My experience doing spoken word this weekend makes me wonder if our souls not only resonate with other people, but also with experiences and vocations.

Resonate: produce or be filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound
Tremble: a trembling feeling, movement, or sound

Why do these words feel so similar?
Do we tremble our way to resonation?

Is this tremor a signal that we are going in the right direction? That there’s a fight going on inside of us that has less to do with failure, and more to do with strength? Something inside of us – dare I say our souls – fighting through the fear our life has laced through the sinews of our bodies as we fight to feel, create, and participate in our lives in a way that is resonate and full?

Sometimes I tremor when I smile. A new word. A slight variation on the word ‘tremble’, and when I look this new word up in the dictionary I find words like ‘earthquake’ and ‘involuntary’.

Involuntary?

Maybe… involuntary in the sense that the tremor does not come from ‘me’, and my thoughts, and the ‘acceptable capsule of behaviours you can rely on me to be’ [a line from my spoken word poem ‘The Rubik’s Cube’]; rather, this tremor comes from the shifting of space between the tectonic plates that are my identity. Maybe this tremor comes from a ‘something’ inside that is moving perceptions and knowings around – like one of those sliding puzzles – until it can be expressed… until it can speak.

If a tremor is an earthquake, it can’t last forever. Eventually the ground will (has to) return to balance.
And when that happens, I suppose the logical deduction is that a new terrain will stand strong. Where once the discomfort of impending change shifted its feet, there will be strength.

I wonder what that will feel like.