Penelope and Ulysses (20 page)

PENELOPE
has
come
full
circle,
and
this
is
her
life
message
and
thoughts
on
all
the
defeats
and
joys
she
has
experienced
in
living
with
and
without
Ulysses,
her
thoughts
on
the
purpose
and
meaning
in
life,
and
her
thoughts
about
her
departure
from
the
audience’s
life.

It
is
the
beginning
of
a
new
day.
All
the
struggles
have
been
fought
and
PENELOPE
has
multiplied
in
emotions
and
spirituality
and
intellect,
and
she
knows
her
place
in
her
life
and
the
world.

The
lights
start
to
come
on
to
create
a
Dawn.
(The
play
begins
with
night
and
it
ends
with
dawn.)

PENELOPE
is
standing,
facing
the
audience,
holding
her
sword
upwards.
She
is
standing
by
the
sea
.]

PENELOPE: I am ready for my departure.

Has my life and journey brought you sadness?

Devotion and belief

that our love will continue in the world?

There is no world without the making of love

over and over again.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I took the journey.

I travelled on the journey of life.

I was blessed and cursed.

I planned and plotted to remain alive—

not surviving like animals

but alive, with imagination, vision, and dream.

BOTH: I am ready for my departure.

PENELOPE: I go from life to life

and I am ready to continue,

to continue, to continue.

I am ready to eat away at eternity with the tiniest of shells.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Hail to you, my love!

PENELOPE: My brother, my comrade, my lover.

BOTH: You are welcome, whoever you are.

PENELOPE: Have you seen Ulysses?

YOUNG PENELOPE: Does he send a message with you?

PENELOPE: I have lived in exile among the dead, the living, the sirens,

and the birds.

BOTH: They have chosen me

and I embrace them as my home.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Ulysses was a wild bird.

PENELOPE: Ulysses was the salt in my journey,

the sea I swam in and on.

I am departing at the Dawn of the world—

your world, my world, their world, our world,

so many worlds,

and we thought there was only ours.

The world that makes and breaks

and remakes itself over and over again.

BOTH: The “eternal recurrence,”
45

the eternal making of the world,

over and over again.

PENELOPE: I want a universe for you where nothing dies.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Is there such a universe?

PENELOPE: A universe where nothing dies

is where death is in life and life in death.

Both are different births and endings;

therefore, we go from life to life

where you make the world over and over again

in the image of deep longing,

deep searching,

deep seeking,

deep surrendering,

in the image of deep love.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I have whispered and shouted the eternal code

of the beloved and the lover of the earth.

BOTH: For all I know is from this earth, this moment,

as if time does not exist—it is an illusion.

I am not concerned by time,

although when I have transformed,

this time as I know it

will not exist for me.

It will still continue to exist for others,

but I would have changed into something else,

something I do not recognise in this time,

as the caterpillar does not recognise the butterfly,

nor does it know it is the same entity.

Time has been distant from me.

Life has been the one that I have chased after.

It is life that has been my siren:

connecting me, disconnecting me, playing with me,

tormenting me, offering me, removing from me,

taking from me, giving to me, and always laughing:

“This is not the end between you and me!”

This universe does not die. It multiplies.

It scatters its seeds into the next generation.

It changes and transforms the previous generations,

as all layers of generations are suspended and quivering

above and below each other—

the world makes itself over and over again.

BOTH: Keep loving the earth; keep devoted

to the life you are in.

Do not take the face of another.

Remain true to yourself.

YOUNG PENELOPE: And now that you are leaving,

take some part of me with you into the light.

I have touched parts

of your unspoken world.

We are taught not to share our vulnerabilities,

our sensitivities, our visions,

and therefore this becomes the unspoken world of another,

the sunken world.

How can you live a full life with a full heart—

with a sunken vision?

Vision is meant to be lived and shared, not drowned

where even the mermaids lose their glory.

I have travelled on the sea of life

without maps and charts.

I have lived the human adventure with a full heart.

PENELOPE: How does it stand here,

above and below,

backwards and forwards?

YOUNG PENELOPE: The relativity of time and travel

from one place to the other,

without even seeing movement,

not a sound . . .

You are pushed into the world

and pulled without any warning, without any sound,

back into metamorphosis—

another birth.

Without movement or wheels,

without maps or charts,

we find our way into the world

and find our way into the next realm,

the next birth.

We find our arrival.

We are there for our departure

and know precisely where to be and where to go

for our unknown destinations.

PENELOPE: Our arrival into life;

our departure into the unknown.

YOUNG PENELOPE: Upon our arrival in life

we are also entering the unknown,

and yet we cling to this known

as if it were the only life, the only experience

that we will ever go through.

BOTH: Our lives are full of arrivals and departures.

PENELOPE: How does it stand here,

that the wheels and trains and planes

move without progress,

and with fixed destinations?

Where is the adventure

if you know exactly where you are going to go,

who you will be with,

what you will wear,

how you will look,

and how you will act.

Where is the adventure

in such a controlled destination?

BOTH: We are all navigators in the sea of life.

“And there is the sea and who will drink it dry?”
46

YOUNG PENELOPE: Man, among all creatures,

is the most desirable to me.

BOTH: The most frightening.

PENELOPE: The one that knows of the progress and stages of life,

the cycle of birth and death,

and still pretends that these laws do not apply to him.

YOUNG PENELOPE: The most lovable

and by far the most desirable one.

PENELOPE: It is strange, how when we are older,

words that we have used when we were younger

come back to haunt us.

BOTH: Man has the capacity to create, to make, to invent,

to heal, to love, to harvest peace and prosperity to all.

PENELOPE: How does one know

if one loves from their soul,

from their vision,

from the depths and sleep of eternity?

YOUNG PENELOPE: They make fire in the heart of others.

They make fire for us to see each other.

They make fire and play around it like young children.

They make fire

and give light from their struggle in life and with life.

This fire, this heat and light,

connects us to our lives and to the lives of others.

We become both alive in life and alive in death.

This is what they mean by not being separated by death,

and a love going beyond death.

PENELOPE: It is this fire in the heart, in the spirit of man

that multiplies;

it generates and consumes the fire giver

and the fire taker.

These are the seeds from eternity

that we pass on to each other.

YOUNG PENELOPE: We pass the seed of love,

the seed of fire,

the seed of eternity,

the seed of “memory” to each other.

We infect and affect each other.

PENELOPE: What happens to those

who are seed carriers of memory and fire?

YOUNG PENELOPE: We bury them in the ground

so that they can grow and we can all eat from their fruit.

They let us bury them into the ground.

Surely such evolved people would know

that if they exposed too much fire or light

others who do not want to be seen or exposed

would come to put the fire out, to put them into the ground—

and they still do it, not out of spite or defiance

but out of love.

PENELOPE: Thank goodness we cannot contain

the wild bird’s vision

or the song of the siren.

“It is the madmen and children

who keep the fires burning.”
47

YOUNG PENELOPE: What would happen to the world

if we removed the seed carriers from every generation?

What would happen

if we cut down the trees in the soul?

BOTH: We would be engulfed in total darkness.

PENELOPE: The seed carriers

postulate and bury unseen seeds

in the journey of the human heart

to promote justice and peace,

to abolish exploitation of others,

to abolish wars,

to increase the ever-threatened dignity and life of man.

It is love that reaches us

from the shores of the invisible and the visible,

like the siren’s song

echoing a message that cannot be heard

in human voice

that reaches us—from where?

YOUNG PENELOPE: From the struggles and sacrifices of our lives,

from those we kept afloat in life,

from those who keep us afloat from the other shore,

from the rivers of human tears.

BOTH: The aching longing.

The shores that we reach and cannot reach.

The measureless human tears.

PENELOPE: We dream of voyages through our connection

to the seeds of longing.

We create and grieve through the fire of our love,

the fire in our being.

We arrive and depart with the light,

with the burning in our soul

that gives us direction and guidance.

BOTH: Love is in us or nowhere.

Humanity is in us or nowhere.

Kindness is in us or nowhere.

“Eternity is in us or nowhere.”
48

PENELOPE: Do you have regrets?

YOUNG PENELOPE: And would you change anything

if you could be taken forward

and backward into your life?

BOTH: Would you change anything at all?

Would you offer your love to a stranger?

Would you feed and clothe a stranger,

wanting and seeking nothing in return?

PENELOPE: I do not have any regrets

upon the journey I have taken,

the love that I have shared,

the love that was stolen and hidden from me,

the long years of solitude

in which I found myself and my life.

YOUNG PENELOPE: I chose to live in the forest

and now I have returned to the sea.

I have multiplied as all fish returning home to the sea—

and so full of seed.

PENELOPE: I have come to an end.

If someone could continue where I have stopped

And there above me and below me,

my life waves to me for recognition.

YOUNG PENELOPE: For life chose me

and I choose life over and over again.

PENELOPE: I chose the road that took me away from

prestige, recognition, and power—

I chose freedom.

YOUNG PENELOPE: How do you bury a man who has loved?

PENELOPE: How do you bury a man who has loved?

can it be that the man who does not love