Glastonbury Tales, pt. 1

For a few weeks now, I’ve been thinking that it could be a good idea, albeit a very dangerous one, to name one of my short story collections from sometime in the future “Glastonbury Tales”. You can just imagine the kind of answer I’ve gotten from the people I’ve mentioned it to.  Yep, they range from “Aw, cute, but be careful with it”, to eyebrow rise and a bit of a scoff.  However, instead of a series of short stories told by whatever range of quirky characters I could come up with for this wondrous town, a series of true telling of my emotional odyssey to finally get here?  I mean, yes, a little bit here on the blog, as I’ve been doing for a year now and will carry on for as long as inspiration flows, but also, how about making that my autobiography? Or biopic, if Stephen wants in and we make into a partnership project?  How fun, we’re already planning it, actually…  It could be a biopic based on a double-biography…  Caution: mind working, beware of future possible tangents…

Anyhu, I’m here now, after years of never knowing where I was going or where I was coming from, I’m home.  Glastonbury is a place where there is as much kookiness as there is healing and spirituality, I know; I’m not saying it’s perfect, and it may yet give me a few downfalls, just like Merano, Vancouver and even London did back in the day, but that’s not what matters.  I’ve grown and evolved enough to know that all the shimmer and glitter in the world doesn’t take the darkness and gloominess away from a place or situation, because life brings dark-patches here and there whether we want them or not, and to run away from them is never the answer because they will follow you… I learned this way back when I was 18, returning crestfallen from Merano, where I’d thought I’d finally belong because Italy was surely full of artists who would at long last understand me, right?  Wrong!  It got so bad at a certain point, that I was offered to change city, moving to Milan with another family in the exchange program.  Yet Merano enticed me to stay with the promise of a first love, a first kiss, and a chuck-load of friends.  So I took my chance and stayed!  But my first love was unrequited, my first kiss consisted of the right place but the wrong person and the wrong feelings, and the chuck-load of friends vanished in time and space as our hands grew tired of writing and our minds could not remember more news to give in a life that carried on pretty much the same whenever we stood to look back at it – at least that’s what it was in my case!

I often wondered what’d been if I’d moved to Milan, but that question ceased to exist once I realised that my reasons would have been the same in moving from Merano to Milan than they’d been on the move from Durango to Merano: running away.  It didn’t matter anymore after a few years – six or seven, perhaps, too many for a heartbroken soul.  It didn’t hurt any longer after a bit more.  (Or does the hurt have to stop before it ceases to matter?) It didn’t even come back to my memory until a few weeks ago, when I was on the eve of the move again and I came across old files in folders forgotten and boxes of memories that do not make sense anymore...  Not that I see those Italian months as a tragedy left behind to be forgotten, not at all by any means!  I think that what makes it unsurpassably good, is all that I learned from it, however long or short it took me to understand those lessons and put them to action.  I mean, the learning comes from bits and pieces of the past, doesn’t it?  So mine comes from Durango, Monterrey, Chihuahua, Ann Arbor, and, as much as it pains me to say it, from Vicente Guerrero as well, and the three first are ongoing at that, but when it comes to that big Bam!-You-fell-and-you-have-to-get-up-on-your-own kind of moment, Merano is very much it for me…  Although, strangely enough, the rush of memory and re-realisations came from finding my old pictures of my Summer of acting school in Vancouver.  There the only thing that truly went askew was my unrealistic belief that I was going to be discovered by a big-time producer and be carried off into the spotlights and the flashes of fortune and fame (away, away from my classmates who thought me weird and confused)…  Of course, I also got carried away by believing once again that the friends I’d make would be there forever and give me that bit of a turnaround my social-life needed…  No can do, chickaree – wait, doesn’t rhyme…  Never mind, I was just making the point that as long as I’d want the place to save me, I would have to be thrown back to the ring.  Well, I did get an amazing thing from it, other than the funky learning of course, and that was my full-face shot right by Steve Zhan in Bandidas, a little after minute three goes by.  My hair is blonde in the film, btw, so you might have to look a couple of times if you were expecting the pitch-black that I’m known for today (my natural colour, btw, though that fact may surprise many).

As for England, well, I’m not counting Newcastle as a place that I ran away to, because that was a perfectly planned learning experience, quite literally – in every way!  And it was also perfectly timed by the Universe, because it made sure that every little bit of life that I chose while living there would bring me something positive, even if it was taking the wrong class, dating the wrong guys, or getting the wrong dissertation advisor…  All of those things, as negative as they may sound, were there to give a turn which would take me to a better place than the one I was thinking I was getting to, but there was also one more factor that made it become a more successful journey than its predecessors: this time around I was not running away from anything.  Sure, I was running towards a specific goal, and sometimes I ran for longer than needed because I kept thinking that my goal was on another route, hence my referring to myself a few months back as the Woman Who Ran (which I still get a kick out of, btw), but that was different… And that was exactly what made my experience in London take a different shape than I had originally expected, because I thought my goal was there, when indeed it was just going to be an important part of the trajectory, where I’d be making a lot of pits-stops for healing and nurturing, and from where I’d have to keep going back to Mexico a few times for the same reasons to that I could have enough power in body, mind and soul (the heart always had even more than enough) to get to my real destination: Glastonbury.  Who knew?  I certainly didn’t, but it was worth it taking everything step necessary to discover it, to hang around long enough so that I’d get the chance to find that new route towards my goals – I mean, I’ve been saying for a few months now that indeed my true home is in Stephen’s arms, so it could as well have been back to Newcastle if that part of the project had been successful, or back to London if he says he wants to go for it at the West End or any such theatre venues, or back to Mexico with him by my side if things get rickety here, but the real point of this whole telling (of this first part within the telling) is that when you stop a little bit just to listen and focus on the signs, you might be told exactly what you need to do or where you need to go to get closer to your goal…  I like that – I love that about London because it taught me the hard way that when in London I should always follow my intuition, and I love that about Durango because it never stops reminding me to check myself and see if I’m missing anything…

But you know what, I’m gonna leave it here this time, and carry on with part 2 next week, because I didn’t even start speaking about the plane and the horrible turbulence and how I shook lots of fears away like that, cos that story deserves its own time and lots of space and I will happily comply with it.  So I leave you with my best wishes of brightest blessings, and let my limbs and mind take a little rest after all the running I’ve done…

Sandra Tena ≈ Writer, healer, dreamer, lover