All The World's A Stage...

Today was a very happy day for me.

It was Sonnet Sunday at the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre here in London. It was FREE to enter the Globe, walk around, get food and coffee and listen to sonnets. They were being performed in various languages in honour of the Olympics, and there will be a festival in which all of Shakespeare's plays are performed in 37 different languages as well. Needless to say I didn't understand a whole lot of what was being said but that is entirely beside the point. Just being there inside that theatre was enough for me.

The original Globe Theatre is long gone of course and the tourist attraction which now stands in London is a replica designed to imitate what it would have been like in Elizabethan days as closely as possible. It is such an amazing space and I can't wait to see my first show there, once the plays are being performed in English, that is. I would even like to try seeing a show from the yard - the standing seats right beneath the stage where you are up close to the performers the way it was in Shakespeare's day. The Globe is not kidding around - it's an impressive space that is made for theatre as a collective experience - you can see everyone else at all times because it's in a circle. It's one of the reasons I wanted to come to London and being there today was definitely something special for me.

I'm trying throughout this whole experience to focus on being here now and appreciating how lucky I am to be seeing and doing all of these things. It's definitely a challenge at times, but recently I seem to be settled in enough to find moments of happiness sneaking up on me! I was feeling fairly stuck in Vancouver and already I can feel that this change of place and situation is allowing things to start moving again. Which is good. 

A favorite from today, which I heard performed in Cree :

 SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.