DURING On Stage, keep notes in your pocket. This will prompt your brain to remember your material (I already know your practiced a lot so I won't remind you of that.) If your notes are in your hand while your nervous audience could see them shake and you'll most likely use them simply out of that nervousness. Make eye contact with your audience, especially those warm and friendly faces. Talk to that one person for a moment, and you won't feel so alone and isolated. Never mention your nervousness, and I bet no one else will either.

Know that you can gain control of your stage fright. That control can become a powerful ally to you on stage. No one has ever died of stage fright so I'm sure you'll be quite safe if you've practiced, practiced, practiced. Because being well prepared will be greatest thing you can do to overcome stage fright. But feel free to try these other suggestions as well.

Think successfully! Tracy

Lizards flit about, and hummingbirds, and even an eagle soars. The ants lug to their nest every scarce crumb they find. A scorpion rests under a rock, but lift that cover and she scuttles away. When wind ceases, insects are everywhere. Timeless it is, but movement still through time. I am embedded in Life’s relationship . . . if I can just be slow enough to see.

Heading back to camp, I spotted a pile of human trash, old pots and rusty cans, stashed under a rock. I loaded my arms, and booty made my unfit body even more ungainly as I clambered up a few hundred feet of boulder-size debris. It somehow mattered enormously to me that I carry out at least a portion of that anonymous debris, make an act of reparation toward slow processes of desert.

Back in my perch, I turned again writing:

Radical Love . . . guides me in knowing that child starving in Sahara, woman celebrating a birth in Melanesia, man tortured in Brazil, all are part of me. I feel deep kinship with little lizard that stopped to exchange stares and tree that snapped when I pulled too tightly on rope anchoring my tarp.

Radical Love makes work for justice inevitable, for God is present in this lizard, this tree, as surely as in eyes of a stranger, or heart of a friend.

The desert taught me that we are all connected – not just with our neighbors, not just with our own species, but we are one with ocean sand and desert cryptogam, great whales and Asian elephants, mockingbirds and, yes, bugs and bacteria too. We are one with mountains, and rivers and trees, and great mystery of beyond.

Time passed, and I survived. Saying final thanks to tree that anchored my tarp, I said aloud, “I owe you more than I have words to say.” Perhaps I moved, but perhaps not. What I experienced was tree reaching down, tweaking my hat from my head. As though spoken aloud, I heard a voice: Your species always uses so many words. To listen, to love, that is enough.

I went to desert to learn to listen. I did not expect to hear voice of a tree.

(c) M. Killoran, Hendersonville NC 2003