About the Creator
Who’s Asking
I grew up in Kentucky saying how come.
How come we do it that way. How come that’s the rule. How come everybody knows that and nobody can tell me where it came from. I said it all day, to anyone who would answer. I was the how-come girl before I was old enough to know that was a reputation.
I don’t think I was being difficult. I think I already suspected something. This reality didn’t feel right to me. People would say that’s just the way it is, and it never once settled.
My mother encouraged the asking. When we had questions she handed us Marcus Aurelius and Buddha and Yeshua and Edgar Cayce. She took us to every church and temple and holy place she could find. After Star Wars she’d ask us what good and evil actually were, and why a person might believe one thing over another. We moved almost every year, so we never quite fit anywhere — which turns out to be good training for noticing what everyone around you has quietly agreed not to question.
So I kept asking, and it never stopped. Most of what we’re told about how to live, what to want, and what counts as a reasonable life came to us secondhand, passed down from people who got it from someone else. We’re walking around inside something we inherited and calling it reality. Most of us live in something close to a dream and rarely wake up long enough to question it.
I’ve always known things I had no way of knowing. My friends and family called them gifts. I’ve had them as long as I can remember.
Here’s why I make this show instead of something easier.
I believe this isn’t all there is to life, and most of us never get to the heart of what’s real and what matters. We arrive here having forgotten who we are, and remembering is the work, the honor, and the joy of a life.
I used to think I came here to save the world. I wore myself out helping in ways people told me would work, and they didn’t. So I learned how to unlearn. Now I enjoy just being here and living what I know to be true. Delusion doesn’t hold up near something true. That means I don’t have to rescue anyone. I get to be who I am, and life does its work for me.
When you’re whole, you don’t need much. Most of what we do to keep ourselves safe comes from fear, which leads to control, which is the opposite of being whole. Without fear, control, and obligation, you’re free to change your mind. Free to be one thing to one person and something else to another. Free to stop performing the identity that was handed to you, or the one you built through careful manipulation.
That’s why this show has five voices.
Y is still asking, and the more she learns the less this reality holds up to her scrutiny. The Philosopher got clear the long way, by questioning everything and learning to look at it from somewhere else. The Otherly stands outside all of it with nothing at stake, so she simply says what she sees, and she’s right precisely because she isn’t attached. The Carpenter asks plenty of questions, and often answers one with another. Reality itself he leaves alone. He has nothing to defend.
And then there’s the Father of Lies, who is the only one arguing. He works by mixing ninety-nine parts truth with one part lie, which bends the whole picture, and then people defend the bent version as though it were their own.
I don’t argue with him. Why would I argue with delusion? It only puts me further into it. I think of him like a fly. Shoo, fly. Don’t bother me.
What I want, if you watch this: I want you to feel seen, and I want you to feel free. Not convinced. I’m not after your agreement, and I don’t want you to believe anything because I said it. What I’d love is for you to come away understanding yourself more fully, and being kinder to yourself, and more loving toward yourself and the people around you. That’s what the curious company is for.
That is what this show is. The remembering, coming back to yourself, done out loud and in curious company. Big questions, little certainty, and better company than doing it alone.
— Laura