Brazil - 10 March, 2006

We are in the home stsretch and I am feeling it. Tonight is a talk in São Paulo, the weekend in free and then Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are talks in Belo Horizonte, Uberlandia and São Jose... and then I get on a night flight to start the long slog home to my little island and to the life that awaits me.

Our talks on Sunday and Monday went quite well, though I had the uneasy feeling that we were two speakers with two messages, not one message with two very different styles of speaking it. By Wednesday's presentation in Joao Pessoa, that flaw showed up in technicolor. Many things were less than wonderful about the situation. The Visao Futuro facilitators had booked an inexpensive hall, but... it belonged to a religious group whose reputation apparently made some people unwilling to come. and it was a cavernous auditorium with 800 seats and a stage 5 feet off the ground with a monumental dais for a panel of speakers that would have fit right in to the old Soviet Union. Intimacy was not easy to create. Plus, about 120 people came who scattered themselves in the auditorium, making it feel creepily empty. My translator was on her maiden translation voyage and so nervous she became stiff, loquatious and often just plain wrong. Neither Susan nor I felt able to spiritually touch the people scattered in the vast emptiness of this hall. there was no bounce, no lift, no light and we both need to feel a connection to connect with the deepest source of speaking.

We processed for several hours this failure with the facilitators, two high spirited women who ended up way down in the dumps. Then we stayed up for another two hours searching for the way through... especially with 6 more talks to go.

So much of what I have relied on for public speaking was missing. I can't make jokes. I can't use slang. I can't feel what is real for Brazilians like I can feel with American audiences. We are sort of locked in to using powerpoint so that if the translator is off at least the slides on the screen are correct - so I can't be spontaneous. I am sharing a time slot barely big enough for me to get it all across... and needing to leave the audience alert and alive enough for susan to have something to work with. In trying to adjust the talks until then, susan had been getting feedback from her facilitators in each place and then trying to steer me into better choices. Each correction seemed to move me further from the ease and intuition i rely on to hit the mark.

what a perfect set up for breakthrough! all we needed was to understand what this wall we hit meant. i staunchly navigated through the dark forest of doubt - and the desire to just throw inthe towel and let her do it all in her charming Portuguese. I settled again and again my ruffled feathers as susan would try to steer me to choices that didn't feel quite right... but what do i know as i am so at sea with the language and culture. i needed her - badly - to steer or i would sink. and I knew that my uneasiness had nothing to do with her... but with being so very challenged on every front, unable to use most of my normal speaking skills. so we sat in this fire of not knowing and the breakthrough came. We searched for the one message - what is true fulfillment - that would link our two presentations. With that key, we each tossed chunks of what we had been doing and massaged what was left. I searched for ways to have my intuition and personality present with the awkward rhythm of pausing every sentence for translation. in that fire we also became more 'one' with one another, more of a team, deeper friends and companions.

AND, the talk last night worked very well. I did little skits and pantomimes to make my points, the translator had a sense of humor as well so could support me in playing with the audience, the setting was perfect, every chair in the auditorium filled (about 250), and the group so happy about the result.

There are some deep teachings in all this... about pulling within for deeper ways of connecting beyond words and culture. I have long felt that i wear my personality like an overcoat - it isn't me, it's what i run around in. But being so stripped in high demand situations with lots of people witnessing my nakedness is certainly a crucible for transformation.

it's time to go for tonight1s talk so, to paraphrase jimmy durante, goodnight mrs calabash and the rest of you reading, wherever you are...