Three years ago, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I recorded a video of myself singing I Will Survive. In the video, I’m wearing a gold lamé jumpsuit, long dark wig, and copious amounts of 70’s-inspired makeup, all of which I acquired for the purpose of the recording. I posted it on various social media with the following caption:

Aaaaah, Valentine’s Day. This sugary day on which singles feel alienated and coupled folks gaze at their significant others and secretly find them wanting. A day so laden with gooey expectation that the chance of getting through it without experiencing burning flashes of envy or disappointment is .3 percent (margin of error plus or minus 2)—whether or not you happen to be in menopause. This day on which everyone else seems to be getting fresher flowers, more thoughtful handmade cards, tastier food, and more passionate sex than you will ever have. This day on which, while arguing fiercely under your breath with your significant other at a restaurant, you’re acutely aware of other couples holding hands across the table and gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes. I, for one, have had some of the worst dates of my life on Valentine’s Day. I remember one such occasion, more than a quarter-century ago, in which I stomped out of an Italian restaurant, nearly knocking over the candle and setting fire to the checkered tablecloth, and started trudging home in the rain before my then-boyfriend and I had even had a chance to order, the stares of waitstaff and patrons burning holes in my indignant back as I made my dramatic exit. It is in honor of all this and more that I give you this Valentine’s offering, with mad respect to Gloria Gaynor for her timeless anthem, which has helped more of us get through breakups and heartaches of every stripe than any survey can possibly calculate. Because Yes, Yes, and again Yes! If we survived four years of Donald The Rump, we can definitely survive this day of white-tinged chocolate and brown-edged rose petals. So sing it loud and clear with me, friends—get up and dance, too, if the spirit moves you. Whoever you are, whether your couplehood or singledom strikes you today as blissful, miserable, or somewhere in the vast realm of the in-between: YOU. WILL. SURVIVE!

Relationships, Memoir/Personal Essay, BuddhismTanya ShafferFebruary 23, 2024Valentine's Day, Relationships, Marriage, Divorce, Separation, Romance, LoveComment

Are You a Follower, a Bender, or a Breaker?

Rules are meant to be [FILL IN THE BLANK]

BEACH CLOSED, said the sign. HAZARDOUS.

And yet the people walked toward the sea.

When my boys were in elementary school, their principal sent out a weekly email containing parenting tips and anecdotes. In one such message, she told the story of a mother and child she’d seen at the natural grocery. The child reached for something marked off-limits. The principal overheard the mother say, We’re not supposed to touch those, but let’s do it anyway.

I hope that child doesn’t go to my school, our principal wrote. I’m a rule follower.

The rules keep us all safe, she went on to explain. They keep our community running smoothly.

Of all the emails I received from her during our years at that school, this is the only one I remember.

I was raised to be a rule challenger, bender, and, in some cases, breaker. I was a young child when Timothy Leary popularized the phrase Question authority, but its guiding principle was baked into my DNA. My parents were anti-war and civil rights activists. I marched against the Vietnam War when I was three years old. My dad was a leader in a movement to integrate the swimming pool in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, a movement that eventually led to the creation of a public pool that all could enjoy. My mom, though reserved and soft-spoken, wore jeans in college as part of a coordinated effort to overturn the college’s dress code for women. She marched on civil rights picket lines. Much later, as a faculty member in the statistics department at UC Berkeley, she mentored women in math and science and pushed back against attempts to favor American PhD candidates over more qualified international students.

Of course these are very different kinds of rules from the ones my boys’ school principal was talking about. These were matters of principle, not safety or courtesy.

Even so, when I read the words, I’m a rule follower, my gut registered it as if she’d written, I’m a sheep.

Yet though I would never say, I’m a rule follower, I would also never say, The rules don’t apply to me.

The former calls to my mind the sickening phrase just following orders—also known as the Nuremberg defense—while the latter evokes a certain orange braggart who deems himself above the law.

So what’s the difference between a rule breaker and one who thinks the rules don’t apply to them?

Memoir/Personal Essay, CreativityTanya ShafferJanuary 25, 2024freedom, responsibility, rules, memoir, theatre, Grotowski, experimental theatre, actingComment

What Comes Between Mother and Crone

I’m aware in a way I wasn’t when I was younger that my time on earth is finite. I’ve lost many I held dear, including my father, stepfather, and one of my three brothers. My mother, at 91, is fading. I belong now to the rising generation of elders.

Though there is at times an undercurrent of sorrow, this bone-deep sense of mortality does not depress me. It focuses me. It’s like a giant leaf blower blasting away the detritus of shit-that-doesn’t matter, clearing the deck so I can see what does. For me, that’s caring for friends, family, and community, and doing my best to be in right relationship with the wider family of humanity, the planet, and all non-human beings. And my creative work, which is, for me, both source and fulfillment.

Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferJanuary 11, 2024Memoir, Neopaganism, FeminismComment

The Exuberant Professor: Introducing Harry

There he is—Professor Harry G. Shaffer. See him tearing around the campus of the University of Kansas like a man hellbent on jotting down an idea before he forgets it. See his white hair flying, papers spilling from his old-style leather briefcase, his jacket and suspenders and lightly scuffed Florsheim shoes. See him adjusting the microphone for his intro economics class, where he lectures to some 300 students at a time in his scratchy, heavily accented voice. See how these students adore him, how they laugh at his jokes, repurpose his sayings, draw hearts on their end-of-term evaluations and write comments like, “I want to sit him down by the fire and feed him warm cookies” and “I wish he were my Grandpa!” Behold the Facebook group Harry Shaffer is the Man, made up of current and formers students, which at the time of his death in 2009 boasted 800+ members. Read tribute after tribute to “the man who never left home without his toothbrush.” See how they celebrate his daily greeting, “Good afternoon!,” sometimes transcribed phonetically as “Gut ahftanun!”

Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferDecember 22, 2023memoir, History, Holocaust survivor, civil rightsComment

On the Occasion Of My Fifty-Seventh Birthday

After Annelyse Gelman, “How to Pray”

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all?

- Oscar Wilde, “An Ideal Husband”

Bless the missteps, the stumbles, the chances lost

Bless the heaviness

The memory of those things brings

Bless friendship abandoned

Love unrequited or forsaken

Opportunity squandered

The gentle Spaniard

With eyes of softest brown

Whose hands you held and lips you kissed

On the Peace March

in Nicaragua, 1990

Then lost at a rally

And never found again

The Dutch friend met in Ghana

Who said if you didn’t write her back this time

She wouldn’t write you again

And why, oh why, did you not?

The number a friend gave you

In your solo performance days

For a major presenter

He was sure would be intrigued by your work

And the prestigious director

who handed you his card

Bless those times you sat by the phone

Those numbers in your hand

Dialed and hung up

And dialed

And hung up again

The Song You Came to Sing

There was a sign on the wall at the Lawrence School of Ballet, in Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up, that read, Make sure the song you came to sing does not remain unsung. Throughout junior high and high school, coming and going from dance class, I saw that sign almost daily.

That sign frightened me—What if I don’t find my song?—but it also filled me with determination. I would find my song. Nothing and no one would keep me from it. I would find it, and I would sing.

The Human Experience: “The Fourth Messenger” and Me

My journey with The Fourth Messenger began in the year 2000, on a nine-day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California.

It was my first retreat, and to me it felt hardcore. Meditating all day, alternating fifty-minute periods of sitting and walking, stopping only for food, kitchen duties, sleep, and to listen to a dharma talk each afternoon. Every couple of days we had a one-on-one meeting with a teacher. We weren’t supposed to bring reading or writing materials, but I secretly bucked that rule, feeling both sheepish and defiant. In the evenings I sometimes hiked instead of sitting. Once an owl swooped close to my head, beneath a half-moon so clear I could see every contour. Oh, it was beautiful. Oh, how the silence entered me.

But oh, how hard it was for me to sit so long. One of the hardest things I’d ever done. I was perpetually restless. When the retreat ended, a woman told me she’d made working with the frustration she felt about my fidgeting part of her practice.

Creativity, Buddhism, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferFebruary 27, 2023 Comments

From Nudism to Buddhism

When I broke up with my boyfriend last summer, I did what I always do under such circumstances: fled the country. Not everyone considers this the healthiest way to deal with personal crises, but I figure it's my life, and if I want to run from it, I can. Fortunately, I’d recently gotten some moderately lucrative on-camera acting work, so I had enough cash to take off.

Since both morale and funds were low (the on-camera work notwithstanding), I decided to begin my trip where people knew and loved me and would be likely to buy me meals. My father and his wife spend every summer at a nudist colony in the South of France and had begged me to visit for years. Though the thought of being naked with my father made me slightly uneasy, I decided now was the time. Perhaps the stripping away of clothing would help me to cope with the unadorned truth of my break-up.

Somewhere in the Universe, All of This Is True

I was late because I overslept.

I was late because I was dissolving in tears.

I was late to protest the tyranny of time.

I was late because I was sucked into a Black Hole. Fortunately it didn’t like the taste of my deodorant, so it spit me back out.

I was late because I was smelling every flower and petting every dog

I was late because I fell asleep on the couch by the fire, covered in a mauve wool blanket, one dog snuggled against me and two more on the rug beside me, and when the alarm went off—I’d set it because I had to meet you—I thought I hit snooze, but I accidentally hit stop. That’s why I’m still asleep, and what you see here is not me but a holographic projection. The real me is still asleep on the couch by the fire and will sleep there for a hundred years, until awakened by True Love’s Kiss.

I was late because I was deciding whether to jump from a bridge into the choppy silver waves and let the fish feast on my flesh.

I was late because I was frolicking in the autumn leaves.

I was late because I’m genetically coded for lateness.

I was late because of the rain.

Because of the traffic.

Because of the traffic caused by the rain.

Because a woman with a walker was crossing the street in slow motion, and I had to wait for her to pass.

Because I was standing at the tippy-top of the world, wondering what would happen if there were no gravity and I were lifted off into space to float around the universe. Would I find another planet with life on it? Would they accept me? Love me? Would I finally feel at home?

Of Sweethearts and Sperm Banks: A Twenty-First Century Love Story

On May 10, 2001, I sat on a mountaintop near Dharamsala, India, watching the last rosy gleam of the sunset reflect off the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, and made a decision. Throughout my adult life I’d boldly proclaimed to anyone who would listen that if I found myself 35 years old and single, I would have a child on my own. Yet for all my bravado, I’d never imagined that day would come. Now my 35th birthday loomed large, and I was, in fact, unpartnered. Blame it on the writer-slash-actor’s peripatetic lifestyle, excessive pickiness, a volatile emotional temperament, or just plain bad luck: my intimate relationships had not panned out as I had hoped.

Your Inner Dog

Years ago, before I had kids of my own, I yearned for every baby and toddler I saw. I had only to pass someone pushing a stroller or toting an infant to experience a sensation in my chest that felt simultaneously like a constriction and an expansion. I loved those babies and toddlers, every one of them, and by love I mean I ached for them with a ferocity that bordered on frightening. I wanted to grab them and make a run for it, to pour my vast untapped reservoirs of maternal affection into their little selves. Fortunately I managed to keep those impulses enough in check to stay out of jail.

Now, with my own two baby boys grown into towering teenagers, I no longer feel that craving when I encounter the three and under set. I still think they’re cute and all, but I’m perfectly content to smile and walk on by. But even though I’m also the mother of three charming canines, a huge and painful tenderness still wells up within me every time I pass a dog.

The Woman Beneath My Skin

The woman beneath my skin is alternately ravenous, elated, grief-stricken, bored.

The woman beneath my skin is sometimes at peace and sometimes dissatisfied with everything, thinking, what else, what else, what else??

She wants company, she wants solitude. She wants to write, she wants to simply be. She is bursting with stories, she has nothing to say.

She is profoundly selfish, she would do anything for her kids. She tries to be kind to everyone, always. Sometimes she fails.

She wants a new relationship. She wants to get back together with her wasband*. She starts conversations with strangers on dating apps, gets excited, loses interest, all within a couple of days, or hours, or minutes.

She determines to invest more in her friendships, then fails to return calls.

Sometimes I get so sick of her.

Get Out Into It

February in Michigan is thirteen months long. - Bob Hicok.

That’s why I don’t want dogs! said a friend. You have to take them out every day, no matter how crappy the weather.

It’s a gray Monday afternoon, and the temperature outside is a bone-chilling 14 degrees Fahrenheit. I have fetched my offspring from school and walked the 29 steps from my heated car to my heated home. As I sit by the fire, clutching a cup of Bengal Spice tea in my hands, inhaling its cinnamon steam, the last thing I want to do is to go back outside. But within the hour, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Being the mama of three energetic canines means that every day of the year, whether there’s rain, snow, icy sidewalks, gusting gales or, for that matter, scorching sun and humidity to rival the rainforest, I walk.

I do this because, although we have a fenced yard where they can chase squirrels and deposit their bodies’ waste, I know that this ritual of the daily walk, when they get to go beyond that chain-link fence and bask in the wider world’s infinitely varied smells for an hour or so, is the highlight of their day. I know this because the closer I get to the spot where their leashes hang, the more wildly they dash back and forth, wagging their tails and prancing with glee. I figure it’s the least I can do for them in exchange for all the unconditional love they shower on me and my family with their exuberant greetings, licks, snuggles, empathetic gazes and rollicking joy.

But here’s the other thing : As much as I long to stay hunkered by my cozy fire, as soon as I suit up in boots and coat and balaclava and gloves and step out the door (after four and a half years in Michigan I can tell you with absolute conviction that your well-being in winter is all about the clothes), something unexpected happens: I fall in love with the world.

The Silver Revolution

When I was in preschool, I asked my mom how old she was. Over twenty-one, she said. Intrigued by the mystery, I kept asking, but no matter how many times I repeated the question, that was all the answer I could get. Finally, when I was six, she told me: She was forty years old. I had no idea why this was such a big secret, but I felt very grown-up to be entrusted with it.

Almost three decades later, I was interviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle about my solo show Let My Enemy Live Long!, which was playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The article revealed that I was thirty-three years old. When I showed it to R, a fellow solo performer who was about to launch her own show off-Broadway, she responded with horror, Never tell a reporter your age!

Why not? I started to ask, but her look stopped me cold. Did she really have to tell me about our culture’s obsession with youth and beauty? Obviously a woman in our industry had everything to lose by revealing her age.

Not Buying It: My Date With Marketer Bob

A lot of artists I know hate marketing. They know it’s necessary, but they’d give anything for a fairy publicist to appear in a glittering puff of smoke and promote the hell out of their latest project with a wave of a wand, so they could forget about websites and email programs and social media and keep right on making stuff.

Personally, I’ve long had a more positive relationship with this aspect of the business than many of my peers. When I started my career as a solo performer fresh out of college, I was filled with energy and enthusiasm for every aspect of the job, including promotion. I finagled friends into taking photos of me in costume. I wrote my own booking brochures, blurbs and press releases. I printed the text for my flyers on my printer, cut and pasted the images (literally, with scissors and glue — we’re talking 1988) and went to the copy shop to duplicate them. I walked every commercial neighborhood in San Francisco and the East Bay armed with flyers, tape and a staple gun, posting my image in spots both legal and il. Anyone I chatted with about my show for even a moment walked away with flyers in hand. I, on the other hand, usually managed to walk away with their address scribbled on a piece of paper to add to my embryonic mailing list. When I mailed out postcards for my upcoming shows, I added personalized notes in ballpoint pen. I felt like my audience members were my friends, and indeed, many of them were and still are.

Fast-forward thirty-plus years. My mailing list is now an email list. I have a website and the requisite trinity of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, though I definitely prefer a discursive warble to a succinct tweet. My creative pursuits have evolved too over the years. In addition to writing plays and prose and hosting a podcast and taking photos and even still acting and singing once in a while, I’ve been leading Off-Leash Writing Workshops for the past three and a half years.

The Intimate Realm of I Don't Know

A few months ago, I had a discussion with a dear friend that turned into an argument. It started when he told me he was an atheist, and I told him I was an agnostic.

Same thing, he said.

Is not, said I.

Is too, said he. You don’t believe in a deity; therefore you are not a theist, which makes you an a-theist.

I neither believe nor disbelieve, said I, which makes me an agnostic.

From there things got a bit heated, which seems kind of silly in retrospect, but that’s the way we roll.

Reflecting on the conversation later, I asked myself why this was important to me.

More than twenty years ago I heard the Theravadan Buddhist monk Ajahn Amaro speak in Golden Gate Park. He said something that struck me so deeply I wrote it down and have thought of it often over the years: Not knowing is most intimate.

Although I’ve been turning those words over within myself for decades, I never thought to research them until after my friend and I had this argument. With little memory of the context in which Ajahn Amaro used them, I’d always assumed he’d come up with them himself. But when I searched the phrase, I learned that it is foundational to many Buddhist thinkers. It comes from an ancient Chinese story in which a monk named Fayan goes on a pilgrimage and stays at a stranger’s monastery. The master at that monatery, Dizang, asks him why he’s making the pilgrimage. I don’t know, says Fayan, to which Dizang nods approvingly and responds, Good.Not knowing is most intimate.

The sentence strikes a powerful intuitive chord, but what does it mean?

When I think of the word intimacy, the first thing that springs to mind is sexuality. Nakedness. Trusting someone enough to reveal yourself, literally and figuratively. Showing the parts of yourself that others don’t see — the tender, delicate parts — and facing down the fear that your most exposed, vulnerable self might not meet with acceptance or approval. (Which isn’t to say you can’t have sexuality without intimacy. You can approach sex — as you can approach anything in life, really — from such a great emotional distance that your innermost self barely feels a thing. But that’s a conversation for another time.)

Buddhism, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferSeptember 5, 2021Buddhism, spirituality, agnosticism, religion Comments

Never the Less

A few years ago, after reading an article about the impact of climate change on the arctic circle, I had a vision.

A friend had given me a temporary tattoo that read Nevertheless, She Persisted. As I applied it to the smooth skin of my inner arm, I marveled that Mitch McConnell, of all people, in describing his attempt to silence Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor, had inadvertently handed the feminist movement such a powerful and enduring rallying cry.

I was meditating on my living room couch the next day, my eyes closed and the ink on my arm already beginning to fade, when I saw that same sentence written across the sky in puffy cloud letters, with the first word separated into three parts: NEVER THE LESS. Seeing it broken up like that made me understand it in a new way—not only does she persist, she is in no way lessened by all she’s been forced to endure.

What came to me next was an image of the earth as viewed from outer space, that glistening blue-green-brown ball with white swirls of cloud hovering above it. With it came a deep knowing that the words NEVER THE LESS, SHE PERSISTED referred, not to me or women in general or even humankind, but to Her—the earth Herself. She is the one who persists, who will continue to persist, no matter what we do to Her, or to ourselves, or to Her other, non-human inhabitants. Even if we managed to destroy Her ecosystem for a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years, that would be barely a breath compared to the five billion years She has left before Her precious sun burns itself out. She’d have plenty of time to get us out of Her (eco)system. She’s uniquely positioned to sustain life, and sustain it She will, with or without our cooperation. Should we go belly up, no doubt other species will make their way in, or evolve their way up, to fill the void.

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

For much of my adult life, I longed to be one of those people who procrastinate by cleaning, rather than snacking, clipping toenails, or surfing the web. If I were a procrastinate-by-cleaning type, I reasoned, then whether or not I got any writing done on a given day, at least I’d have a clean house to beat myself up in. Then recently, more than half a century into my tenure on Earth, a strange thing happened: I became one of those people. If ever there were proof of the Buddhist theory that there is there is no solid unchangeable self at the core of our beings, my becoming a neat person is it. If you don’t believe me, ask one of my former roommates.

Of all the Buddha’s ideas, the one about not having a self is the hardest for me and most of my compatriots to wrap our heads around. After all, the cult of self-actualization was our national obsession long before social media gave rise to the age of selfies. Plus, we feel like we have selves. And if we aren’t selves, what are we? Who looks out through our eyes? Who holds our memories?

Buddhism, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferDecember 20, 2019 Comments

Does Ego Get A Seat At The Table?

Twenty-odd years ago, I raised my hand in the large hall at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, and asked the renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield a question.

“Is there a role for ambition in the Buddhist cosmology?”

“That’s a good question,” said Jack, and silly as it sounds, the memory of that compliment warms me to this day. Jack said I asked a good question!

He had been talking, as Buddhist teachers do, about the fact that according to the Buddha’s teachings, desire—alternately translated as grasping or clinging—causes suffering. This concept, one of the Four Noble Truths at the core of Buddhist philosophy, had resonated with me ever since I picked up Sharon Salzberg’s book Lovingkindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness in my early thirties and plunged headlong into Buddhist teachings. Desire or grasping as the root cause of suffering spoke directly to my experience.

At the time, I was working as a regional theatre actor in the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the West Coast. I related intimately to the pain of desiring to snag a particular role or work with a particular company. The desire itself was painful—I could feel it in my body as a visceral ache. Often the waiting period following an audition—the days, weeks, or even months when I didn’t know if I’d gotten the job—was worse than the disappointment on the occasions when I didn’t. And the feeling never stopped. Even when I had an acting job that I loved going to every day, I would hear about roles others were playing and feel a stab of envious longing. I felt it even when the shows they were in conflicted with my own. I wanted to be every place at the same time, and because I couldn’t, I was never satisfied.

When I discovered the Buddha’s teachings, I immediately recognized myself in the image of the Hungry Ghost, a voracious apparition with an enormous belly and a tiny pinhole mouth, who eats and eats but is never full.

Buddhism, Creativity, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferNovember 7, 2019Buddhism Comments

Give It All, Give It Now: A Manifesto of the Creative Life

Confession: I still doubt myself. A lot. Even though I’ve lived more than half a century, even though I’ve been putting pen to paper on an almost daily basis since I was nine years old, even though I’ve made the arts my profession throughout my entire adult life, as actor/writer/solo performer/producer at various times, I still ask myself why I do these things and what makes them worth doing.

There’s an ebb and flow to this inner questioning—there are periods in which I’m so utterly absorbed by the work itself that the existential dilemmas blessedly recede and I’m carried along by the current of pure doing. Love those times. But when the Muse takes a call on her cell, leaving me with the ditherings of my own mind and the eternal struggle for a more disciplined daily existence, the doubting voices return. The most persistent of these is the one that says Why bother in the face of…fill in the blank: mortality, climate change, humans’ abhorrent treatment of each other, violence, racism, poverty, greed…

A year ago, I added regular teaching to the list of creative endeavors that comprise my professional life. Leading others in the act of writing has been an incredible gift, but it’s also ignited a blazing new round of self-doubt. Who am I to take the lead? Am I capable of holding a room? What do I have to give? And accompanying all of that, the old underlying refrain: why why why why why…

Since this inner Why has been with me for so long, I’ve developed a litany of responses, drawn primarily from the work of other artists: songs, poems, passages from favorite books. So when the questions arise within me, these alternate voices rise up to answer them. Together they form a kind of Manifesto of the Creative Life, a buttress against despair. This is why. And this. And this. I share them with you today, dear Reader, in the hope that they may help you through your own moments of darkness. And if these things don’t resonate with you as they do with me, I hope the examination they sprung from may inspire you to develop a Manifesto of your own.