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Jaime Meyer is a playwright, drummer, father, husband and gardener who
holds a masters' degree in theology and the arts from United Seminary of the
Twin Cities. Twenty of
his plays have been produced in various cities across the
USA
. He co-founded the first theatre in the world for the Hmong community (a
refugee population from
Laos
and
Vietnam
) and managed it for ten years, mentoring dozens of writers and actors, and
playing to over 100,000 people, most of whom had never seen live theatre before.
The
Minneapolis
Star Tribune calls Meyer’s writing “…enormously
seductive. It’s farfetched whimsy with thickly textured thoughtfulness. It’s
like metaphysical cartoons on speed.” Since
1984 Meyer has
studied cross-cultural shamanism, mysticism and the
spiritual uses of drumming from many cultures.
Among others, he has studied with Ailo Gaup, Martin
Prechtel and Sandra Ingermann. He has also completed a two-year Celtic shamanism
training with Tom Cowan.
My Influences
All of
my work is influenced by three streams. One is my life as a playwright. I have
luckily learned how to follow my instincts and impulses and try not to ask why
certain images arise or why I am compelled to go in a certain direction. My
writer’s side urges me to trust the powers that are growling in me, and trust
that they want to lead me toward The Beautiful. This has been the greatest gift
of my life, to have learned this kind of trust. Of course, it is something that
I have to learn again and again, each day, each moment.
Another
stream is my 20 years’ fascination with and study of what is popularly called
shamanism. Honestly, shamanism is such a poorly defined word, and, especially in
middle class white urban American culture, from where I spring, shamanism is a
terribly convoluted subject. But after many years of wonderfully torturous
questioning, I come back to a definition that was once given to me: a shaman is
someone whose shamanic work is effective. It’s not how you dress, or act or
the specific gestures in your ritual work. It’s all about whether or not your
work works. I use the tools of the trade (drums, rattles, incense, poetry,
performance, song, trance, story, dreaming, wonder, humor, misdirection) to, as
much as I am able, become a mediator between the human and non-human worlds.
A third stream of influence is my formal, western, academic studies in religion.
I went to Seminary for four basic reasons. 1) It was an impulse (certainly
to date the most expensive impulse I’ve ever followed). 2) I am in love with
the human religious imagination, wanted to study it, and wanted to deepen and
refine my own, 3) I wanted to be forced to read mind-numbingly boring, 1800
year-old texts that had absolutely no connection my personal theology. (I
thought I was doing this as a way of testing my intellectual and spiritual
resolve. It turned out that everything I read was thrilling, even when it was
mind-numbingly boring. Everything I read made me love the human religious
imagination even more). 4) I thought if I got an advanced degree from the
seminary, it would give me a Teflon-like coating and the “New age weirdo”
label would not stick. I hope what I do honors ancient and cross-cultural
healing traditions, provides nourishment to the unseen forces which
permeate our lives, contains a plumb line to perennial wisdom, is aesthetically
beautiful and well-done, and most of all is useful in people’s immediate,
modern lives.
In the
long and winding hollows of the heart
Where neither sun nor moon,
But only
pale amber light, shines
from the
long and winding hollows of the heart.
There,
rest awhile
There
you may call my name
And I
will come.
And I
will come
As
quietly
And as
gracefully
And as
certainly
As the
stars are called into the sky
Just after dusk
Coaxes
the dreaming eye
Open.
--After a poem originally by William Sharp (aka Fiona Macleod, 1855-1905).
Adapted by Jaime Meyer
© 2002 by Jaime Meyer
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