You can take the Madame out of the puppet circus, but you'll never take the puppet circus out of the Madame.
I smiled when that thought first arrived.
For years, I believed I had left that world behind.
I thought the curtains had closed on the puppet circus for the last time.
I thought the marionettes had taken their final bow.
I thought those wooden companions belonged to another lifetime.
But puppets have an uncanny way of waiting.
Patiently.
Quietly.
Until we are ready to understand what they were trying to teach us all along.
It wasn't until recently that I realised they had never stopped speaking.
They had simply found another stage.
I once performed in a puppet circus called Istrongmani.
Strong Man.
Looking back now, I wonder if the strongest thing I encountered there was never strength itself, but surrender.
The willingness of carved wood to appear alive through the quiet intention carried by unseen hands.
As a puppeteer, I was taught something that has taken me a lifetime to understand.
A marionette is never truly made to dance.
The puppet chooses to surrender to the intention carried through the hands of the puppeteer, and in that surrender discovers its fullest expression.
Of course, I know a puppet carved from wood cannot choose.
That is the quiet magic of puppetry.
Somewhere between wood and movement, between silence and story, we begin to believe the puppet possesses a heart of its own.
We lend it our laughter.
Our grief.
Our courage.
Our longing.
The puppet never becomes human.
Instead, it awakens something profoundly human within us.
Life, I think, has been teaching me the very same lesson.
Submission has often been misunderstood as becoming someone else's puppet.
Yet the deepest submission I have known has never been to another person.
It has been to truth.
To gravity.
To the quiet thread that asks me to stop dancing for survival, to stop performing who I thought I needed to be, and to begin dancing from the truth of who I already am.
There were years when I believed shadows were enemies to outrun.
Or places to hide from.
Now I wonder if shadows are simply faithful performers.
They obey the light.
The darker places in me—the frightened child, the performer desperate to please, the woman who confused endurance with devotion—were never villains.
They were old marionettes repeating the only dance they had ever learned.
One by one, I have taken them gently into my hands.
Not to cut their strings.
But to teach them a different dance.
And perhaps that is why, when I look back now, I find myself saying—
We the Puppets Remember.
Not what the puppet remembers.
But who.
The puppet remembers…
…that it was never merely wood.
Not literally.
Symbolically.
It remembers its true nature.
It remembers that it was never created to perform for survival, but to dance in joyful surrender to a worthy intention.
It remembers that it isn't here to resist the dance, nor to perform for applause, but to become a willing expression of something beautiful.
It remembers trust.
It remembers relationship.
It remembers joy.
It remembers that the strings are not there to imprison, but to create movement.
But I think there's something even deeper.
Perhaps the puppet remembers the hands.
Not the strings.
The hands.
For the strings have no intention of their own.
They simply carry the quiet wisdom, love, and purpose of the one who brings the dance to life.
Perhaps that is what we have been searching for all along.
Not freedom from every string.
But the courage to entrust ourselves to hands worthy of the dance.