(Inter)Action and Artmaking

As my artwork has expanded beyond gallery walls, as the frames have fallen away, unsurprisingly lots of questions have arisen. Many from within me, and many from curious friends and onlookers.

The most common, and still the hardest to answer is the ever ubiquitous 'so, what is it, exactly, that you do?' More often than not, this question is my own. The jacket of a bell hooks book I've been reading describes her as a 'cultural critic'. Yes! I think to myself; that's a good term. I'm certainly a cultural critic. But that's not the whole of my practice, not even close.

Some colleagues of mine have decided not to call themselves artists anymore. They've adopted terms like culture worker, philosopher poet, environmental interventionist, and activist.

And, yes! All those fit too. My film, time and its passing is surely the work of a philosopher poet. And what could you call my private protest: sprouting alfalfa project if not the work of an activist/ environmental interventionist? And the gifting project? Culture worker, clearly.

But then there are the small private pieces, like this broken ceramic bird, each shard threaded together, a metaphor of brokenness and repair, of the glaringness of the fissures in ourselves, the possibilities of re-piecing into a new whole.

So, you mash all these things together, and you slap on the label artist. But the image that title conjures doesn't quite fit, either. The art itself has never lived exclusively in the lines for me, the composition, the color. (Though you'll never convince me that craft doesn't matter.)

Art is in the action, the interaction.

Which is why I'm so excited about the Occupy movement. This is not a protest; it's a movement. And that movement is pure art. People are out on the streets embodying the metaphor of change, of action, of engagement, of democracy. They are not demanding democracy—which, I think, is what has so many people flummoxed—no, they are modeling it; they are creating and performing it. Our cultural frames are being challenged, falling away.

So, when I marched down the street with fellow citizens chanting: show me what democracy looks like: this is what democracy looks like, and singing quietly to myself we are a gentle angry people (and we are singing, singing for our lives), it felt more like making art than a lot of afternoons I've spent alone in the studio. Art is about creating something, and there I was amidst thousands of engaged, saddened, angry and hopeful people who were co-creating something together.

Yes, this is art too. This is everything art is meant to be.

Life and Death in America

It has been an exhausting few days, full of alternating panic and gratitude, fear and faith, and all of the hairpin turns of days spent in hospital waiting rooms.

On Wednesday, at least three years ago now—or according to my calendar, 3 days—I spent the day glued to my computer watching the proceedings of Georgia Death Row Inmate, Troy Davis. Despite mounting evidence of his innocence, his execution was set for 7pm local time. I watched as hours ticked by, waiting on final word from the US Supreme Court. 7:10, 7:40, 8:15... each moment the tension mounted, each moment greater hope, greater fear among the family members, friends, and supporters gathered outside the prison. Then they announced that the Supreme Court had denied the stay of execution. Davis was going to be killed.

14 minutes pass.

I alternate between pacing in frustration, anger and sadness, and watching the events to continue to unfold on the livestream from Georgia.

Then my phone rings and I am shaken completely from this grieving and plunged into a familiar and unwelcome terror.  It's my father. He's in the hospital. He's had a heart attack, and is going into surgery in the morning.

What follows is a blur, but once the surgery is finished and I see my father again with my own two eyes, my thoughts begin to return to Troy Davis, to see-saw from my presence in the critical care unit to my anger at our communal choices. We, America, killed a likely innocent man. The miscarriage of justice is abominable, the humanitarian considerations are too much for me to even approach in my current state. But our priorities, as a community, as a country, are where my heart goes.

Estimates vary widely, but taxpayers paid from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to execute Davis.

As my father lies in his hospital bed, recovering from heart surgery, you know what he's worried about? How he'll pay his medical expenses.

Lecture after lecture from the nurses about stress, and he's sent home with prescriptions for drugs he cannot afford, a bill for surgery and hospital stay that's astronomical. And he's not one of the innumerable Americans who's uninsured. No, it's just the above-and-beyond costs, the medications that aren't covered, the deductible, the percentage of costs.

And I am angry. Livid. My mind keeps wanting to get an exact number for how much we've chosen to spend to kill someone, when we won't collectively keep each other well. Punishment is prioritized over wellness; death takes precedence over life.

When we'd rather kill someone in pure vengeance than support the health of our people, pardon my language, but our priorities as a country are royally fucked.

Wendell Berry on Conserving Communities

Wendell Berry's works, both in the field and on the page, have always had a special place in my heart.

If there were ever words to live by, here they are...

If the members of a local Community want their community to cohere, to flourish, and to last, these are some things they would do:

1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth.

2. Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, the native creatures – within the membership of the community.

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.

4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products – first to nearby cities, then to others).

5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of ‘labor saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of national or global economy.

7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.

8. Strive to supply as much of the community’s own energy as possible.

9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.

10. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.

11. Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its children.

12. See that the old and young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily, and not always in school. There must be no institutionalized childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

13. Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalized. Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.

14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.

15. Always be aware of the economic value of neighborly acts. In our time, the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.

16. A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

17. A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.

--Wendell Berry, from Another Turn of the Crank

Waves of Gratitude

I've been feeling waves of gratitude the past few days, been feeling them building for the past weeks. Things are shifting over here, over here with my sailboat heart. My apartment is amidst another turnover and I chopped off all of my hair again. Both of which, if you know me, you know means something regarding internal structures, as well. I've just finished my MFA portfolio, Structures of Hope, which was accepted (with even some accolades), much to my delight and relief. Which means graduation and looking for work, and figuring out what life has in store for me next. So, new and exciting things are afoot.

There's also been hard change. My uncle passed unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago. The renewed and deeper contact with family is a major source of those waves of gratitude. I've been feeling a lot of love, and really feeling the connections that span miles, the threads of how our hearts are entwined with one another. It's hard, though, to know what to do for my cousins who have lost their father, or for my own father, for whom I feel so much love that it sometimes catches in my throat when I hear his grief. This week he experienced another episode of heart trouble. He had a major heart attack a few years back, a smaller one a few months ago, and now this, whatever this undefined thing is. He seems fine. But the news sounds like a clock ticking in my ear. It makes my gut knot up thinking about how unready I am to lose him. I've come close with both of my parents, but somehow they're still here. I feel some guilt of privilege, knowing that it's pretty much a lottery, but I'm not dumb enough to let it overshadow the deep gratitude I feel for the fact that they are still here.

With my mother it's understood. She's always been able to read my mind. She knows my heart; I know hers. But with my father it's different. Sometimes I think he doesn't know how important he is to me, how the very roots of my life are entangled with his, how much I still need my father, how much I still need him. I want to figure out how to put it on paper, draw a key to the map so he can see it, so he can read it by the light of day, return to it at any hour. I feel an urgency to give him something to hold in his hands, something that makes it concrete. I want to know that he knows.

The waves of gratitude are changing the shore. I feel it. I feel expanded. I feel love.

And my man with the tugboat heart, I'm deeply grateful for him too, for his countless hours of cheering me through the portfolio over the past months, his hours of sitting with me, listening to me, loving me. At times his kindness and graciousness overwhelms me. We're building a way of loving each other that feels... well, I'm at a loss for words to describe it. It's good, and whole, and wide.

This is all just a tiny thank you note to the world, and to you.

I'm spending my morning at my boyfriend's sweet little apartment on the outskirts of the city. It's in one of those rural little bubbles amidst concrete and stripmall—a vibrant thrum of greenspace, birdcall, tall flowering trees, climbing ivy, and garden beds tucked into the cultivated mind-numbing monotone of suburbia. I've been thinking, since yesterday, about Virginia, about picking up and starting a whole new life there, or anywhere, really—anywhere with rolling hills and lush greenery, anywhere I can put my hands in the dirt and my heart has room to unfurl.

Life is but a blink.

This weekend I lost my uncle unexpectedly, though it doesn't feel right to say it that way, to claim any rights to grieving. I didn't lose him like my cousins lost their father, like my father lost his brother. What I feel is but a sliver.

We spent the morning yesterday sharing stories of his life, of how he didn't waste his time here. He did a lot and he did it with gusto. He took pleasure in shaking people up a little, making them take themselves a little less seriously. Longtime friends joked that the classic Hank-ism was Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. My delicate sensibilities balked for a moment at that one (because sometimes, frankly, I can't) but only for a moment, because true enough, that just about covered it. He lived, and he didn't let anybody get in his way.

I need a little more of that in me.

So why not move to Virginia? Or France? Or anywhere else my heart calls out for? Why not stand in the middle of a crowd and make a fool of myself? Why not unabashedly break all the rules? Who cares about failure? Who cares if it all breaks down? If there's anything to be learned it's that it will... regardless.

I don't want to spend one more day in a dark room talking about what we're going to, worrying through all the details.

Here's our chance. Here's my chance.

Let's do it to honor Hank. Let's live.

This morning we danced around kitchen, sang made up songs, and drank coffee together over a close—if slightly overly-serious—conversation. At church, a man stood in front of the pulpit speaking of the equilibrium between desire and acceptance, between the striving, and the stillness of gratitude. I kept thinking about the abstraction of language, of the context of the conversations. Over brunch we all talked about being being in the world versus talking about being in the world.

Afterwards, as I was outside digging in the ground, my mind kept drifting to that dichotomy, to why my mind thinks it's a dichotomy—being in the world and thinking about being in the world. Action or thought. We live in a culture, don't we, that creates that conceptual rift. A philosopher is one whose head is in the clouds and can't see his feet on the ground. In a film about Derrida I watched recently, he refers to the joke of the philosopher who falls in the well while looking at the stars. It's a nearly unchallenged assumption. The thinkers can't be concrete, the doers can't really stop and think.

Why do we split these ways of being so divisively? Or is it just me? When immersed in thinking, doing seems a threat. The inverse is also true; immersed in doing, thinking too deeply seems to threaten the action.

But I think we can have both. I think we can be in the world and think deeply about how we choose to do so. So I try—at least for today. Today I spent my afternoon digging in the dirt, a piece of my early evening philosophizing about it, and next we will go join hands in solidarity, to literally, physically, stand on the side of love. Because, for me, the doing of it matters. I can send my heart out any day of the week, and I do, but sometimes, sometimes I've got to use my body.

Mid-May Reflections on Love

It's a sunny spring day, the perfect middle of May day—the kind you imagine when you think of the promise of summer just around the corner—a little breezy, bright and blue, just shy of 70 degrees. And I'm spending my afternoon writing—well, clearly I'm writing, but I'm taking a break from Capital W Writing to write this here.

Intermingled with my day of sunshine and Writing about Art, is a little bit of sweet nostalgia. A year ago tomorrow, I met a pretty terrific guy. Am I really blogging about my boyfriend? Why yes, yes I am. Because, truth be told, he's become a pretty important part of my life.

My mind is not all art and politics. Turns out, I've got a whole lot of space in there for love. As a matter of fact, most of my thoughts about art and politics revolve around love, around relationality, culture, community, the ways we share this space with each other...

But I digress.

I will spare you all the details of how and why I love him. Suffice to say, I do, and I'm grateful for all he's brought to my life—a great amount of joy and a great amount of growth; I'm grateful for his gentle and patient ways, for his wisdom, his thoughtfulness, his amazing heart, and, I'll admit it, for his ridiculous handsomeness.

An Ode to Me?

I'm home sick today—not to be mistaken for homesick, which is a different beast altogether, no, I am home sick, in bed, runny nose, sore throat, feverish, et. al.—which, for me, means trawling the internet... and, via a long circuitous track of poking around, I happened upon the blog of an old boyfriend's new girlfriend. Now, that's hardly fair, as we were only together for one hot minute years ago, and they've been together since... as in, exactly since. But either way, it's been a long time and I only felt fond feelings upon seeing her face. We were friends once upon a time, after all. But then I read her blog and felt a little jump and a ping upon finding myself featured in it. She was polite enough to have changed my name, but it was strange to hear her story of one of my first dates with this man.

She even included a photo of her "general memory of what [I] was like, though perhaps a little less pink & blue and more maroon & navy blue. With pearls. And an apron":


First: Uh, no... just, no.

Second: I'm not sure if I should be flattered or offended, or maybe just plain weirded out.

Let me assure you that I do not (nor have I ever) resemble(d) either of the ladies pictured above. I did, briefly, have a pair of white kitten heels I was rather fond of, but that's about as far as one could go.

It is strange on all sorts of levels to be featured—as the antagonist, nonetheless—in someone else's love story. I was the force that needed to be overcome, the obstacle laid out at the beginning of the story, just so the reader knows what they're in for.

That's right reader. I'm what you're in for.

It turned out, though, that it was almost fun, if wholly disconcerting, to read another angle of a story of my life, be reminded that the stories of my life are the stories of others' lives too. As a matter of fact, maybe it felt good precisely because of that disconcertion. Sometimes it's good to feel humbled. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that you're somebody's 'other', the supporting role—sometimes even the character the audience isn't supposed to like—in somebody else's play.

And, you know, I'm pretty happy it turned out the way it did. They sound happy. I know I'm happy, and I'm feeling generally pleased and pretty damn lucky in regard to matters of the heart these days.

So hey, thanks for the shout out, lady. I wish you only the best.

On Bolivia, Mother Earth, and Religious Tolerance

I have just engaged in a long thread of facebook comments about this article. Bolivia is set to enact a law granting rights to mother earth. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

And it's really got me thinking, not particularly about the article itself, or even the issue therein (though—and let me interject my own political agenda here—good job, Bolivia!) but instead about belief and about respect.

It just so happens that this particular article was posted on someone's page who comes from a very conservative religious background. Fine. Here's my chance to put my money where my mouth is, walk my talk, (insert any further preferred figure of speech here): Be positive, check; assert my beliefs while being transparent that they are my beliefs and therefor subjective, check. But what followed was painful.

The tone that struck me, the one that always wrenches me, was the one of dismissal of others' beliefs, the One True God mentality. Casual comments like "Welcome back pantheism!" and the utterance, as if it were the one and only true truth that "God created ALL the world... [and]modern man [is] now trying to personify 'Mother Earth,'" felt like violence, though I know they were not intended to be. I know that those speaking were defending what they believe to be true, but there is something deeply upsetting to me about mocking what others' hold dear. Now, I am not a Pantheist, nor am I a Pagan, but I have a right to be, should I so choose—as I have a right to be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Agnostic, or Atheist.

I, personally, do not see a personified Mother Earth as any stranger of a notion than a personified Father God. As a matter of fact, recent research points to the fact that human's first deities were female rather than male, that the creative force was seen as female. Makes sense—as life emerges, literally, from the body of a woman... but I digress. Because these beliefs are mine; they are personal and they are intimate, and I don't need you, dear reader, to believe them. What I do need, is for you to respect them, for you to respect my right to have them.

The truth is, most of us think we're right. Whether we access our Truth through logic, ancient texts, science, or via our own hearts, most of us think we are right. My particular truth tells me that we can't know the provenance of the divine, that we can't know what happens after we die, because, well, none of us here have done it yet. I don't believe in a gendered or personified God—because when I have tried to imagine such a God, it seemed arrogant to me to assume that the greatest power out there looks like us (I mean, why not a bird, a tree, an elephant?)—but I do believe in powers far greater than me. I also believe that we, ourselves, have more power than we often allow ourself to believe, and that inherent in that power, in that privilege, is a responsibility. I believe in an Interconnectedness that transcends what we can see. To quote Carl Sagan: "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." I believe that we are all made of energy, that energy goes on eternally, and that our being unable to know in what form it does so, doesn't make it any less beautiful. And with all of this, I know that if I allow myself to remain open, if I continue to turn toward that which I do not know, turn toward it with an open heart, my beliefs will evolve as I do. For me, that's an important part of it. These are the things that I hold dear; this is the structure of my belief.

And so it is that we all think our perspective has particular and unique merits. I am not exempt from that, but if we are to make peace in this world together, if we are to find a path to consensus, we have to learn to be increasingly open to one another, ever-more-respectful. It is a challenge I am still facing, a challenge I imagine I will likely face more and more deeply as I learn to allow my voice come forward. Because I think we need to talk about this, and I'll admit it's hard, but I don't want to feel diminished, and I don't want to allow others to feel that way either. In a political and cultural climate that is feeling increasingly more polarized and less and less tolerant, I believe it is more important than ever to find common ground, to make room for each other.

All I can do is try to balance integrity and peace, learn to speak more honestly with more love and compassion, and to temper any disagreements and differences in viewpoint with a deep and abiding respect.

Learning to See, Learning Not to Shut Up

Daytime is for writing; my alarm is set; the evening hours pass quickly, and I dawdle, and soon (now) I reach the wee hours of the morning. I know this will affect my day, but I can't seem to turn off my brain, or turn it fully on, either. I am beset by insecurity; I feel dislocated, nearly dizzy, yet somehow eerily still, unmoving. She says there is still something missing. And she's right. But isn't that how I always feel, how it always is—as if there is something still missing? I am perpetually one revelation away from figuring it all out.

But what to do about that? I am full of revelatory moments, full of paying attention, full of learning to let life roll over me, roll through me. I know these things. I live them. In this, at least, I walk my talk. I am the living breathing unknowing. But how many times must I bite my own tongue just to remember the iron taste of my own blood? When will it be enough? At what point may I open my mouth and speak instead?

I think art changes people, changes people's hearts. That's what art is; that's how I'd define it now, anyway—at this hour, on this day. That's what it's done for me; art has changed my heart. But what about beauty? It is not always lovely, what I have to say, what I have to hear. It is not always even palatable. And yet. And yet. There are these things that need saying, these things that desperately need saying.

I know, and have known for a while now, that I can't shut up. Not to say that I haven't, because often I have, but that I mustn't. I'm pretty sure, too, that that's something of the job description of an artist: learning not to shut up, even if you can hardly breathe, even if there are tears streaming down your face, even if you are saying things no-one wants to hear.

Yes, I need to learn not to shut up. And it's harder than I thought it would be, especially for a girl who everybody thought would be a lawyer for her incessant arguing. But that's not me, not really, because I can't bend the truth, and I can't make a point for a point's sake. I am always seeking the truth. Concealing is not my profession; it is revelation. Sometimes I am pulled to call it epiphany, but it is less like something landing from above, and more like learning to see.

It's painful though. That's the part no-one tells you. Learning to see is painful. Because it takes a willingness to be ever-vulnerable, be always proven wrong. And when, if just for a moment, I let the defense clap shut, the fall is sharp, the waking stark.

Instability and Hope

Sunday, March 13th, 2011. I’m sitting down to begin writing my portfolio. The intention is to write a call to consciousness, a manifesto of sorts. I want to, in lyrical prose, shake us awake. And as I try to direct my mind into abstraction, into the tunnels and passageways of language, I keep returning to the flickering images of the tsunami sweeping across Japan, of a white sheet waving from the upper floor window of a home engulfed in water, waving in the wind as the helicopter capturing the image zooms in close, then moves on and away; my mind is flooded with the image of flames mushrooming from a natural gas processing plant, with images of cars swirling through rushing water, images of vast expanses of splintered wood, rushing cascading waters on fire. This devastation is so new that we don’t know how to place it yet. We don’t know what it will mean, what it will become, and as nuclear reactors teeter on the edge of meltdown, we collectively hold our breath, waiting to see the magnitude of this disaster. Will this be one for the record books, or will this change life as we know it?

It is in these places that my artistic self begins to flail. How do I understand the making of things to have relevance, significance, in the face of events of this magnitude? How can I begin to understand scale? Shouldn’t I just have become a doctor, a philanthropist with a fleet of helicopters, a nuclear physicist? Where is the contribution I can make that will have impact? This, then, must be the place to begin.

I think of the safety net—a project I completed just under a year ago—and of places of repair. I am not a nuclear physicist. I cannot prevent meltdown. What I can do, is offer some small scraps of solace, of hope. After all, if we are to effect any kind of change, we must believe that there is hope. A couple of weeks ago, I saw Vandana Shiva speak at the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall in Portland. The title of her lecture was Soil Not Oil, and one of the first things she spoke of was how she didn’t talk about global warming, because the terminology wasn’t accurate; it painted a pretty picture of nicer weather, a more pleasant climate—you know, more bikini days at the beach. No, climate change isn’t primarily about global warming, it’s about climate instability.

And that instability is seminal.

In times of such great cultural, environmental, political, and fundamental instability, we must build structures of hope. Small as they may be, I can only keep interweaving these threads of hope, only slowly keep working away in my attempts at repair.

I'm having a line up the ducks sort of day. (Frustrating) school financing correspondence, planning nuts and bolts of the rapidly-approaching term, sorting (and actually washing) the laundry, organizing both things and thoughts in a logical fashion.

Yes, a line up those ducks into a neat little row kind of a day.

This morning over coffee we were discussing rhetorical systems and belief, the relationship between belief and experience. I met a woman recently who told me she didn't really have beliefs, only experiences. Beliefs just get in the way, she told me. If I believe it, it's up here, she pointed at her head. If I experience it, I don't need to believe it.

Belief is extraneous.

What a revolutionary thought. Come to think of it though, that's a belief too, isn't it? And back into the fold we fall.

And this is how my mind has been tumbling lately. Over coffee we parsed out the differentiation between two kinds of belief structures, one in constant dialog with experience, and one built up and defended in spite it.

I've been thinking a lot about conservativism, trying to understand it (and if you're a conservative reading this, I could use your help). Today I'm thinking about it in relation to those two systems of belief structuring. Science, for example, could easily be classified as a belief system not unlike religion, but science is in constant dialog with experience, and is therefor self-regulating. If an experience conflicts with a belief, the belief changes; it evolves to encompass the new experience. There is fluidity in this kind of belief structure. The other kind of belief is the kind that confuses me—fundamentalist, if you will: This is what I believe, and no amount of contradictory evidence will make me consider reassessing my beliefs—think of creationists, or the so-called birthers.

So how do we dialog with that structure of belief? How do we create fluidity and movement within—breathe life into—a closed system?

This system is how one can so tightly cling to opposing beliefs, or rather, beliefs in clearly contradictory policies. Take, for example, the proposed cuts to all government funding for family planning organizations. The folks behind these cuts are the same folks who are so adamantly anti-abortion. Fine, your religious beliefs make you against abortion... but here's where I get confused: you want to take affordable reproductive health care and access to birth control away from our nation's poorest women. This does not serve your cause; this does not reduce the number of abortions, in fact, it does quite the opposite.

So far the logic is lost on me. Is there logic. Am I missing it?

That January wish for spring/ banging around the house

The sun is fading from the sky here at five o'clock. It's the beginning of the signs of spring returning. Soon, daphne. I've been sick. And tired. Separate, but equally true. And today is the first day I've been out of the house during daylight hours in several days. I found myself blinking under the bright sky as I emerged. (If there is anything that humbles...)

I've been doing a lot of writing, a lot of thinking, a lot of talking, a lot of organizing internal space—the internal spaces of my mind. A lot seems to be about to change in my world, but I'm not sure, at the moment, which way it's all going to bend. I'm about to start the final term of my MFA program, and what I've come to understand about art, about what I mean when I talk about art, about who I am in relation to it has changed so much over the past year, that I don't quite know how to orient myself. I'm pleased to have found myself making lists again over the past few weeks—lists of the trajectories of my artistic aims, lists of ways to make visible the things I want to say, the things I care about.

Days have been passing in a fog, as the undercurrent rushes below. I feel its beginnings of bubbling up in the bursts of pressure, the crystalized moments that seem, for a nanosecond, to exist outside of time. Right before my thesis year of undergrad I felt it too. I knew that the threads I'd been pursuing were starting to weave together; I just didn't know how yet. It is the same here. Human rights, intimate and international relations, socio-politics, the persistance of making, these things are family. I just haven't fully traced their genealogy. I don't yet fully understand the foundation upon which these things lie, the soil from which they all grow. I know it has something to do with consciousness, something to do with awareness and making meaning. It is, somewhere at its root, about interconnection, and about unveiling the ways in which we are all entangled.

As winter begins its leaving, I'm beginning to feel that old familiar tug, that itchiness in my limbs, the spark of excitement as streams approach convergence. Yes, I'm beginning to feel it; it's time to wake up.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

I keep thinking about paralysis lately, about the things that stop us from forward momentum, the ways and reasons we sometimes don't do the things that we want/need to do. What is the origin of the voice that keeps one spinning?

I want to change the world. (What a cliché, yet I can't think of a better way to say it.) And I want to do it without causing anyone any discomfort. Crazy, totally crazy. How to gently and compassionately say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done? How to offer everyone, anyone, enough grace?

I called a friend today and left a message on his voicemail that went something like this. "I'm having another existential crisis. You want to go get a beer with me this evening and talk about the meaninglessness of art, and how that meaninglessness actually makes it meaningful, and how we create structures of ever-deepening complexity in order to reveal simplicity? Anyway, hope you're having a nice day, ok..."

It comes down to that simplicity, you know, it all does. Everything is about presence and consciousness.

Oh, but I fail.

This morning I wanted to go to church. The social justice minister was delivering a sermon titled Blessed Unrest: 'Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, re-imagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It requires something far greater.'

I felt I needed that little nudge that my church often offers me. But I didn't wake up in time... which is fine. It happens. What isn't quite as fine, is that after a frenzied running in circles trying to gather myself, and realizing that we weren't going to make it in time, all I wanted to do was go back to bed. I felt defeated. Now, what is it in me that makes that defeat so close, creates that precise and specific view of success? I need to learn to fumble and stumble and keep trying, keep pushing. What is that quote? Samuel Beckett? Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Yes, try again, fail again, fail better.

I've mentioned this at least twice now, and it this point it seems almost like a tease, like some sort of game I'm playing with myself, but I've been trying to find a way to talk about something hard, something that I know might offend some people whom I care about very deeply... so I keep hesitating.

I'm the sort who wants to be very very sure of my reasoning, of my position, before I put something out into the world, especially if that particular something might cause anyone any discomfort, any pain. But I've spent a long time thinking about all of this, and the truth is, I'm sure. I'm very very sure. So, (deep breath,) ok, next post. I promise.

Eisler and hope for peace

I've been working on a post for days here, and I can't quite get what I want to say to untangle itself. It's been rolling around in my head for a while. It's become like a rock rolling down a perpetually steepening slope.

I've been reading as much as I can get my hands on by social scientist, author, and one of my new favorite scholars, Riane Eisler.

It's been good medicine after a lot of hard world news recently, and a lot of reading and thinking about violence, particularly about violence against the most vulnerable.

In Eisler's acceptance speech for the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award she talks of spiritual courage, "We've been taught to think of courage as the courage to go out and kill the enemy. But spiritual courage is a much more deeply human courage. It’s the courage to stand up against injustice out of love." This is the kind of courage I am trying to have. To put it in the simplest of terms, it is hard.

We are all trying to do what's right. I believe that. It's what I see when I can step away from my ego, away from my fear, away from my anger. We are all trying. We are all doing our best.

But our best, right now, isn't working.

We live in a violent world. It's something I've been struggling to understand, something I've been struggling to see through to the heart of. We have a justice system that is brutal and deeply classist and racist, a social structure that allows for people to own mansions and jets and yachts while there are children and families starving and sleeping on the streets; we have a culture so permeated with violence, that we hardly notice our youth playing video games designed to numb soldiers to the brutalities of combat. We live in an ever-increasingly militarized world. We hear about child suicides in response to 'bullying' (though let's be honest and call it what it is, gay-bashing). The political climate and rhetoric in this country are getting more heated, more polarized, and increasingly more violent. Just last week, a 22-year-old young man, aiming for a congresswoman, shocked us all by shooting into a crowd, wounding 13 and killing 6.

It seems everywhere you look, someone is lashing out violently, lashing out in fear. Violence is a response to feeling threatened, a way to defend something or someone. Sometimes it is a belief, sometimes it is an idea or ideal, sometimes it is a person, sometimes—and I'm afraid more often than not—it is in defense of a hierarchical structure of dominance.

Back to Eisler, because she is giving me hope. She points to the connections that I have been seeing, and I feel such a huge relief wash over me when I read her words. Someone is doing this work. Someone else is talking about the intricate web of interconnection between social policy, international relations, domestic relationships, parenting, and economic and ecological health. The connection is in two underlying social categories: a domination system and a partnership system:

In the domination model, somebody has to be on the top and somebody has to be on the bottom. Those on top control those below them... Families and societies are based on control that is explicitly or implicitly backed up by guilt, fear, and force... In contrast, the partnership model supports mutually respectful and caring relations. Because there is no need to maintain rigid rankings of control, there is no built-in need for abuse or violence.

No built-in need for abuse or violence. Power, then, "is exercised in ways that empower rather than disempower others."

The current political climate is a clear indicator of a society built on the domination model—we must destroy our enemies, rise to the top, subjugate the 'other'—but the rhetoric of leadership that is slowly taking hold is one of the partnership model. The best leaders inspire not followers, but more leaders. When we empower others to act on their best selves, we can shift the thinking. When we stop the cycle of domination—in our families, in our relationships, and in our communities, we create the opportunity for a better way.

Insomniatic Mumblings

It's quarter after five in the morning. My lids are heavy and my body feels the heaviness of exhaustion, but I haven't been able to sleep. I need to get up and start my day in the next couple of hours and I fear I've reached that crucial crossover where falling asleep now would be disastrous. No, I must just push through.

It's raining this predawn Thursday morning. I can hear it through the bedroom window—the sound of the water in the spout from the gutters, a sound I've grown accustomed to in my years in this apartment. The sound of it at this early hour, something to which I've also grown accustomed.

My earliest recollections of true insomnia are from this room, latenights my undergrad thesis year, my first year at the museum, work stress and excitement keeping me up, then following years up far too late talking or thinking. I remember tiptoeing out of the bedroom to sit on the patio some middle-of-the-night a few years ago, staring out at the street, the swaying shadows of trees under streetlights, the occasional sound of a passing car, the windchimes; feeling the whole of the world spread out beneath me, the root of myself settle into something; feeling, in that quiet moment of the darkest hour of night, a sort of peace, a sort of gratitude and grace, a deep settledness within myself.

I've been thinking a lot about that root of myself, about the gratitude I feel for being allowed to nurture it...

I've just deleted 6 or 7 paragraphs here, paragraphs describing all the thoughts that have been keeping me up, but I'm not sure I'm capable of being eloquent about it yet. It all came out as a rambling jumble. It is important to me. I'd like to say it all better than I can now. I'd like to find the words.

Suffice it to say for now, it has something to do with that anchor, something to do with what Unitarians list as one of their (ok, maybe our?) basic tenets: the inherent dignity and worth of every person. It has something to do with violence, something to do with empathy, and something to do with our rights to be nurtured as our selves, nurtured and loved as our own individual, flawed, confused, struggling, striving, radiant selves.

A Happy 2011 to You

At the end of every year, I spend time writing about the year that has just passed; month by month, I try to put it into words. This time, I got lost somewhere trying to recount the last year. Sometime in March I lost momentum. Something about that rings true: sometime in March I lost momentum. But that isn’t quite it, not exactly; it is that something has changed, and I am just beginning to understand the nuances of those changes.

For most of my conscious adult life (excepting my late teens and earliest twenties here—for that is a different sort of conscious, in my case, adult, but not conscious in the ways I have come to know consciousness since) I have self-identified as an artist, a visual artist, a maker of things. Over the past months, as I have been forced to see and articulate parts of myself in new and deeper ways, I have come to see that that label, that way of understanding myself has been shifting beneath me for some time.

Creating objects of meaning that affect only those who are already in the position to connect with them isn’t enough anymore. I’ve come to see that what drives me, the thing I think about almost constantly, is social consciousness—social justice, morality, criticality. I see so much around me that needs changing: so many people so deeply-rooted in belief systems that allow them—even encourage them—to cause harm; I see so much deep-seated fear and bigotry, and the pervasive stains of those things in people whom I love: that almost ubiquitous fear, shame, and guilt. And we all know that fear, shame and guilt do not inspire us to do good, make good; they instead grow roots in the darkness, and in that darkness, they strangle the roots of love, of courage, of truth.

We need to do better. I know we can do better. For all the wrongs I’ve seen perpetrated, I still see the goodness in the hearts behind them. At first glance, this is almost devastating, but it is also heartening. We have the capacity to wake up. We must wake up. We must learn to look critically at the things we believe, why we believe them, how they serve us, how they help us to serve others.

I want every action to be rooted in empathy, in compassion, and in love. Now, I know that for most reading this, that statement may seem like a classic no-brainer, but the kind of empathy I’m talking about involves a deep vulnerability, a purposeful and intentional criticality. We must make a practice of stepping out of our own shoes, and begin to try to think about the impact of our actions on every living creature.

We must learn to imagine the provenance of our vegetables: Who grew them? Did the farmers and farmhands receive a living wage? What practices do the farmers use? Do these practices help or hinder the health of the land? The people? Who delivered these vegetables? How far did they travel? What effects do these modes of transportation have on our air, our water, our communities? What is the local, immediate and communal impact when I buy a banana from Ecuador instead of an apple grown within fifteen miles from me? Do my political/social beliefs and practices correspond with the well-being of those who are feeding me?

We must also learn to imagine and observe the ripple-effects of our kindnesses as well as our unkindnesses.

I take care of children, 2 beautiful children, an almost two-year old girl and a four-and-a-half year old boy. In them I see the manifestations of how they are treated. They are kind to one another; they are gentle, thoughtful, curious, and loving. The boy reasons carefully with his younger sister when she grabs a toy from him. He does not yell; he does not hit. He reasons with her. He tries to understand, and he tries to help her to understand. I see this as a direct result of the way their parents treat them. The children are treated as people, and they are respected. In turn, they are respectful and thoughtful young people. They learn the real consequences of their actions by being allowed to explore within safe and loving boundaries. The older child understands that the consequence of grabbing the toy back from his sister is her sadness, her sense of loss. Cultivating that empathy in him is far more powerful than some artificial imposition of consequence or punishment. He is given the opportunity to devise better solutions, and he rises to that challenge. He values the responsibility entrusted to him. He learns to be gentle with her, because those who love him are gentle with him, and because compassion is rewarded. She, in turn, is learning this gentleness not only from her parents, but from her brother as well.

This is how we should all be with one another. It is so clear to me. I know that my ability to see this comes in part from the encouragement in my own upbringing to think critically, to question that which does not seem right, to stand up for what I believe in even if it's unpopular to do so, even if it is painful. For this I am deeply grateful.

My morality is rooted in empathy, in the knowledge that we do not have the right to hurt each other. As I say that, I realize that it bears repeating: We do not have the right to hurt each other.

We must learn to always think about power, about how we choose to wield it, in what ways we choose to bow to it. Power, privilege, authority… these must always be questioned, must always be measured against the deep knowledge of our hearts, our conscience, our consciousness.

I strive to live my life with an ever-awakening consciousness, an ever-deepening willingness to look at the world around me, look at myself, and be willing to see what is being shown to me by the universe, by God, by the world—by whatever we choose to call that energy to which we all are rooted, that energy from which we all came. I seek to live with vulnerability, with perpetually renewed willingness to be changed. I hope never to cling blindly to dogma. I hope never to use ill-founded beliefs of other fallible humans to defend actions that my heart knows are wrong.

This is not an easy task, and I am always failing. But I continue to be humbled by my failures, and I continue to strive. This is how I want to live. This is how I hope I can encourage others to live.

May we always be willing to grow and change, be willing to be wrong, be willing to reevaluate what is right. And above all, may we always listen to the call of our hearts towards empathy, towards compassion, and towards justice.