This one is for my dad. Actually, this one is from my dad. He was in his happy place when he had a line in the water. Catching a fish was not nearly as important as the peace and quiet he experienced while fishing. He had a special spot on the lake; the door to his sanctuary was a fishing pole.
One of my favorite memories is of the day that Columbus taught Kerri to fish. I sat on a rock jutting into the water and watched two of my favorite people enjoy the mountain calm. Late summer breezes fluttered the aspen leaves. The ziiiing of the cast. The plop of the bubble hitting the water. Click. A slow reel in. Repeat. No place better to be. Being there – and nowhere else. What could possibly be better than that?
The world does not stand still for anyone. When Craig led us down into his studio I felt as if I was living a fable by Aesop. The same technology that essentially crashed Kerri’s career is now making Craig’s musical genius possible. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? “Well, that depends,” says the farmer to his fate.
I was witness to best of good things: the son, a consummate musician, sharing his artistry with his mother, a consummate musician. Craig showed Kerri how he creates EDM, electronic dance music. Layers upon layers of sound mixed and altered through digital magic. EDM is his passion. He comes alive when he talks about it.
EDM was not possible 20 years ago. Watching Kerri and Craig play in the studio together I remembered something that Kerri once said: “I feel like I was born 10 years too late.” Mourning the rapid change to the music industry, brought about by the advent of streaming services, she felt as if “her time”, the music that she most understands and resonates with, was the wave just in front of her. Analog. No acrobatics. Soulful. Her star was rising just as her business was washed away in the raging digital stream.
The music remains. It’s everywhere, available to anyone, anywhere. We regularly come across her pieces used in commercials or underscoring everything from tiktok moments to youtube tributes. She’s popular. She’s just not paid.
If she was born 10 years too late, then Craig was born right in his zone. Digital complexity. Fast-moving, multi-layered, the music of emoji attention spans. It’s thrilling, a sensory assault. Strategic and improvisational, both. Trance music for urban dwellers seeking a drumming-dance path to transcendence.
And, in the end, the essential eclipsed the gap of music styles and time: a mother who infused music into her son was elated as he, now a musician in his own right, immersed his mom into his music. It was thrilling to witness. A moment in rushing time. Ancient passage in a contemporary mask.
This afternoon I received a lovely email from John. He asked permission to use an image from my website, “…to illustrate what angel energy might look like.” I was delighted. The image he wanted to use was of my palette, a fantastic mess of swirling, colliding color.
It occurred to me that my palette is perhaps where I do my most honest painting (the action as opposed to a finished piece). I mix color on top of color. It’s a terrible habit and, if it becomes public knowledge, I’ll be banished from the art league: I never clean my palette because I love the paint build-up. It’s a history of the dance. It also grinds down my brushes. I love working with rough worn brushes. Don’t tell anyone.
“Don’t you love that he called your palette ‘Energy!'” Kerri said. I do. It brought to mind Jakorda Rai, a healer, a Balian that is significant in my life. He was a painter, too. His paintings were visual captures of the movement of energy in the body. A mix between solid structure and whirling flow. Color streams that resembled photos of distant galaxies. His pieces were unceremoniously tacked to the walls of the hut where he saw his patients. Spiritual healing; the art of moving energy stuck in an eddy. The art of regaining natural flow. Natural pace.
We walked through the city as night fell. Dinner was done and we had a train to catch. Kerri snapped photos along the way. The river. Reflections in the buildings. The ceiling of the train station. As she focused her camera, I watched the people hustling to the rhythm of the city. The pace is fast. The gestures emphatic. Aggressive. People racing to “get there”. Never here. It’s easy to get caught in the undercurrent. Hyped up. Swept away. I thought of Georgia O’Keeffe’scity paintings. Towering buildings reaching to the heavens. Hard linear thrusts obstructing the sky. “That’s why New Mexico was so appealing to her,” I thought. A different energy. Softer. Deeper. Ancient. Less eddy. Human scale and slower. A place to be still and meditate.
As we boarded the train Kerri said, “I like visiting the city but I like it better because we can leave it.”
I thought of a phrase I’d read earlier in the day in The Marginalian: “…our golden age of compulsive productivity at the expense of presence…” [William James]. “Sometimes it’s too much energy through the wire,” I quipped, suddenly yearning to move to New Mexico and walk the arroyos where Georgia painted. “Nothing between the artist and the stars,” I whispered, “…angel energy.”
I lost my copy of On Reflection by Jonathan Miller in one of my moves. He gave it to me. I treasured it both for the generosity of his gift but also a reminder of a night I had a casual dinner with an artistic giant. He was kind. And funny. And shared his ideas, thoughts and new work like an enthusiastic child. He listened intently to my ideas and thoughts like a fascinated friend. It is the mark of a great artist: humility. Healthy doubt. He loved his work and loved to share the exploration. He was brimming with questions.
I left that evening thinking, “I want that!”
That. Secure in my work. The playfulness of a child. The love of the exploration. The fearlessness to my bones knowing that each painting and every play is not an end in itself – not an achievement – but part of the dance of life on the playground called artist. Dedicated to asking questions. Dedicated to surfacing shared truth.
To Mary Oliver’s question, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” I say, I want that. Wild and precious.
That. It’s not an achievement; rather, it is a way of being. A practice. It alters Mary Oliver’s question: How will you be within your one wild and precious life?
Safe. Steady. Unshakable through dedicated practice. Arrived at through a lifetime of grace and humility. Or, perhaps, grace and humility arrived at through a lifetime of questioning. The certainty of doubt. That’s what I saw in Jonathan Miller that night. The paradox of the artist: security in vulnerability. To feel so safe as to play without inhibition. To express sans trepidation. To share and receive with equal enthusiasm.
It is a practice available when the artistry is no longer about the “I” but about the “we”. The bigger energy, call it what you will. It’s humbling. That.
Completeness and equality. I rolled these words around a bit. Celebrations like Pride are how we strive to complete the dream of equality. Or, better: how the dream of equality strives to fulfill our founding intention. It’s written in our Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident.
Protection is a word but in practice it is among the deepest of human necessities. Protection is the gift of equal inclusion. Every single point on the circle is necessary; “…without visual hierarchy”. Inclusion has recently been made a tug-of-war term, a specter of the scary monster, Woke, but beyond the ruckus it is not an abstract highbrow concept. Not really. It’s a fundamental: a community that cares for its own. In tribal communities being cast-out is a fate worse than death. An outcast is never safe. Safety-for-all is among the aspirations of Pride. To come safely home. One need not be woke to grasp the concept. Compassion for others requires very little sophistication to grok.
And so, for me, I take Pride in the circle. That which leads back to itself, the original source. Our oneness. Our deepest humanity. Wholeness. Original perfection. Timeless. All the colors of the rainbow.
The artist, Joe, had us write our names again and again until the lines lost their meaning, until we realized the lines were…lines. And shapes. Until we realized that our names were drawings. Unique and easy. His message? Everyone draws. And, more importantly though less obvious, the lines do not carry the meaning, the person infuses the line with meaning.
Visiting a pal in the hospital, I watched a heart monitor. More lines. Pattern. Waves. Visual indications of the drumbeat of the body. The drumbeat of the body propels the rhythm of the poet’s pen. Iambic pentameter. Short, loooong. Short, loooong. The poet’s lines reach through time and space, heart-meaning yearning to pulse through another person, to perhaps synchronize with their heart-wave pattern. Centuries may have passed between the inky scribbles from the poet’s pen to the person absorbing the meaning into their beating heart. Time travel. Ancient heart touches the living. “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/ I summon up remembrance of things past…”
Watch a child learning to “write” their alphabet. Assigning meaning to shape. Crayon fist making lines. The refined adults see the shaky line as crude. Cute. Titanic imagination squeezes itself into alphabetic parameter. The little hand becomes a giver of meaning to shape and line. Expression. Learning to combine the limited shapes for greater and greater complexity. The conundrum: among the first lines we learn to scrawl are our names yet these few lines carry a question that can never be answered. Who am I?
The artist, Joe, had us dash off our names again and again until the lines seemed nothing more than a doodle. The meaning is not found in the lines; the lines and shapes merely point the way to the question.
We find that the balm to most of life’s greatest challenges is to dance. Anxious? Dance! Confused? Dance! Worried? Dance!
In truth, most of our worries, anxieties, and confusions don’t have a solution or a single answer. They are passing circumstance. Monkey mind run amok. Unsolvable dilemmas. In the face of uncertainty, quandary, or existential mess, it feels really good to dance. And that’s precisely the point. No sense to be made? Dance. Dance. Dance with the one you love! In the kitchen. In the front yard. In the airport.
And, isn’t that the name of the balm! The epicenter of existence! The purpose of life? To dance with the one you love. Preferably a slow dance. There’s no reason to rush when a solution feels so good.
It’s hard to know what to believe. For instance, each day I cross paths with an advertisement showing me what to do if I experience tinnitus. The ad is muted so what I see is a smiling woman yanking repeatedly on her earlobes. And, each day, I think the same thing: this has to be some trickster-ish plot to get masses of people to pull on their ears. Invisible theatre worthy of the great Augusto Boal. I’m considering jumping on the city bus, taking a center seat, and without comment, begin tugging my lobes. I’ll either clear the bus, make friends or, in these United States, most likely be shot by an armed citizen whose only answer to the unknown is to shoot it. I suppose that sounds cynical but we citizens of the U.S.A. are living proof of the adage, “If a hammer is the only tool in your toolbox, then everything looks like a nail.” If a gun is your only solution, you’ll kill a teenager who accidentally pulled in your driveway or shoot someone who mistakenly knocked on your door. We read about it everyday. Every single day.
There’s another ad I appreciate appealing to people to check-the-facts before forwarding or liking what they read. “We are awash in misinformation…” it warns. “Amen, advertisement!” I cheer, “What took you so long?” With so much mis-info-noise ringing in our ears, we either need to regularly check what we hear or smile and yank our earlobes. My theory is that yanking our lobes will occupy our fingers so we can’t like or forward info-dreck. By-the-way, the statistics on gun deaths are easy to check. No one is making up the story of neighbors killing neighbors rather than talking to them. Of course, in one horrific case, a neighbor killed his neighbors because they talked to him. Sometimes the factual stuff is so disturbing it’s better to yank on your ears than consider how out of control it’s all become. Our elected officials are certainly yanking on their ears to make our noise go away.
My hope? My fantasy? We are trying to bust out of our cocoon. A caterpillar transformed can’t know it has become a different critter until it breaks out of its hard protective shell. Escape from a cocoon is not an easy process. It looks ugly. It’s not meant to be easy. The difficult cocoon-exit is essential for the next stage of butterfly survival and thriving. An arduous rebirth is necessary for the caterpillar to fulfill its transformation. Flight, an utter impossibility prior to the protective cocoon, the next part of the story. The fulfillment of possibility beyond imagining. Maturity. Wings dry while the butterfly catches its breath following the struggle. And then, the newly-minted butterfly takes its first step off the branch, releasing the old story, and sails anew into the world. Or, sails into a new world.
A new world. People protecting each other as civilized people are meant to do. All grown up. Listening. A bag full of tools for every situation. No guns needed. No longer a necessity to yank on its ears.
Pre-Covid we regularly had dinner parties or hosted gatherings of Kerri’s choirs and ukulele band. Each week the big dining room table was piled high with food and drink. People crowded into the kitchen and living room. People spilled out onto the deck.
Now, we use the dining room table when we have large projects that require space for organization. We use it as a staging ground when we’re preparing for a trip. Covid ushered in an era of reclusion and the necessity for space and quiet.
Last weekend we had a surprise large project to assemble. Tons of paper to sort. As Kerri prepared the plan I headed to the dining room to clear the table. I stopped in my tracks with what I found there. The table was covered with rocks. There were several gallon size ziplock bags with painted rocks and rocks ready to be painted. Mostly, there were paper towels spread like islands across the table surface, each populated by dozens of hagstones. Odin Stones. Adder stones. Magical stones of many names, all sizes, from tiny bead-size to fist-size rocks, each with a naturally eroded hole. The power of water working on earth.
I hadn’t realized that we’d collected so many. We’d inadvertently converted our dining room into a hagstone sanctuary, an epicenter of ancient folk magic: nature’s talisman of healing, protection and wisdom. I laughed. Apparently we could use a bit of ancient protection. I certainly could use a healthy dose of wisdom. I considered laying on the table, body across the bumpy stones and saying, “I’m ready! Do your stuff!”
We bumbled onto the secluded beach a few months ago. The power of the lake is palpable. The beach is a festival of wave-polished rocks and treasured hagstones. The gulls circle and chase. The portal to the beach requires crawling through trees recently burned. Fire. Air. Water. Earth. People have created whimsical structures, crude altars and twisted sculpture from the driftwood.
We’ve returned a few times to comb the beach for the miracle stones with holes made from years and years of their dance with water. A feather on the stone. Time disappears as we slowly walk the beach, heads down, sensing as much as looking for the rare hagstones.
According to tradition, only good things can pass through the hole in the stone, made magic by the watercarver. Our growing collection, a prayer-pile or incantation cairn. Good things.
I will, someday soon, lay on the beach after dipping into the cold Lake Michigan water, warm myself in the sun, and feel the large hole that life has worn through me, myself now a magic hagstone. Grateful, I will think, “Only good things. I’m ready. Let’s do it.”
Our Sweet Boy is getting older. A few night’s ago, for the first time, I watched him struggle to stand up; for a moment his back legs refused to cooperate. I felt a hot rush of panic, Kerri caught my eye to acknowledge that she saw it too. And then, in a miracle moment of instant transformation, he caught sight of Boris-the-cat next door and all signs of decrepitude vanished in his hot-dogga-dogga-rush to bark at the window. Crazy Boy was back.
He’s always had two distinct personalities: Crazy Boy in the daylight hours and Sweet Boy after the sunset. Each evening, Crazy Boy herds us to the living room. Once we are settled safely into the couch, the signal that his duties for the day are done, he collapses on the floor between the living room and dining room. When next he raises his head, Crazy Boy is gone. The spirit of Sweet Boy fills his furry being. Our now gentle dog checks in for a head-pet, and nestles in beneath our feet.
It’s the ratio that is pulling at my heart. Once, Crazy Boy dominated the hours of the day, wearing deep circle-paths in the backyard in his exuberant patrol. In the past year, there is a new more-equal balance of Sweet Boy and Crazy Boy hours. His ebullient patrol still wreaks havoc with the backyard flora and fauna, just not so often. He’s become more content to observe his vast territories from the cool of the deck rather than continually clear the yard of marauders. Now he sleeps more of the day away.
When we are away on errands he sleeps in the sunroom by the backdoor but is joyful and bouncing by the time we get the key in the lock. He is the world’s best welcoming committee. Yesterday, we were completely inside the house before he was aware that we were home. “Some watchdog!” we quipped. Once again he struggled to get up. Kerri knelt by his side, ruffling his ears, she said, “Don’t worry, Dogga, our joints hurt, too.”
We’ve joked that Dogga had a tough assignment with us. A hyper sensitive dog with two overly sensitive artists. He’s been part weather vane – I know when Kerri or I are about to storm because Dogga looks at us and heads to the bathroom, his quiet space. We’ve averted many-a-storm because Dogga turns and slinks toward his sanctuary. “It’s okay!” we call after him. Not wanting to upset the dog has taught us how to not upset each other.
“I guess we’re learning how to grow old together,” Kerri said.
The Direction of Intention 