A new bag....

 I'm up early today and filled with that expansive gratitude feeling that comes from surviving food poising, settling your mother's estate, and, well, that's enough for me this morning...really, I was happy with my sub-conscious, god-self, what-have-you, for having such a lovely dream to wake up from, in which I was...oh, wait, but, first, more preamble.  About the creative process.  I think that's what my brand is.  My product, message, brand id, and so on and so forth....so, I am typing.

I woke up in the coolest hours I'm going to get in middle of a two hundred + hour California heat wave from a dream where I was enjoying a convivial time at a busy old-timey cafe with my sister and her boyfriend (he and I were discussing antique handrail design and fabrication, between snippets of loving banter and jests between my seester and myself, while music and glasses tinkled and joyful voices full of laughter and mirth murmured in the background) and I was cool and not-nauseous and I realized the sun was coming up and I hadn't woken up to run to the bathroom in hours and hours and there was an immediate satisfaction sensation, a type of all-clear nervous system reset that echoed a and reverberated in my soul until softly mutated into gentle rolling sobs of gratitude and thanksgiving.

See, it's been a rough couple years.

I've been through a lot.  To hell and back, as the saying goes.  And it's not the first time, but, for some reason, it feels like I went a bit deeper this time, and it's a bit hotter now that I'm back, and I've a feeling I'm as strong as I've ever been, or will ever be....

So spirit roused me into a shower and I brought the wunder dog Butters to our field for his morning ball and sniff and I felt I really wanted to speak to the people, to my people, and share this gratitude-love-family feeling with them, tell them my adventure, share a bit the hard-earned elixir, and I have been feeling called to write for months (a year, now, actually) and though my intial impulse was to make a video, that was the conceit that floated in: me, gaunt and salt and peppered, teary eyed and sexy-prophet looking in front of strange, half finished paintings, waxing on and on about how important it is to expand our definition of "people" and "family"...and, since the creative process is so largely a material one, full of logistics and design issues, and the "art" computer is now set-up away from the morning light windows, which I had realized made the glare and heat too distracting to work in the early mornings, and, like I mentioned, I had been being called to write for years, anyways, this video blog post will be brough to you, dear view-reader, as an old-fashioned text-block.

See, the heat wave, well, it's apropos. The data is clear, and the global warming catastrophe in situ  has now reached the level of modern day global mythos--meaning, not "something that everyone thinks is true that is not true" but rather "a narrative that everyone knows and must somehow come to terms with vis vis their own lives".  Are you Jason or Medusa?  Which of Hercules' tasks are you currently engaged in?  What stars do you see yourself reflected in?  It is the story of our time.  And Time itself is magic, like Lenny said, but he didn't mention deadly, now did he?

So, about death.

When the mother dies, there is a crisis in the world in which it is easy to feel that the world, also, has died.  But, since the the world has not, the idea of the soul is born, or the eternal circle of life-energy that is inextinguishable, and undeafable, though it be so humble, and corpse-like, and dirt-like, and broken down old woman with a cripple hand like, with a house full of working class American knick nack and harware store do-dads that the family might some day save a few pennys with, if they can figure how to look, and see what they are looking at...

It's been a hard couple years.

Life be like.

I love you guys.  So grateful for life, don't worry about the catastrohpe. 

God has a plan, like mama used to say.

I'll be writing a lot.  I'll be painting a lot.  We keep going.  It's what we do.