Oh, ma. Or, Indianess

2022 was my 2020.  2020 was kinda my 1999.

Been so long since I wrote much.  Since I put together an artist statement.  Made myself a product and wrote some pitches.  Since I've shown any work outside of my little shop I've been occupying myself with in the wild little sand dune town of Los Osos.  Been just living.  Art living.

Where to begin....

Ma died.

No, too morbid.

I fell in love.

No, too personal.

I like waking up early.

No, too mundane. 

The work is about trying to capture the texture and significance of what it feels like to be alive.

No, too grandiose.

What do I say about the evidence that I have continued to pay good money to spend good chunks of my life putting colors onto surfaces in an attempt to create meaning and value for myself, and some hypothetical audience which I then go on to try to hustle up the best I can through pestilence and fire and death?  

Do you even follow me on Instagram?

First off, love.

No.

First comes the death.

1-26-22

    Epic mission to China Harbor on Monday.  Got pretty good sleep--only six hours, but basically uninterrupted.  Got up early yesterday--normal time, 6:30/7--got good stretch in and got into studio & was pretty productive; still feeling haunted and worried about Cole.  Kept crying all day.

    Missing mom, sad feelings highlighted by moving back into the world of plans and bills and busy-ness-it's like death throws the futility and tragedy of life into a stark relief against its brightness and splendor, in general.  Body was real sore from mission to China.  

    Seized a bunch last several days.  But.  Thinking.  I want to do a thorough & detached evaluation of my life and art.  Structural decisions need to be made.  Feels important.  So, the major things seem to be my artistic practice, my relationship with Ashely, my living/rental situation, & my family relationships.  My health and lifestyle practices.

    When sad songs come on, they makes me feel, so much.  The heightened state I'm always in; the amygdala and hippocampus on overdrive.  The whole thing feels significant.  Like, it is standing- in for the real thing, like an actor stands for the hope fears and dreams of a culture.  I get the feeling of watching myself like I would a movie hero.  I become emotionally invested.  I care.  And then the seize reminds me: It is only a movie.  It is just life.  A story.  And there is vertigo.  And I long to be held.  I guess that is what I'm doing when I create:  I am trying to create anchors, hand-holds.  Moments of clarity and balance to hold onto, help me orient myself.  Stop the falling feeling.  Determine what the Real is.  How far or near I might be to it, anyways.  Perhaps.

6-10-25

3.5 years. That was the door to door grief period.  Enjoy the dance. The dancing is the Dance. The chores are the reward. 

That was sort of the things with the grief season...every single thing was an act of honor...no matter how humble or even grueling...I think right now I'm kind of grieving the grief, itself...there is something similar in the festival grounds and the graveyard...they are places apart, sacred, and they alter you; there is an intensity of experience in the alter spaces that is, literally, ecstatic, outside of oneself. And when you go back to the other spaces, you carry that with you, and are more sensitive to it, and part of you longs to be back in the place where the holy, the sacred, is the commonplace, the day to day...

Made a lot of peace the last three years, a lot of "progress".  I am physically better regulated and more abundant and healthier than perhaps I have ever been.  That's another thing about the alter space, is that it will carry you away from life, from the body.  It will disrupt your sleep and your ability to focus, it will (in my case) give you seizures that melt past present and future in a single, overwhleming moment.  It will steal your appetite and make you run on fumes.  It will steal your very breath away. But, by the grace of god, and the skill of my ancestors, I returned again and again to my body. 

To breath: all three of us had the grief stuck in our lungs, and all three of us had ma come to us and rub our chests and gently and firmly remind us to breathe.  Big big breaths.  Breath, baby, breathe.  I would get bronchitus every years as a kid, and she would sit in my bed with me and rub my chest and have me do big big breaths with me and hold a bowl for me to expectorate, and sometimes vomit, if the coughing attack was severe enough, into.  Love is often covered in bodily secretions.  And the breath, the sky, is reaching past that.  To health.  To mind, song, spirit, dance, play, adventure.  I think, in a big way, going to the mountain was going into the place where breath was the primary skill.  At altitude, it is an act of will, and making good will habitual has always been the warriors path.