...waiting for the brightly clad messenger at the corner of change and change

(8" x 10" Collage)

July 12, 2018

An Open Love Letter at 60

I felt strangely serene reclining on the emergency room bed at Swedish Medical, while very nice strangers fluttered around me, trying to find a vein for the IV that would keep my throat from closing after a juicy puncture wound from our cat who really, really did not want to go to the vet.

It wasn’t surprising. After all, my mantra for months had been,
 “I don’t want to live in Trump’s world. I don’t want to live in Trump’s world.”

I really, really did not want to live in a polarizing sea of racism, sexism, under the increasingly fascist rule of narcissists and fundamentalists, regardless of their race, gender, political affiliation, or hairstyle.

Did we learn nothing during the love, peace and understanding sixties?                                                                               Did we learn nothing from the ecological disasters, the protests, riots, and PTSD of our returning vets??
I’m getting too old for this shit.

The prick of the nurse’s needle says, Be careful what you wish for.

My existential musings weren’t all Trump’s fault, of course. I was already floundering in the midlife morass of menopause, a major cross country move, a recurrent back injury, and my first winter in the Pacific Northwest--and, yes, my southern friends, Seasonal Affective Disorder is fucking REAL.

Separated from familiar routes, roles, friends and physical function, battered as we all were by wave after wave of political outrage and violation of human rights, I was drowning in grief, pain, depression, and fear that my body and the world would never be right again. Wrap that up with a cosmic bow and call it Second Saturn Return. Old structures dismantled, identity dissolved. Word of the day, every day; WTF?!

Even though my body had arrived at the place that had been calling my soul for decades, ethereal drag made me a ghost of myself waiting for my habitual calm and competence, my accustomed strength, energy and regenerative powers to catch up.

It was kinda like being stuck in the transporter room of the Starship Enterprise. I could hear the shimmery music, see the sparkles begin to swirl in the columns of light where I hoped my trust, faith, and identity would be reconstituted, but I was caught in an unresolved liminal loop that went on and on. I didn’t know if Scotty’s ingenuity would get that sucker working in time to save me, the captain, and crew, or if I would suffer one or more of the popular apocalyptic visions lighting up the zeitgeist.  

IF, the root of all fear, if, if, if... What IF everything IS broken? What IF it never gets any better than chronic fear and pain? What IF I never feel whole again? What IF this game isn’t “ as Alan Watts would say, “worth the cost of the candle? The suspense was (literally) killing me.

In myth-speak, this was the part of the Hero’s Journey where I felt least heroic. My superpowers had evaporated. The underworld loomed large in every direction. But, as Joseph Campbell assures us, the hero/heroine inevitably meets helpers along the way. That’s where all of you come into my story.

I was a mess, but I was not abandoned. Miraculously, Sam was at the gate to drive me to the emergency room after I lost the fight with my cat. My family and tribe still professed love for me despite my glaring imperfections and insecurities. And dear David and Aloria placed the key to a new community in my hands by introducing me to Sidney Ji, musician, lighting designer and Networker Supreme.

I found an alternative health practitioner who became the first link in a chain of helpers reviving my hope that I might one day occupy my body in comfort, and operate with ease again. Spirit prompted me to go to this hair salon, that festival, and a New Year’s brunch where kindred spirits, music, love, and laughter could be found.

Every open mind and heart, every kind word and warm embrace, every soulful offering of music and art, of food and drink, have  brought me to the realization that I do NOT in fact live in the world fear and hate-mongers seek to design for me, but in one co-created with a conscious, collective desire to respect, protect, educate and heal, to make the world a better place for all living things.

Time and again I meet living, breathing proof that mindfulness, goodness, beauty and truth are alive and well, that many worlds co-exist, and that I have successfully re-materialized in a reality where love and reason engage in games of compassion rather than power. Where walls of fear and separation are coming down rather than going up. Where I see  my values reflected in public services and plentiful green spaces, and I can live the truth that a single life, a single gesture can make a difference, even though the face in my mirror and world outside has changed.

May we co-create the changes that allow us ALL to THRIVE.

December 28:
"It's almost there," has been my painting mantra for the last month. I repeatedly imagined being a mere 3 to 6 hours away from completion of the 30" x 40" canvas, only to find after another 13 hour day or all-nighter that I've logged something closer to an additional 60 hours wedged in and around the requisite holiday preparations/activities... and then I saw it: Creative proximity is spirallic in nature, the linear distance to be traveled to the next turning is far greater than the visible gap between them. Just gotta keep putting one foot--or brush stroke--in front of the other...

December 30
Did you hear that? The pop and fizz of cheap champagne punctuates completion of a painting that has evolved out of a vision received during a meditation in Alex and Allyson Grey’s visionary art workshop 3 and a half years ago. I wasn’t too surprised by the female tree being at the time; the third breast, on the other hand, pressed a quizzical wrinkle into my forehead that persisted until, in the course of drawing it, I got the full download.

This image expresses the wisdom of a book that had a profound impact on my thinking, “The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World is a nonfiction social sciences and sociology book by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson,[1] first published in 2000.[2] The authors introduced the term ‘Cultural Creatives’ to describe a large segment in Western society that has recently developed beyond the standard paradigm of modernists or progressives versus traditionalists or conservatives.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cultural_Creatives .  (Asheville Magazine has an excellent article, Cultural Creatives Q & A: http://newfrontier.com/asheville/cultural-creative-faq.htm)

The idea echoed here is that beyond the either/or push and pull of polarized beliefs-- whether the political schism between conservatives and liberals, or the warring philosophies of religion and science, lies a third possibility: Mutual respect. Cooperation. Unity.

The flexible and expansive cultural creative mindset embraces paradox. It acknowledges the necessary balance achieved through seeming contradiction as left AND right, above AND below, light AND dark transcend the rigid dogma and limitations of EITHER/OR judgments and nourish an alternative paradigm that preserves worthy traditional values, while allowing human rights and planetary quality of life to evolve for the greatest good of all.

The idea is not new. Taoism expresses the dualistic nature of physical reality in the symbol of opposing and mutually defining yin and yang, receptive and assertive life forces unified in the classic taijitu symbol, here embedded in a mandala over the heart. After all, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

The title announced itself after our trip to Bali in the spring. Damai is the Indonesian word for peace. The Damai Divina expresses the divine peace possible when we view the contrast that makes not only equilibrium, but growth, possible through the eyes of love that acknowledge the value of every perspective on the infinite spectrum of creative possibility.

*****************

This was a learning piece (the biggest lesson I learned was not to dry the canvas outside subject to grit and flying insects of a Texas summer *Sigh* but I was too far in to abandon the project when I saw my error...), and one that owes a debt of gratitude to my instructors in the mischtechnik, Amanda Sage, Laurence Caruana,  and Maura Holden, and to Timea Tallon and Daniel Mirante who introduced me to the properties of various pigments (saving me a great deal of drying time as my deadline loomed). I’m thankful also to my fellow artists whose painting continuously inspires me to keep reaching higher and deeper.

Namaste.

December 2006

It is Llea’s idea, to take Christmas to Mary Lane.  Jolly coconspirators, we load a miniature Xmas tree, a Currier and Ives tin filled with fudge and cookies, a set of pretty blue glasses, a poinsettia, spools of wired ribbon, sparkling cider and a zip-up sweater for our frail 70-something friend living alone in her 90 year old farmhouse.

Llea warned me before she first introduced us that it is best to visit Mary Lane when you have no other agenda, nothing you personally need to do or say.  Simply allow her to pour herself out, all those words and emotions with no other outlet, nowhere else to go since her heart condition  (and probably a series of mini stokes) has compromised critical connections between the conceptual and executive branches of her brain, slowly extinguishing her ability to express her self in any cohesive way.

To be with Mary Lane is to enter her “world,” as she herself calls it, a psychological space devoted to the nature she has nurtured on her 50 acre farm and other transcendentalist and often romantic sensibilities: philosophy, prose, poetry, art, and music... Altho her thoughts scatter and roll in all directions like a broken strand of pearls, they are still pearls. Her manic monologues are rife with references to “beauty,” “depth,’ and “mystery.” And, sadly, with increasing frequency, “regret” and envy.”

The small shady yard looks a bit wooly and overgrown, but the pots on the porch have been painstakingly clustered together and covered with a sheet against the light freezes we’ve been having.

Llea pushes the front door open, calling out loud to Mary Lane. It is dim inside, more so than the three windows  would suggest. A dusty film of age and neglect blunts edges and dulls colors. Spider webs lace the window frames while the detritus of ancient floral arrangements, faded, brittle and drooping combinations of synthetic and dried flowers and grasses, slowly compost on the table tops. The walls barely remember white. Scuffed now, the porous old pre-laytex paint has absorbed the stains and shadows--material and emotional--of decades of living. Heavy dark wood lintels and beams, also filigreed with spider webs, fight the light for supremacy in the high ceilinged room.

I remember when the furnishings of the 60s and 70s were shiny new and oh so modern, but nearly 50 years later remnants of that era are tired. The earth tone florals on the matching love seat and sofa need to be refreshed. The pink polyester blanket on the sofa is pilled and forlorn. Still, there are telling treasures here. My favorite thing in the room, a  gloaming forest abstract painted by Mary Lane’s own hand, begs to be hung on a rich colored wall, deep warm blue, ochre or blood red that would reactivate the nuances of color on the canvas. The dusty baby grand piano and worn guitar and violin cases, deep cut crystal bowls, and a singular carved antique chair suggest once keen ears and eyes, but like Mary Lane herself they tend to get lost now in the haze of Havisham-ish loss,  great expectations disappointed...
 
Mary Lane comes thru the kitchen door with an “OOOHHH” of pleasure on her lips and two open arms. I’m struck anew by the birdlike delicacy of her bones inside her oversize pants, layered shirts and her small stained powder blue quilted nylon jacket held together by a safety pin across the breast bone. The absence of the makeup she usually dons for visitors speaks of hastening decline. Her full head of black and grey hair is missing its normal curls as if it is too weary to hold its once graceful arcs and curves. Llea and I hug and pet her, feeling how insubstantial she is inside the old coat, under the salt and pepper cloud of hair that is softer than it looks. She is so excited, “OOHHH, OOHHH,!” she exclaims joyfully at a loss for words that scatter before her like a flock of starlings. “I, I, I don’t know what to --oh my--I can’t believe--OOHH, this is so wonderful--I feel like I could cry...”

She does cry before the visit is over.  In the midst of watching us plug in the tree lights (altho it is a fake tree we’ve attached miniature old-world glass ornaments to it), pour cider and drape gold edged wire ribbon, (Mary Lane’s decor has fallen victim to time, but at her heart she appreciates the finer things, and it would be cruel to impose tacky or garish commercial decorations on her artistic sensibilities) Mary Lane, unaware that she has lost one lilac slipper buries her face into her hands, shuddering and weeping while we wrap our arms around her yet again, rocking her and  stroking her head as if comforting a child...

“Oh, oh, you don’t know how much this means to me. I’ve been so so, so-- I didn’t even want it to be Xmas...  since I can’t... I had--” She stammers, talks in starts and stops, struggling to remain on track, making it obvious how easily overwhelmed she is by even the simplest task these days. When words fail another hearty hug says it all.

The wood floor is lost beneath layers of blankets and carpet remnants Mary Lane put down for her labradors during their final illnesses.  The layers of synthetic fibers caked with the black and brown fur of dead dogs triggers steammatic carpet cleaning fantasies in Llea and I. In fact we both itch to clean the  room that speaks far more eloquently of lost powers than its mistress can. Ironically, Mary Lane’s obsessive compulsive tendencies have derailed her from basic cleaning tasks. Llea finds a washcloth and, giggling like kids about to be caught smoking in the girls room , we do some quick cleaning, swiping at the heaviest coatings of dust when Mary Lane mumbles her way in and out of the room, looking for some of her own Xmas decorations.

She comes back with a hand=made nativity from “South of Mexico.” I don’t know what that means exactly as I came into her life too late to hear more than fragments of her stories, but I like to imagine her in her prime, studying art, playing guitar with passionate young beatniks, a beautiful woman in Mexico wearing large silver and abalone earrings... Our humble offerings have sparked something and you can see it on her face, the memories that come flooding back to return her to herself however briefly.

That is why I invest so much time and energy into holiday preparations for my family, going to the trouble to dig the boxes out of my own attic, that crude and cramped time machine that takes me into Christmases past. A few bars of Nat King Cole singing The Christmas Song and the ritual unpacking of lights, garland and ornaments floods my brain with endorphins. (However my mother might believe she has failed, she feasted us with her version of beauty for the holidays --the home baked goods and handmade ornaments, colored lights, fresh crows foot evergreen wrapped around the bannister, the rare experience of family unity as we decorated the tree together... Later, aroused by our interactions here today, I will call to tell her so, surprised by the raw emotion that clots my throat when I try to thank my mother for the precious memories and traditions she gave us.)
           
Mary Lane clasps her hands together in pleasure at the tiny changes in the room making the cider, cookies and fudge all the sweeter. Standing on the porch to say goodbye she gestures at the yard around us and says emphatically that she couldn’t see the beauty even in this, her heart’s delight before, but now--she gestures again forcing me to read between the broken phrases--color, texture and the simple grace of trees and nodding narcissus have been restored to her.

Mary Lane frets that she cannot give us anything in return. She confesses that she can’t even write a thank you note. She is sincerely bewildered by our loving regard as she has been stripped one by one of the layers of competence and identity she felt gave her worth. There was a time when we wouldn’t have had to explain the mysteries of love to her, but now...

She thinks we’re here as a Christmas present to her, but I know this natural high is one of the best gifts I’ll give myself this year.

It’s been a full work week, but sulky and disruptive, the Writing Muse is not impressed  by the overflowing carts of ankle-twisting brambles removed from the muddy yard, the freshly sorted recycling bins, wave upon wave of dishes washed, counters, windows, and walls wiped, floors swept, workmen answered, paperwork organized, deadlines met.



Nor was she entertained by the episode of Christmas tree wrestling when an attempt to straighten the artificial trunk resulted in inadvertently dismembering it, a not so wily Coyote moment --actually more like seven minutes--of staggering under the top two thirds of the 7’ tree still attached to the bottom boughs by the tangle of mockingly cheerful lights, ornaments swinging wildly like shrunken heads on the Night Bus over my head while I tried to reinsert the top tube into the bottom obscured by the branches and lights filling my arms and mashed into my face.

I imagine this as a comic episode, but the muse is... unamused.



The Writing Muse was not distracted by the walk intended to stimulate my butter and pie saturated blood flow, nor was she appeased by the yoga aimed at unifying my body, mind and spirit, either. Jealous of the seven hours allotted to refining what I hope are among the last layers of brushwork on The Damai Divina, she’s stamps her dainty foot on my attempts to sleep. She looks at me accusingly.

We have work to do.


I know.
I know!



There have been breakthroughs in 2013: my re-birthday tattoo, art and myth workshops, travel to Seattle, Bali, Toronto, Italy, Fiji, and Austria, reunions and readings, all yielding insights, "aha"s tumbling into place unlocking new possibilities as I step--sometimes fevered and wet--across the threshold from motherhood to crone.

Not all visions, however, wish to be rendered in paint. Some ephemeral psychological states require words to jell.



Never mind the boxes of decorations strewn across the living room, the ringing phone, the unmade bed. The joy in creating order is that order clears the way for emerging creation... but order is a castle built of sand, and what is the point of living by the sea of creative potential if you don’t let those life-renewing waters wash over you now and then?



Right now it is Art’s turn. Word art.



And so I surrender. My ears and hands are yours--for now.

Notes from the  Alex Grey Art Intensive July 25, 2009

Twentyseven years ago my father-in-law walked thru my studio for the first time. After peering critically at the intuitive drawings accumulating on the drafting board he sniffed and pronounced that I would (might!) be a good artist once I outgrew this “cosmic stage.” My cheeks burned with the stinging dismissal of my nascent creativity. Even then I knew my trajectory was set to grow deeper into, rather than away from my creative source, but his message was clear: “Good” art depicted the safe, predictable world of objective reality, traditional subjects, rendered in traditional ways... i.e. not the rainbow hues and metamorphic forms that issued from the invisible fountain of my mystical inspiration.

*******************

The life drawing models, wrapped in simple sarongs wait quietly on the pile of floor pillows on the sidelines until Alex has finished leading us thru a visualization of the warm red energy that connects the human body to the earth thru the root chakra at the base of the spine. Slipping out of their modest coverings the young women--one girl relaxed and easy in her skin, the other doe-eyed with arms folded under her breasts, both lovely, but different from each other and the sterile textbook guidelines for the average/normal human (height =seven and a half heads, width= three heads across the shoulder, pupils approx halfway between hairline and chin, etc.)-- walk naked across the polished floor to take their positions, exposing their tender skin to the eyes of 60 strangers, artists armed with pencils and paint for ferreting out the nuances of spirit that animate the flesh.

I think how much courage it takes for someone to risk revealing their flaws and imperfections--except that I don’t see them as flawed or imperfect. Different from each other, from me, from everyone else in the room, yes, but in no way deficient.

Seven times the process repeats as one of the great visionaries of our time leads the occupants of the room in visualizing then rendering the interface between material and non-material realities, one chakra at a time.

We applaud our thanks to the models when the exercise is over. Then the artists lay their studies on the floor where artists and models alike can see them and we wander quietly among them murmuring our admiration and appreciation, conferring in small groups about our experiences and insights. This is not a critique, but an opportunity to see how diverse the interpretations of the subtle energies, transmitted thru posture and gesture, are, a chance to give and receive inspiration...

In this place where models baring their bodies is followed by artists baring their souls, I realize, that the real risk for everyone is to allow anyone to see our BEAUTY. We are so vulnerable when we expose what is most precious in us to unbelievers and elitists. Here, where the treasure buried in our heart of hearts, the luminous pearls of our souls are made visible, the greatest gift we give one another is trust.

I get behind the wheel for the two hour drive home from Austin well after nightfall. It would probably be more sensible to sleep on a couch on these late nights, but a nice caffeine buzz and the siren song of the infinitely receding horizon calls me into the darkness at the edge of the visible world. Beyond the city lights, the world shrinks to the variable arc of headlights on an undulating ribbon of asphalt. Bound by brilliant white bands of paint at the pavement’s edge, the vivid gold center stripe snakes into distance, the safety reflectors flashing like scales on a dragon’s spine.

Tunnel vision induces trance with its zen simplicity. The dashboard dials glow softly, suspended in velvety black shadow that has swallowed the emerald hued oak savannas, farms and ranches of the daylight drive. Now mere grey ghosts, grass, trees, and rock, flicker grainy black and white at the edges of the windshield. Consumed in small nocturnal bites, this road becomes all roads, all possibilities, past, present and future compressed in the universal song of a freedom-seeking body in motion.

Listening to Jack Keroac’s “On the Road” I dwell in dual realities: Keroac’s American west of the late 1940s and mine at the turn of the new millenium. Our times twine in the mesmerizing line of telegraphic dots and dashes painted on the pavement that leads us deeper into the mindscape of memory, metaphor and imagination. Keroac grooved to “mad jazz” on the radio while I pump customized playlists of lusty rock  or dance and electronica thru my ipod when the fatigue of long days and late nights threatens to pull me under.

With normal senses contracted into a small bubble of pulsing, rhythmic sound, my hands and foot instinctively control my trajectory thru space with minor, mostly unconscious adjustments in arc and pressure to steering wheel and accelerator. The incessant vibration of the engine mingles with provocative bass and drum to awaken subtle sensations in my nether regions and I become aware of sanguine shifts in internal pressure as centrifugal force pushes the cells beneath my skin this way then that on the broad sweeping turns. My body has become an auto-erotic vessel riding the wheels that trace the curves and contours of the land like a lovers hand ...

Alert again, I can switch to a downtempo mix. The seductive boom and plaintive opening notes of Maroon 5’s sensual “Secret” pierce me like an arrow, lodging in a hidden compartment of unspeakable longing that sometimes breaks open on the open road, flooding my bloodstream with strange deepwater dwellers, all hungry eyes and mouths surging toward the surface, bursting thru the smooth facade of a life replete with satisfaction to stir unexpected ardor for something more...

Fragments of lyrics catch in my breast, flotsam in the flood of rising emotion:
“Our road is long, your hold is strong ... I know I don't know you, but I want you so bad... I’m driving fast now, Don’t think I know how to go slow ... Cool these engines, calm these jets, I ask you how hot can it get, and as you wipe off beads of sweat, slowly you say, ‘I’m not there yet... ‘ “I know I don’t know you, but I want you so bad.”

The sudden visceral ache for a nameless something beyond the visible horizon-is as palpable as the hunger for any flesh and blood lover. But what moon beckons this burgeoning tide of yearning?

K. D. Lang croons in Constant Craving, “Maybe some great magnet pulls all souls toward truth.”

Is the truth waiting beyond the reach of my night vision as K. D. suggests, “Life itself”: Do our hearts beat desire at the bidding of Life’s passion to know itself, to discover thru its pleasures its intrinsic wisdom, a deeper, more vibrant, lyrical and intricate ordering of consciousness and flesh than we can begin to comprehend?

Life seduces us with silver tongued promises whispered on dark, winding roads, tantalizes our imagination with possibilities--fresh vistas, new lights, unmet friends and lovers, heretofore inconceivable inspirations--waiting beyond the next alluring curve-. Mysterious attractors coax us to become conscious progenitors of meaning, thus increasing life’s lush and lusty measure--whether an idea, a child, a song, a painting, a home, a relationship, or a journey. Creativity begins with the spark of desire to move beyond familiar horizons, a more or less erotic rush into the unknown in hopes of giving form to the heretofore formless...

A hazard sign warns that deer are prone to leaping into the highway ahead. Others advise of concealed entrances, construction and hard turns. Who knows what other dangers threaten objects hurtling thru the inky darkness at 70 mph? But still the engine purrs--or is that me?--and I follow yet another broken line that stitches the north and east of my past to the south and west of my present.

Despite the knots and breaks in the thread, wanderlust, that irrepressible need to penetrate the mystery, reach higher, dive deeper, whether inward or outward, in darkness or light, remains needle sharp, mobilized by nothing less than radical trust--trust in the mortal vehicle that carries me, trust in the unseen laws that govern my trajectory, and trust in the intuitive intelligence that guides both wheel and driver toward fulfillment despite the obstacles hidden in the shadows of time and distance. How else can you explain the ecstasy of blind flight into the inscrutable future?

“You create your own reality,” my father said as he handed me the book. There was a twinkle in his eye and his grin revealed the slender gap between his front teeth. Taking the soft cover in both hands I opened the pages, enjoying the soft zipping sound as they fanned open under my thumbnail in that breezy front to back perusal that is the bibliophile’s first curious sniff of a new animal. And this was a strange one, indeed. Jane Roberts’s book pushed aside the heavy curtains of my assumptions about human nature, creativity and consciousness, and shredded the filmy veils belief had cast over my perception, affirming the instinct burrowed deep in my soul that there is more to life than meets a cynical eye.

You create your own reality.  Those five words crystalized the unformed questions that had been swirling inside me with radioactive intensity since I discovered that there was more than one answer to be found regarding  the parameters and substance of reality, depending on whether I looked to science, religion or daytime television for illumination; and even then there were schisms and contradictions to be found within each as individuals and institutions scrabbled--sometimes violently-- for the monopoly on a singular, exclusive, and Absolute Truth. One ring to rule them all.

What if my assumptions about reality are wrong? What IS reality? Why doesn’t everyone agree about what is and is not real? How can I tell the difference? What if we don’t live in a chess game manipulated by God and Satan, or a mechanistic straight line either-or world of cause and effect, real or unreal, but a spherical world of divine consciousness discovering itself, a world of infinitely expanding AND? What would-- should!-- I do differently if I truly have the power to shape my experience of reality?  The questions lingered in the crowded foyer of my mind like guests who wouldn’t leave as I pored over the pages of Roberts's books and others found on the trail through a multidimensional myndscape far richer, more mysterious, exuberant, and creative than mainstream culture had led me to believe possible.

The questions followed me to college. They distracted me from academics, and picked fights with my childhood religion. They picked up hitchhikers (What is good? What is evil? What is beauty? What is truth?) But it was What do I want? and Where are my desires designed to lead me? that seemed most radical to a compulsive people-pleaser. What if what feels good TO me is actually good FOR me; what if desire is actually a navigational tool leading me to fulfillment of my life’s sacred purpose? Those questions blew up the skirt of my morality and dared me to listen to murmurings originating east of my solar logic, and west of my lunar intuition--yes, right there in the immovable center that goes everywhere I go, fully cognizant of my deepest desires, dreams and intentions to embody love, to create beauty. That voice slowly usurped my trust in schizophrenic external authorities with a steady, sensual and soulful new brand of reason.

The growing cadre of questions accompanied me on barefoot walks along the Outer Banks of North Carolina. (They like the ocean. It makes it easier for them to hear themselves think.) What if? and How about _________? prompted me to pick up my neglected rapidograph pen and draw the circles and trees that would boost the signals from my imagination where new realities gestated. Relentless and playful, the questions tiptoed through my dreams and periodically pulled my body out from under my mind lest I foster any illusions that my consciousness was nothing more than an electrochemical storm behind my eyes.

I felt the questions peering over my shoulder as I read passages from the ancient Taoist text, the I Ching, which proclaimed in a voice intimate with the secrets of season and cycle stashed in the underwear drawer of the natural world, “The social responsibility of the artist is to reunite people with their reality through the rhythms, symbols and patterns that have long inspired mankind.” What exactly does that mean? I asked them and the questions, grinning with crackpot zen master glee, laughed, pointing back to the crazy notion that started it all: You create your own reality, leaving me to decipher which rhythms, symbols, and patterns could best illustrate the possibility that we are not merely pinballs in a soulless machine, but co-creators of subtle psychological constructs, electromagnetic fields that attract and organize matter and the events therein in meaningful ways.

You create your own reality. Sleeping in that philosophical acorn was, in E. E. Cummings’s words, the “deepest secret nobody knows” (or at least it was... Hello world wide web!). Most of us operate on the assumption that Seeing is believing, unaware of how much of our reality is bankrolled by the flip side of that coin: Believing is seeing. This, in contemporary psychology, is known as confirmation bias, “the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias )

Discounting or ignoring altogether information that contradicts our carefully cultivated world view, we often mistake opinion for fact, our beliefs about reality for reality itself, the finger for the moon to which it points. Have we ever been more keenly aware of the lack of consensus regarding the “truth,” ever seen more extremist points of view, the ability of people to ignore “facts” in order to find/fabricate proof that theirs is the “right” version of reality than in the 2012 elections? Emotions are sticky, the stronger the emotion, the stickier it is, prone to accumulating whatever evidence will validate it, until, like a snowman rolled from the lawn, with bits of grass and leaf caught in the ice crystals, it has acquired enough mass to be observed, or at least its effect on us and our behavior-- until it melts away under a more compelling sun.

Despite widespread agreement about the objective physical characteristics of the reality we share, the assumption that those who do not assign the same subjective values to reality-- a word, a behavior, an object or event-- as we do (for no better or worse reason than because they are biologically bound to perceive everything through their own brains programmed with different genetic codes, grown in different climates, exposed to different stimuli),  are stupid, lying or mentally ill, undeserving of the respect at the foundation of all human rights, has caused incalculable human suffering.   

All subjective realities, judgments, fears and joys are equal in their fidelity to the mind that conceives and experiences them; harvests differ according to the intentions sown, the attention they receive. We may lament the ignorance or moral breakdown of all of Them or we might consider that an expanding global population means there are a lot more nuts and raisins to fold into the cake batter of planetary co-creation. We’ll go crazy if we take our differences personally. Surely we can come up with better ways of resolving conflicts between world views than trying to drown out the opposition with hateful rhetoric or devoting trillions of tax dollars to incarcerating or bombing Them and their families and neighborhoods.

What if we were less concerned about the veracity of other people’s beliefs and more concerned about how our OWN beliefs enhance or undermine personal and collective freedom, agency, and fulfillment?

My persistent curiosity about what Terence McKenna called the “wiring beneath the board,” is, borrowing from Cummings again, “the root of the root and the bud of the bud” that has yielded a lifetime of wondrous strange artistic fruit fertilized by the likes of Kahlil Gibran, Richard Bach, Alan Watts, Carl Jung, Tom Robbins, Jamie Sams, Jose Arguelles, Esther Hicks, Joseph Chilton Pierce, and Alex Grey. My studio bulges with sketches, drawings, paintings and assemblages, a visionary cornucopia harvested from the possibility that my life, with its myriad twists and turns, good and bad choices may itself be the ultimate work of art... and that other lives may be works of art as well, created  to appeal to the taste (Chocolate vanilla or mango?) of those artful reality generators also grappling with: Who am I? Why am I here? How can I minimize pain and optimize joy?  What is love? How much freedom do I require? How do I negotiate boundaries where my desires clash with others? What, I ask myself over and over, IS possible--really?

You create your own reality.  Are we all, then, artists riffin’ off themes of mortality, love, lust and death? Freestying, making it up as we go along?

I enjoy a natural rapport with many of the answers I’ve found in my explorations of the psyche, the truths self-evidenced within the strange looping mechanism of reality creation. Still, questions provide livelier company than self-satisfied answers. Sure, I comfort myself with the peace and creative satisfaction to be found in my own confirmation bias, watching my intentions and carefully cultivated expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies, a lush, made-to-order landscape of sensations, relationships, objects and events, a world challenged, enriched and expanded by thoughts and intentions not my own. I try, however, not to be too self-righteous or attached to a self-referential version of reality that at every moment appears to contradict the realities millions of others have fashioned from different assumptions, beliefs and preferences (strawberry, banana, rocky road...) Who, after all, can claim supremacy in a sensory soup in which billions of realities brush shoulders, bumping, rubbing and polishing each other like rocks in a riverbed?  

My view of reality creation parallels my view of art making: Harming none, do as you will. There is no “wrong” art. Art, like myth, expresses unquantifiable yet universal truths in styles unique to the era and personalities therein. Impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, realism, surrealism, romanticism, minimalism are all legitimate expressions of the spectrum of human experience, as are decorative, figurative, abstract, pop, pornographic, rococo, gothic, psychedelic, comic, sacred, secular, digital, street, protest, outsider and countless other art styles and life styles, all are snapshots of private psyches responding to and reformulating our shared social and material reality.

Sometimes my questions wander off to poke and prod other grey matter, but they always come back to keep me humble, mentally and emotionally flexible. Secure in the knowledge I may be dead wrong in my subjective assignations of cause and effect, good and evil, and the purpose of life, I’m no longer willing to quibble and quarrel with the utterly convinced or supremely self-righteous. It’s not my job to correct, convert or fix anyone.

You create your own reality. Singular you, plural you, we’re all in this together, cells in the body of something beyond the comprehension of our narrow, one point perspective. Call it Humanity, God or Gaia, the liver cell is as precious as one residing in a hamstring, a hand, an eye... I am but one of billions of beings rendering consciousness in living color and surround sound, demonstrating moment to moment, through word, thought, and deed, changing answers to the question, What reality merits creation NOW?

And so I return to my studio, to the room and tasks necessitated by my desire to keep a channel open to the realm of creative possibilities, between what is and what could be. Gazing into the velvet darkness that envelops the questions burning at my core, I coax answers-- metaphorical, ethereal and paradoxical-- out of hiding and into the fleeting garb of paper, pencil, or paint, materializing a myndscape thrumming with wonder, illuminated by beauty. I create art for the simple and profound pleasure of What?, Why?, How? and What if? answered, dissolved and reconstituted, renewed, expanded and enhanced... I create this reality, one breath, one intention, one choice at a time.