....surrender....

The word is easy. Not only the sensation, but the desired feeling. About life, about all of it. Easy. Surrender; it can be easy. Love; it can be easy. Heart, soul, destiny, spirit, magic, even work—they, too, can be easy. It is we who make it hard, the dragons in our minds, the demons at and on our backs, our philosophical and existential pursuits, our debates of meaning, constant quest for understanding, furthering, our individual complexities, eccentricities. Sometimes, it is simply a challenge to breathe. To breathe! The one thing we must do. Dragons of memory, of pain, of confusion and trauma catch our breath at the back of our throats, keeping her at the top of our lungs. Demons of nerves, demons of doubt, possessions, egos, perceived necessities, the drive toward fame and fortune, validation. These are the things that make it all difficult, that make life as we know it, difficult. I have wrestled Easy. I did not want to know her, I ran from her, I ran toward darkness and it was darkness who I found. I have known her, Surrender’s antithesis, the confused tunnels at the base of our minds. We all realize the most difficult thing is to sit still with ourselves.

The wild horses of my mind have been at a gallop. Sprinting, racing, everywhere, in all directions, all at once, nostrils flaring, manes ablaze, eyes wide open, hearts pounding, pointing everywhere and nothing in between, for so very long. Each beast with a different energy, all spread outward, reaching. And what do you say to a horse to calm her? Easy. Easy, easy. Whoa. One of the horses turning, pausing, checking itself before its eventual demise. An animal in fear, a deer for example, if being chased, will run until it falls down and simply dies. The body of the deer is unable to cool itself to match the exertion of her perpetual flight. This is the way a human can catch her. Slowly, over great time, tracking the lesser animal in fear, waiting, following behind at a sustainable pace, continuing to supply the necessary food and water to fuel the pursuit. Deer will run herself out, if we can wait for her to do so. And then, death is easy. We do not even have to shoot. Deer simply falls down and dies, ours for the taking, a bird in the hand.  

It helps me to consider my mind this way. Its a thing I can relate to, the taming of an animal. The calming of the mind, the honing, and possible mastering, of some focused skill. The idea of taming something as wild as our hearts has been familiar to me since the reading of The Little Prince and the beautiful fox therein. He tames. I am hoping, I am seeking, to tame myself, in a way. 

Imagine a source of light, igniting a great space. The light reaches all the corners, emitting from a source in the center. The light fills the room, it is pushing outward, always. This is the way I have felt for quite some time, as though I was reaching into all directions at once, all places at once, toward each person I met, every story I heard, so thirsty, always outward, toward the sea, toward the horizon, toward the mystery, toward men, even. Often, in this process of extension, I ignored the source entirely. This is because that source felt less beautiful than whatever its light could touch. Only recently has it occurred to me to take the light in my hands and draw it back toward the center. To pull it inward, to give the majority the light to the source, to the source that is me, without guilt. To hold it and feel the heat being generated and surrender to the love that we can offer ourselves. 

Today I was handed a tool by a master. It is a bamboo stick, very simple, employed in the art of traditional Thai style bamboo tattoo. To use it you move slowly, the practice of tattoo of lesser impact, less pain, less power, more surrender, more patience. The tool has potential motion at both axises. Its offering to me represents something I choose to accept, and that is a destiny of sorts. A responsibility. Being a tattoo artist was never something I anticipated, nor is it something that’s come easy for me thus far. It has taken much from me, and challenged me on every level. Learning to handle that practice, to handle myself, to humble myself to someone far wiser than me, who is a true Thai master of magic and heart, and to give effort toward something I am absolutely, for the moment, faking being confident in—that is my mission for the next three months. I have been given an opportunity, and I will not run. Lovely baby steps in the direction of my own power, my grace, my one wild and precious life.  

Thailand is, so very simply, beautiful. I am, so very simply, very, very lucky.  If you need me, I’ll be here for, at least, three months, working to concentrate, working to heal, working to learn and focus. I commit to these ideas of healing and growing, of ease and surrender, of magic and power. In a temporary world, the vaguest permanence we can muster is the state of being we carry in our hearts. I grant this experience permission to affect change in that, and I will give it the time and energy required to do so. 

Salud! Looking forward to working with many of you. Thank you for supporting my process. I hope to share much of what I learn in this strange format, as I realize its a beautiful creative process, but I will be keeping much of my situation to myself, as well. If you want to know, you already do. 

Wishing you beauty in all your pursuits, peace in your hearts and love in your hands. Warrior spirit.

Saudade

An Update.



I finished two months in the desert (slowly walking, medicinally yelling, generally caterwauling, exhausting, elating, impressing) and made a choice I've made, and suffered the consequences of, before, to drive my vehicle to California full of all my worldly possessions. Two days later, my truck and all my things were stolen, from the Oakland Hills (a mighty nice neighborhood) and I was left considerin'.

Understand that what was in my vehicle are not the only things I own, but they were the things I had made some extension of an attempt to protect in my gypsy manner, for years upon years, to keep and hold near my person, a place I deemed more safe than left alone for months in the sweltering and moldy heat of a new orleans summer, aboard my ship. My art porfolios, my tools, my music boxes and shiny things, my stuffed bear I'd had since, literally, my moment of birth, silly things, foul weather gear and leather boots, sentiments, photos of childhood and boxes of sage, you know. Treasures. Possessions. Weight.

It is that moment when something you were familiar with in a physical sense is replaced by a void. Its when your house burns down or your loved one dies--what was one there now is, simply, gone. I've addressed it before, its Hiraeth to the Welsh, Saudade in portuguese, its haunting and strange and difficult to process regardless of the name. Hell, there's nobody alive that can process that type of thing instantly, it takes us all a few days, a few months, the course of a life we spend reeling from one event to the next wondering, "what the hell was that?"

The truck was recovered. Its a damn miracle. Truckleberry smells weird, feels weird, and has some scars, and the act of banditery and subsequent recovery revealed some as heroes and others as foul. Like it does. I am immensely grateful for the support and recovery, and curious as to my feelings of owning a vehicle that I now know everybody wants to steal.

Theft, in this sense, is difficult for me to swallow. Its a bitter pill. I can understand, and even commend, theft as a response to true need. Hell, I have empathy for Somalian Pirates in that sense.  I do not, however, have empathy for a bunch of greedy, senseless motherfuckers who pirate my precious things just to throw them on the ground or make an easy buck. In a country such as this one, where there is already way too fucking much, the last thing anyone needs to do is steal from the fellow underbelly. Its injustice, and its wildly frustrating. You're lying to yourself to ignore the ever increasing baseline of fuckery in this country. Accept it, wise up and git tougher. Its pretty much par for the course, and pretty much so, so lame.

So, its another kick in the psyche. Its been a year chock full of 'em. Suicides, sicknesses and episodes of grief abound. Its a strange time. But, what can you do? Whats the response? Its like I've said, and will probably go down screaming, its about what you see from here. The future shapes itself to your whims. Its about what you see when you look at the pile of shit that might be your past, hell, maybe you take your hands and literally shape that shit into something new. You might not have a lot of friends if you go around sculpting piles of dog shit into dragons, fairy tales and fat men in little boats, but you'll be making a hilarious, and poignant, statement about life. I'm not here to judge. Whatever it takes.

Unless it is, its not the end of the world. Things are replaceable and more money exists. There are more trucks and there are more accordions, I can make more, and way better, art. I can look at this as the world telling me to let the fuck go, man, shed that skin. Its easier to get dressed in the morning if you only have two outfits. Many a time in this life i've only owned what I could carry, and there is, indeed, a particular type of elation in that experience that a lot of people never know.

Also. Also this. This is important. What you carry in your hands and in your heart and in your mind--those are things that they can never take away. Not when your things are stolen, not even in jail. You can sit pretty much anywhere you want with your memories, your ability to speak, your stories and your skills. Once you've learned something, its there with you, forever, regardless of the shirt on your back or the number of zeroes in your bank account. Who are you, without the things you own?  I can sit with that. I can also know that I are loved and safe and protected if I can be brave enough to ask by an astonishing number of truly wonderful people in this world. Its a big deal, that sensation. Imagination, and mental capacity, has no boundaries. They are the final frontiers, y'all. You can go farther there than anywhere else in the world, and you get to chose your experiences and your perceptions. Its just like those choose your own adventure books, except its our lives. Tally ho!

I'm working to heal and to recognize my own needs. Through this, and everything else life has written on her steel toe boots and then slammed into my lower diaphragm, I see more clearly all the time; I'm a very, very lucky girl.

"I am abstinent from the vice of pessimism."
--JEB Stuart

Thank you for your support, now and in the past. I intend to continue getting better all the time.


 Fundraising Campaign to Support Rebecca

Department of Public Works

Irrationally present, there exists a culture surrounding the American social phenomenon that is Burning Man, a troop of dusty vagabonds, carpenters, sailors, medics, personal trainers, mechanics, artists, musicians, contractors, mothers, fathers, marching band conductors, businessmen, therapists, bikers, roustabouts and outcasts who gather in the empty desert months before the party begins with one purpose: to build the experience. I have been present among these fine and feathered folk for one week now, my presence determined by the consistent pressure of two of my truest friends in the world,  an urging to come and find out for myself exactly how this process works, feels and functions; to experience, firsthand, what it feels like to work with a group of people, toiling together in one of the most extreme environments on American soil to build a festival that is attended by over 70,000 individuals. It is dusty, it is hot, it is bright, it is manual labor, it is complex and vibrant, it is beautiful. 

I come from a background of fringe, of rusty unicorns and gypsy ways. The experience of hard labor in a taxing environment are not unfamiliar to me, I have always known personally the extreme, the hard life. My life, as I have come to realize it, in a shock of self-awareness that stems from experiences of great grief and tumult, is a pursuit of pleasure-oriented masochism, a desire to interact with the raw, the true, and the pure, the type of life that exposes, that cracks, that stupefies you into a sort of enlightenment that leaves ego warbling by the side of the road, behind you, beside you, always altered and evolving. And what I have found in my first week of working for Burning Man’s Department of Public works is an enclave of other humans who share these mad proclivities—this time, I am not alone in my toil, not even in my emotional response. 

There is a great mystique surrounding Burning Man, one that I lay no claims to fully understanding. The stretch of land that we inhabit was once the bottom of the ocean and interacts with us in ways that the vast ocean of blue does as well, and it is She, the great Mother Ocean, that has provided my life with the color that washes the backdrop of my understanding of this festival. I am a sailor, from my nails of my toes to the tips of my hair, and the way of life this experience presents in the desert echoes what is required of me to survive on the sea in so many ways that surreality is the norm. The playa stretches for miles around us in every direction, a vast sea of white, a stark backdrop that exposes each image in high contrast—the whites are blinding, the darks are eclipsing, colors ablaze in the urgency of their own existence. A simple pink survey flag transforms into abstract art, its flourescence nearing garish juxtaposed against the bleached horizon. It is, if nothing else, visually stunning, your eyes awash in beauty, intrigue and surreal geometry and perspective.  

But it is so much else, it truly is. When a person envisions something like the ocean the allure rests in her solitude, in her great waves of emptiness, of isolation. Here at the Department of Public Works we start with an oceanic canvas and transform it, over a series of weeks, into a painting composed of humanity—of interaction, communication, celebration and of tens of thousands of minds and bodies processing to the same place for the same purpose; to gather together in the desert to burn something down. Maybe you’re only here to experience the party, perhaps you don’t even care to know the backstory, the creation, but, either way, you will witness an effigy whose dimensions know no parallel on this continent. Hell, this year the structure of the Man is 125 feet tall. The grandeur of build experience does not stop there; anyone attending Burning Man is stunned by hundreds of structures of varying dimension who scatter the desert and the DPW are the ones responsible for their construction. Three weeks of orchestrated utilization and application of plywood, metal, power tools and the ever constant blood sweat and, not surprisingly, tears, whiskey and bacon, births scores of buildings who erupt from the blank playa unapologetically and with great gusto. We are building circular constructions of high-tensile geometric prowess like the Oculus, we are building ice caves, we are building shade, we are building roads, we are employing scissor lifts and bobcats and augers and hammers and a proverbial metric shit ton of rebar and T-stakes to create a city that is now officially recognized by the state of Nevada as such; Black Rock City appears on GPS units and exists, officially, for only ten days. It is, to say the least, interesting. 

As a first year attendee of the event and a first year volunteer for the DPW, I came aboard leery as all get out. i don’t trust this concept, this vague institution, any more than I trust anything else large sects of humanity are attempting to create, but I came with a mind wide open, eager to be shown something I have never seen before by intentionally going somewhere I have never been before. Coming here, I knew two people. Within three days, I have scores of new friends who I understand I will keep for life. The environment pulls open a page of human existence that I had been missing—and that is the pressing consideration of one another. You can’t ignore your neighbor, here, and the level of communication between people, the willingness to understand, the effort that is placed by these folks in the direction of understanding, has been stunning. The median level of conversation that I have found since joining this wily tribe in the desert puts shame to the one-dimensional way so many of us have taken to speaking to one another in the “real world.” It strikes me as unfortunate that the difference exists. It has been recognized, and spoken to, by those before me of this concept of “festival life,” the human proclivity to interact differently with one another when present at an event they consider outside of their “real life,” a place they are only visiting, a people they are only passing through. This is not the way we should come to know one another. 

I have an idea. I would like to see what it feels like to share space with a group of people for a period of time while dirty, while hungry, while toiling, while human. Is this not the way we are meant to interact—in nature, in spirit and in communal effort? Burning Man, and the DPW, as I see them, are just another social experiment, but one with its head in the stars and its roots in the ground. The people, as I have come to know them, are, as many would visually judge, weirdos. Our language is crass, our presentations rough, but we have hearts of pure ambergris. I have been floored. it hadn’t occurred to me how much I had missed other people giving a fuck about me, about where I am, about what and how and why I am doing. I don’t have to answer to anyone in my “real” life and, you know what? Turns out that doing whatever the fuck you want, whenever you fuck you want to, isn’t actually terrifically fulfilling. What I craved, what I asked for, and what I found, here. strangely, are people who care, a purpose to my work, and a place where you can be whatever the fuck you feel. And that, my dear, is all I was looking for. 

These are the revelers in the temporary, the celebrators of the chaos and the sweet-natured genius hobgoblins of the underworld.  I came to Burning Man because I felt as though I was dying and I’m not the only one. Here I have found many a freak willing to talk to me about absolutely anything at any time; a casual discussion concerning the meaning of life while munching eggs and bacon is not uncommon. You have to understand—the biggest thing DPW builds, DPW sets on fire. It took me a very long time to swing my head into the wind created by the beauty of that concept. It seemed to me a waste, a botch, pointless and trite. But it is not that—it is a momentary expression of the glory that is the meaninglessness of existence. If you can see the edge, you can step toward or away from it. These are the people who thrive there, who go there on purpose, because they want to, because it is the state of heightened awareness, both physically and mentally, and it is the closest we can cradle our own sentience to our chests while challenging everything we’ve ever been told, questioning everything we’ve ever experienced. I understand that I am the most important thing in the world to myself, and that I matter immensely, but that I am supported by an imperfect, cracked world, whose flaws have cut me and, occasionally, left me to die. It is always a choice to get up again, the proverbial bootstraps of life, and the experience that is unceasingly interesting to me is what an individual does after they’ve gone further than they’ve ever gone before in any direction—where they place their next step into uncertainty. And DPW is the one i chose, this time, and I’m pretty fucking pleased about it, so far. If you need me, I’ll be over here, pouring whiskey on my pleasure, pounding my fists on the sides of a dumpster full of seventy five utter weirdos while a lightning storm ignites the super moon, hurling her orb across the desert sands to the tune of an gypsy band, covered in dust, grinning like the kinds of fools who caterwaul all night and work all day, the type of freaks who value each other over any physical object, the strangers who hold you long and hard, accept you when you’re crying, and medicinally scream with you when you’re motherfucking pissed. It’s all just fine. You’re awake and you’re participating. You’re human.