I’ve been lucky enough to be asked by my friend Hugh to help him during construction for an installation that will hang above the cash wraps in the new Barney’s Co-op in Santa Monica. Yesterday we picked up a couple boats that were stored at the flagship store in Beverly Hills and repainted them. Today, cutting them into little pieces.
I read Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” a decade ago and some fundamental elements still crop up in my mind’s narrative:
“So, dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will diecover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.”
I’ve gone through multiple cycles of having to halt and answer this question, and find the answer to always be that I must create or face delirious malaise.
The process of creation restores my will to exist. I am amazed at the regularity and consistency that I forget this fact. Spending the day cutting, stitching and harvesting color reminded me poignantly that this is what I must do to feel whole. I felt so much gratitude for my life and limbs, my education and experience as I walked along Easterly and Westerly terrace in Silver Lake valley gathering (and eating) blooming Nasturtium flowers and bracts of Bougainvillea that I used to create a dye bath for a hood I constructed for Oliver Hess of Materials and Applications. I chose to make the color for the piece using only dyestuff foraged within a block of his home. I filled an enameled steel pot full with fuchsia and orange and boiled down the contents into a raspberry colored tea and dyed the felted wool from stark white to a toasted copper.
Today, thinking about this quote by another Silver Lake resident, Anaïs Nin “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
Seeking to expand my life, I pray for courage.
I’ve been feeling like I’ve not been creating enough recently. Those thoughts lead me to start to question what it means to me to create, be creative, and I’ve come to believe that the creativity, art, making and doing are all expressions of processing life and healing wounds.
I am coming to realize that artists and performers of all types use their processes to give voice to their struggles and joys, to attempt to resolve the challenging parts of their lives using the tools that they have, their own talents. I look forward with a sense of excitement to the days when I have enough energy and vigor in my life to be creating work that will not only help me in healing myself, processing my own experience, but can extend beyond the walls of my own home and be of service to others.
I’ve been struggling to reconcile my emotions and actions following the loss of a friend, relocation to Los Angeles from Vermont, change in career, and staggering loneliness and anxiety. I feel that I have no way of understanding or comprehending why these things are happening in my life, what the purpose is for all the pain and isolation that I’ve been feeling. I have come to believe that I need not know the purpose of experience, only to accept and allow it and take care of myself. I am grateful to be able to exert my energies toward my own recovery and sense of wellness, without feeling the need to fret and dissect infinite imaginary past and future scenarios. I get to be, right now, and enjoy this instant.
All my creative energy has been pouring into making this new place a home, creating healing practices and space. I’ve been making very few objects that extend beyond my own realm, save bouquets of flowers, smoothies and homemade pizzas.
I wanted to share a suite of personal projects, a group of things that have been helping me heal and find strength:
Graham’s California Oats : Single Serving
• 1/2 Cup Rolled Oats
• 1 Tablespoon Coconut Oil
• Handful of Raisins
• Sprinkle of Sucanat
• Pinch of Powdered Ginger
• Pinch of Powdered Cinnamon
• Handful of Mixed Berries
In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt coconut oil and pour in raisins, fry lightly and add oats. Toast and stir oats occasionally for a couple minutes. Add sucanat, ginger and cinnamon. Next, carefully add water to hot pan. Cover and reduce heat to low, let simmer until all water is absorbed and oats are fully cooked: not too crunchy, not too gooey. Put it in a bowl and top it with butter and berries, maybe a little maple syrup. Eat it with a spoon.
I buy my coconut oil from the vitamin shoppe, they have the best deal on the stuff which can get super expensive if you buy it in smaller quantities. If you tell them the price that you found on the website, they will give you the same deal in the store, even if it is marked at a higher price.
My Morning Beverage
This is an equal parts mix of Buckwheat and Ox Root. I picked up the Buckwheat down in Gardena. It is available at most Japanese grocery stores. The Ox Root comes from Vital Tea Leaf in San Francisco, but could be acquired from most Chinese herbalists. The combination of these two flavors is vibrant, wholesome, woodsy and rooted. I combine about a teaspoon of each in a tea ball and can get a few infusions out of it at least.
Prayer Tree
I visited the Koyasan Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo, downtown LA and saw a tree there that many pieces of string had been tied to. I thought it was beautiful and it inspired me to start tying strips of fabric to the tree that sways outside my french windows here. I write down my prayers, asking for help with courage, strength and wisdom and tie them to the tree and then go about my day.
My Plants
I’ve been gathering and sowing seeds of my favorite plants and they are really starting to grow and take off, even with all my moving and re-potting and moving and re-potting. The breeze from my windows blows through the lavender toward my desk where I work and write, making the room smell soft and electric. Thusfar, I’ve got
• Lemons
• Madder
• Oak
• Date Palms
• Lavender
• Rosemary
• Sedum
• Baby Necklace
• Anonymous Melon : Found the seed on my floor and planted it, wonder what I’ll get!
Lanterns
These lanterns recently arrived in the mail with a shipment of my things from Vermont. I feel so grateful to have them back in my life. They are suspended from a spider web of chain that weaves across my ceiling. At night, I place candles inside them and my room glows a mellow peach.
My thought monologue, unchecked, goes something like this: “You are a failure! You’ve never accomplished anything. Look how happy, clever, beautiful and successful everyone else is compared to you. You will never have that! You are losing at life, everyone else is having a better time than you. You do not have the courage to live, loser. Stay inside, don’t commit.” My continuous struggle is to continue to remind myself that this verbal derision is not fact. It is just a powerful monologue that my mind has created to keep me safe, keep me from taking risks where I could suffer harm.
To overcome this cacophony, I practice gratitude. I am constantly, consciously making efforts to remind myself what I am grateful for. I am able to find joy in my experience by concentrating on the parts of life that I feel like are blessings. Plants are one of the many things that I am grateful for. I mean, really, plants are AMAZING! They create so many beautiful things that enrich my life, e.g. food, flavors and smells, oxygen, paper, fabric, pigments.
I’ve become enraptured by the idea of seeds. They contain all the information, the billions of years of genetic experience, the story of how to live, create and propagate that has been revised over millions of generations. All the life that exists now GOT IT RIGHT. Everything alive knows how to excel in its own environment, do it’s thing and make copies of itself. I’ve begun to look at the idea of seeds germinating and life issuing forth as a metaphor for my experience here in Los Angeles. Plants grow best in certain environments, many can grow in a variety of environments, but truly thrive where they are supported and the conditions are right for their particular history and purpose to unfold itself. I want to become the fullest expression of myself that I can, and I believe that by planting myself here in Los Angeles, by caring for myself and my dreams, my own life will grow to bear fruit that I may share.
I spent my first few months harvesting seeds from my favorite plants: lemons, dates, lavender. I germinated them in a tupperware container that I placed on top of the digital cable converter box in my bungalow. It kept the seeds at a cozy hundred degrees with high humidity. I took special care of the starts, watering constantly, spritzing, making sure they were warm, got lots of sun. I look at these little guys as mirrors for my own life here. When I get impatient with my experience, feeling like I’ve not accomplished anything, not grown, I look at the little plants and think: just a couple months ago, these things were just seeds, just an idea of what they could be, now they are becoming. Even now, when I brush my fingers against the little lavender leaves, the smell rises up from them. They are already doing what they do, making special scents, making more of themselves, growing. This reminds me, I must be growing as well. Life is okay, and now my hand smells like plants, awesome.
Here are some shots of my little babies, time lapsed one week of growth. Lemon tree and Date Palm.
I’ve been listening to my heart beat: like, really listening.
I place my fingers in the nook of my neck, below my jawbone, aside my throat and just lay still. I hear fuzz in my ear before every swelling beat. My fingers ride out, pushed gently by the pulse of blood flowing through my carotid.
Finding consciousness in this moment reminds me that everything is connected: the food I eat is digested by the bacteria that live in me then those molecules are absorbed into my body and grown into little cells that pick up the oxygen in my lungs breathed in from the air around me and carry that energy to all parts of my body so that it stays ON, so that I continue to live. The air that I breathe out is added back into the atmosphere that collectively holds everything on our planet that floats. Plants and trees take that in to grow; other people breathe it; all living things are sustained by use of natural resources.
Once I realize that I am, some sort of organic composite consciousness, I start to wonder why I am. Why are we all? Why are we sustained? Why do our bodies want to be alive?
I’ve got a couple answers that I am starting to feel comfortable with. Please excuse my use of the plural here, these opinions are merely my own and I am open to all others’ interpretations of the purpose of existence. I’m just trying to get some thoughts stirring here to create a fluid and honest dialogue of why I continue to be…
1. We exist with our consciousness so that all creation will have a way of knowing about itself. Each of us can perceive that the universe is, can experience through our senses all the wonders of the things that are, that grow, that die. We can enjoy the interactions between all things.
2. We exist to be of service to each other. By taking care of ones self, being kind and accepting toward our selves: our bodies, our imaginations, our emotions. By practicing this publicly, consciously, the understanding of kindness and peace spreads to those around us, like a wildfire of compassion and gratitude.
Here is a quick list of things I am grateful for right now:
I am grateful to know that I exist
I am grateful to have food, warmth and physical security
I am grateful to have a body that can experience the world: touch things, look around, hear sounds, jump, run, twist and SHAKE IT!
I am grateful to feel lucky to be alive: the fact that I exist is a statistical fucking miracle! It makes me feel like I must have been chosen for this life, Amazing.
Then place the pinkie of the left hand under the jaw bone and gently press toward the center of the neck, feeling the pulse of life.
