Ocotillo Flowers

Ocotillo Flowers

At Joshua Tree National Park, where I camped for two nights, there had been a relatively wet fall, so many of the cacti were blooming this mild winter. The ocotillo grove, which is one my favorite spots in the Park, had several stands that were flowering. Long conical red flowers at the ends of the long cactus stalks, some of the stands covered in small green leaves. Ocotillo are dramatic, standing up to 20 feet high, stalks growing from a central taproot point. They bend to the prevailing wind over time, giving them a windswept look even when the day is calm.

I made this drawing on my iPad, with the ArtRage app, using one of the photos I made that afternoon as a reference image. Still, I like the more impressionistic result. I didn't try to be too realistic about the background, or the area around the ocotillo, suggesting more than depicting the surrounding dirt and stands of sage. Still, anyone who's been to the Southwest will recognize the colors, the sky, the desert scene, and the ocotillo.

I did this drawing in several layers, exploring the app's Layers feature for the first time. The cactus and its sun-shadow are foregrounded, while other layers were built up for the sky, the distant line of mountains, and the foreground dirt with its loose jumble of rocks. I used several different tools this time, two different kinds of brushes, pastels, a little airbrush, and the paint roller. I like broad strokes for this kind of drawing, and I think the paint roller made an interesting sky gradient, built up in several thicknesses on different layers. more subtle to create than the end result appears. This kind of drawing/painting painting is about underpainting, building up color in layers, so that subtle effects show through. It took me awhile, but I like the finished result.

Taos Drawing

St. Francis of Assisi, Rancho de Taos, NM

Drawn on my iPad using a painting/drawing app called ArtRage. It's the most natural painter software I've used in a long time. Part of that is the iPad's touch interface, but the app uses the hardware very well. I'm pleased with the results.

When I was in New Mexico, we drove up to Taos for the day. From Albuquerque, that's a lot of driving, but it was worthwhile. I had a good day revisiting the places I knew well, from the time I lived there. I also felt some closure on some things. I wonder if the people I knew are still there; who knows. Meanwhile, we stopped at St. Francis in Rancho de Taos, the beautiful adobe church known from paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe and photos by Ansel Adams and others. It's still an iconic building, and I always enjoy a visit.

It was late in the day, with some thin clouds over the blue sky. I made this drawing impressionistically, not trying to be photorealistic. As I've said before, I have little interest in trying to draw photo-realistically. I prefer to be either impressionistic or iconic. I like cave-paintings, archetypal images, and impressionistic renderings of natural objects.

Witch Tree

Poems for Samhain

Two older resurrected poems for Samhain, brought back to life temporarily. The first a boneyard poem, an existential poem. The second of defeat and victory, reminding now, years later, of nothing so much as poems George Herbert used to utter. The collars we fight against that bring us home.

•

the skull behind the sky

the imbrecating winds, the desolating sun.
the shock of the other: the sun
moves; a turn of phrase wakes it,
you see the skull behind the sky.

mare’s tails split you open,
spit your heart over the fire;
suddenly sober, watching a raven’s
aerial dance: a hole in the sky

everything will always come to nothing:

children laugh in the distance,
there are birds, and freshets in the leaves:
still the hollows fill you, emptying you,
leaving nothing but your plucked eyes

and the unvision that fills them,
seeing nothing but vacuum beyond the blue.
only the desert never lies:
the bones beneath the brush.

•



the unnamed

I give up, great christ!,
I give in.
if you still want me, I am yours.
I have spent so many years
beating my way out of your church
of bones, only to find myself
again at your altar of blood.
I would turn this way and that,
fighting my way to an exit,
and, bloodied, succeed.
and then the door would open
only into your own cathedral.
now I grow tired,
unwilling to battle on;
if you still want me, take me,
hard master, or discard me,
or chastise me, or fill me.
it is all the same, I know,
I know.

(The illustration here was developed from acrylic paintings and technical pen drawings I had made as a teenager, in the 1970s. Apparently I already knew I was destined to make visionary/shamanic art and poetry even as a boy; apparently I have spent most of my adult life coming to terms with that, and undenying it.)

That Box of Rocks

A Spiral Dance essay

This morning it's all I can do to wake up after a heavy sleep. A sleep induced by chemical agency I'd rather avoid, but at least it was a refreshing sleep. And a hard process waking up. I'm never a quick awakener anymore, and even slower now. At some point, maybe a cup of tea and a good book later, maybe after a half-hour of hands-on meditation and healing, there's a switch that gets thrown in the back on the mind and suddenly I'm alert, aware, able to parse the day's needs. Till then, I am a slow evolving, a fish who just climbed out onto land for the first time, gasping, trying to learn to breathe. Till the spark inhabits the mind, I am a slow ember, a dark waving of treebranches in shadow, pointing towards the river hidden beyond. A walk to the river is no walk at all. It barely stirs the rushes. I am inarticulate. The neighbors wave and want to chat, and it's all I can do to wave back, smile, and keep strolling. Conversation this early in my day is a calamity. I never want to be social till I'm fully awake, fully aware. Even then, some days being social is a drain. As lonely and isolated as I feel some days, morning silence is never unfriendly. Ask me again in an hour, and I'm sure I'll be a cheerful companion. Till then, ignore my silence. Or better yet, leave it alone, and take your need for chatter with the waitress off to the diner, and leave me in peace.

I am immersed right now in writing words and music. It keeps me alive. Its demands keep me going. All else is not much fun, and if I let myself think about requirements and obligations demanded of me by the outside world, I get cranky and irritable. The disordered illogic of bureaucratic systems is enraging. It's not even a matter of putting up with necessity. It's that you're aware of how fragile and arbitrary it all is. It could all fall apart at any moment. Life itself is irrepressible. Those who decry the end of life are usually referring to their own way of life, not yours.

People, even people who should know better, try to sell you on the idea that if you had a better tool for making art, your art would improve. (Of course they're happy to sell you a better tool, to their profit.) It's not about the tools. Good tools do help make great art, it's true. But a great musician would make great music no matter which tools were available. A great musician could sit down, and be handed a box of rocks, and make music out of that. What makes a great musician, or artist, is the attitude of working with whatever is at hand: Let's see what we can make from this. Great artists I've known have an open-ended sense of wonder and exploration, very child-like in many ways, that allows them to see what's actually there, rather than what most people think is there. They do not pre-judge, they observe; and they have an experimental approach to both work and life. Life is a work of art, making art is a way of life; they're not separate, and both are experiments, trial and error till something good happens. Meanwhile, you learn as much as you can about what you're doing, about how you're living. Making art is an ecological practice: art, environment, life, all are intertwined.

Most people never can see past their own projections: what they think is there. They catalog and dismiss. They move on quickly to the next row, to catalog and dismiss that, too. They believe that a sense of accomplishment lies in how much, how quickly, one is able to catalog and dismiss. But wizards, and bards, and artists, see what's really there. They know that there's no end to learning, and many thing are so vast that in the end they will remain mysterious and unknown, even given a lifetime of study. They see what others do not see mostly because others are not looking. I've said this all before. The only people who listened were those who already understood the truth of it. My fellow wizards, bards, and artists.

Most people see only what they want to see, believe what they want to believe. There is a vast distance separating them from what is really there, and they cling to that gap with all their might. Most people believe that if they recite a cant a hundred times, it becomes true. They believe that about political policy, and they believe that about healing affirmations: if you say it's true, enough times, with enough force, it becomes true.

But the world is resistant. It has its own momentum. You can't turn a turnip into a forest by sheer force of will. Your will imposed on the world is your first, childish mistake. Unlike the musician who, presented with a box of rocks, makes some music from them, your stance is refuse to use the rocks, because they're impractical and unsuitable. The basic definition of ego is fear of change, because all change begins in the self. The ego clings to its own image of its changeless self, and is a master of denial. Don't pay attention to the facts, here's what's really true, says the ego. Political display is ego-display; that's not a new insight. National identity is bound up with ego and its fears of change. Confrontation with the Other is terrifying to most, because on some level they know it will require change. They reject the box of rocks because they're not homeland rocks, and they're not the right flag-borne color anyway.

Politics without artists, without naturalists with thirty years of field experience sitting by the river and observing its ecosystem, is hollow politics. It's incestuous and self-serving. More than forty years ago Rachel Carson disturbed the universe by writing her book Silent Spring, and taking to task what we were doing to the environment. She was roundly attacked by the vested political and chemical-company interests, but she was proved right. Her book led directly to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Look who is trying to dismantle that agency now, forty years after it was founded: the vested chemical-company interests, and the politicians they bought. For the sake of expediency and profit they want to go back to poisoning the natural world. The natural world, they want us to forget or ignore, is also the world we live in. For our own self-interest, we can't afford to shit where we sleep. We will pollute ourselves in our own wastes, unto death. This is not news. This is not a new insight. Why then must it be repeated as if it were news?

Because politics without a sense of the sacred is hollow and self-serving. Without a sense of social justice, in which social justice is part of the fabric of the ecosystem, there is no real justice. Without a sense of human equality with all other creatures we share the planet with, we get a sense of entitled superiority that sees nothing wrong with destroying the very systems that keep it alive, all in name of short-term goals. Politics with no long view is murderous and suicidal.

The world resists being controlled. If you think you're the master of the world, you're deluded. If you think you're even the master of your own small corner of the world, you've never understood true mastery. True mastery is husbandry. It's cajoling the world to be more like what it aspires to be, to evolve, to be better than it is, to find efficient solutions to its patterns. Wizards are ecologists at root, because all you're really doing is helping the world be what it most wants to be. Life is irrepressible, and wants to grow. Nobody wants to die, as inevitable as that might be. Everything wants to reach its full flowering, reaches its fulfillment, finds its purpose and meaning. Nothing makes the box of rocks happier than for a great musician to make music with it, or for a child to fantasize a castle wall and moat made from it. That wall wants to hold together, not fall. When you help it stay upright, and fulfill its purpose, you've made the world into its better self. All you do is help. Life is meant to be about service.

Life is meant to be about service, not about self-fulfillment. Actually, those are not contradictory, because few things are more fulfilling than a life of dedicated service. What you are in service to, well, that's where you have to figure out your own purpose in life. For myself, it's finally clear, after decades of distraction and being waylaid by people telling me what I should be doing, that my own life is meant to be in service of the art, music, and poetry that I make. Decades were spent trying to fit into the ideas and patterns and plans that others told me my life should be about. Now I now they were all wrong. Burn those old maps, they'll just lead you astray.

I have lost all my maps, again. I've had significant practice in losing my maps before. I've been through the dark night of the senses, then the dark night of the soul, when all the maps, and all contact with God, are taken away from you. In that outer darkness, echoing back, all you can hear are your own fearful limits. I have lost my mental maps more than once, this lifetime. Now, after the surgery, after the recovery, still recovering, beginning to prepare about moving forward towards the completion of the medical narrative of recovery, with new maps imposed on me about where I am expected to arrive so that the restoration of my life through another surgery and recovery can be made complete, I find myself angrily rejecting those maps again. I am exhausted with other peoples' ideas of where I'm supposed to be, what I'm supposed to do, who I'm supposed to become. I am being presented with constantly-changing narratives of expectations, told that I have to arrive on that shore by my own will and and under my power, told when I ask for help and a crew to man my boat that it isn't available. That I'm on my own, again, with no one to either count on or to help me arrive without blame.

If I've learned anything, it's that every time you survive something life-threatening, you have to redraw the maps. Or make new ones. I've learned, several times, so that it seems like it was all practice for what I'm dealing with right now, right here, that I have to constantly remake my own maps. And just as constantly be willing to let older maps blow off the bowsprit, into the wind. Parchment leaves in the wind, falling into the sea. I find myself once again mapless and uncertain of the territory. Everything is made new, and I don't know the lay of the land anymore. You bet that strikes a nerve. It also strikes a chord, ringing out of the very air: a celestial music, a ring of voices of angels, which, after all, sound a lot like the music you can make out of a box of rocks.

Angel, speak to me. You forbidding and blaring foghorn, you long night of nothing in the wind but cedar chatter, you long road of suffering and rebirth, you constant immolation and dying, you desert silence, speak to me. Speak to me of the ghats in Varanasi where the bodies of holy ancestors are burned, given to the wind. Speak to me of the dessicated ribs of Joshua Trees in the desert, which slipstream the wind around themselves. Speak to me of the quiet brown river curving under overhanging trees, wind riffling its surface under unsteady light and uncertain clouds. Speak to me, angel, of my own death and rebirth: not for the first time, either, but just the latest in a long series of unmapped reincarnations. I've died and come to life again, angel. This morning, my mind finally clear enough to be able to face the day, is just one more evolution of consciousness, reborn out of sleep into waking life. I find some kind of quiet exultation in the wind in the cedars, the annoyed bluejay shrieking from the pear tree's summit. Life will go on. Life will find a way.

Even when I die and am reborn again, which is inevitable, unavoidable, and neither to be feared nor unwelcomed, I see, with the bard's eye behind my own everyday gaze, that this is just part of the spiral pattern that is my greatest work of art so far, my life. Angel, I've finally learned that I'd settle for starvation and homelessness as long as I can make music, make art, make photographs. Nothing else matters as much, I don[t need much else. I've finally learned that it's more important than anything else I've ever done, to just give in and make art. It doesn't even matter how it gets received, or used. My life of service is to be in service to that which prompts me to make art. My life of service is to be in service to art. I'm a slow learner, it only took me my entire life, and this latest death and rebirth, to at last sort out my priorities and stop giving a damn what anyone else thinks about it. That was a tough one, angel. I've always had a hard time ignoring the outer shell of advice. Well-meant or not, it was useless all along. I see that now. I am at last seeing what's really there: that the most wonderful thing I can do with my life is burn myself up in the actinic blue fire of Creation, to spend all my life on living art and making life, and bring as much of the Creation into view as I can, which is the purpose of making art: to praise and reveal the Creation. All a poet can do is praise. That's all the purpose there is.

Since I died, and was reborn, I've started another new way of art, one that I've been meaning to investigate for a long time. But now, there's no time like the present, nearly dying has re-sorted my priorities, and there's point in waiting to do something you've always wanted to do, and are in fact meant to do. After my parents died, I took up teaching myself to draw with colored pencils: a very conscious choice of learning a completely new art medium, for the first time free of any need for, or possibility of, parental approval or rejection. For the first time, I was doing art that nobody could catalog and dismiss, that those family-born voices could no longer say was unworthy. It didn't even matter if I ever got good at drawing with colored pencils; that wasn't the point. Nor was it necessary to be like every other colored-pencil artist, and create photo-realistic drawings such as they teach you in the how-to books. I have no interest in being like everyone else; I'll skip the perfectionism this time around, thank you. And so, now, I've done it again: started another new artistic process that is brand new to me, that reveals a world never seen before, and reveals it in ways both imaginative and spiritual. Namely, I finally allowed myself to get into infrared photography. Now, with digital cameras, it's technically more approachable and easier than back in the film camera days; I was stopped back then by the difficulties of technical mastery. Now, in the past few weeks, with a new infrared photography system for my existing camera, I've found myself looking at the world anew, all over again with new eyes, as if for the first time, revealed in the first light of the first day of Creation.

And that's essential. With the loss of the old maps, I have to make new maps. Finally, I know that my new maps always have to be crayon drawings, finger-paintings, child-like renderings of the terrain as a bard, an artists, or a musician using sonar echo-location, would see it. My new maps, angel, must always be seen from the ground, not from the air. And they have to be paintings, not technical drawings. Great painters have always taught us to see the world in a new way, in new light. Great photographers have revealed the world as never seen by the unaided eye. Great musicians have opened our ears. Charles Ives once demanded of an audience for one of his difficult, dissonant new compositions: "Stand up and use your ears like a man!" That's great advice, angel with the voice of a foghorn or a bluejay. As long as there is surprise and discovery in this new life, this life whose purpose is at last known to be about nothing but making art, and like a wizard-poet, a wizard-artist, revealing the world the way it wants to be revealed, for its own purpose and joy, as long as there is joy and making, then I will have lived well. Any new maps I must remake will be good ones, even if as usual only temporary. I can always make more.

This morning, after a sunny dawn, thin gray clouds have covered the sky. But it's not an oncoming storm. It's the edge of possibility. Map it out, get it down. Finish your tea. Go make some art, sufficient to the day.

Two Stags Near the Shaman's Cave

Restless tonight, wanting to do something, made a colored pencil drawing from a dream and vision I keep having. Stags in my vision, antlers found on the lawn, deer passing through, the Horned One silent behind the midnight trees.



Wrote music all day, finished half of a secret waltz. It stormed all morning, so I didn't get a chance to take a long walk today. So, restless tonight. Didn't burn off enough energy. It's midnight, but I'll take a walk before bedtime anyway. Cicadas thrumming in the trees.



Something like a personal cave painting, from the walls of the cave of sleep, the plain of dreams. Cave where the shaman goes to paint the walls with sacred animals for the Hunt, to evoke their capture, to praise them, to record their lives and deaths, to thank them for their bounty.



Final state of the drawing. Colored pencils. Not striving for realism, but for archetype. This could be just a sketch, something I needed to make tonight, something that might become some more real painting at another time. Much more ink and pencils and paint to expend on this, later.


Two Stags Near the Shaman's Cave

I still feel a sense of urgency, there's a lot to do, and I'm fighting uphill to get it done. Mind full of visions and dreams, but not coping too well with the ordinary. Need to pay those bills tomorrow, should have done it yesterday.

•

And, naturally, walking at midnight, I encounter deer, running across the road, and into the trees by the river.

Light A Candle

Two drawings from the 1970s, in other words from my teens. Experiments with pen on paper. Lots of dark cross-hatching technique. The aesthetic of chiarascuro.

I found these again in a box of old paintings and drawings from my teens and twenties, the 1970s and 80s. Mostly bad stuff, but interesting to look back on, technically, and thematically. Both of these are early representations of life-long themes in my art: the candle in the darkness; the cave lit from within. The latter a visionary moment that dates back to much earlier in my life than I thought; the vision of the candle in the cave was something I wrote about later, in a longer poem. I had forgotten that there was an artistic precursor.

I had a pretty bad day today. Lots of emotion emerging from the trauma around the recent surgery. it was major, high-risk surgery, after all, so some feelings are bound to percolate up, sooner or later.

So this is to light a candle against that outer darkness. A little remembrance, a little solace.

Teaching Myself to Draw 8

A few days ago, I was back in the clinic for another IV drug therapy treatment. Those mornings spent with a needle in my arm that come every two months for now, those days after the IV I am useless for the rest of the day. It wears me out. I'm wiped out not only by sitting there with a needle in my arm for several hours, but also the psychological side of things; this was the same room where my Dad got his chemotherapy, after all.

This time, I angled my chair so I could see out the big picture windows. I could see the lone tree in the neighboring field, stark black on a perfectly flat white field. While I sat there getting my IV, I drew the tree twice. Once in pencil, and once as a stark minimal black-on-white calligraphy drawing, using my Japanese brush pen.

I noted while drawing each time that the tree was strongly asymmetrical from this vantage, with more feathered edges on the right, and heavier branches in the center and left. You're tempted to "correct" what you see, but the essence of seeing/drawing is to give what's there, not what you want to be there. There is no ugliness in imperfection, or in asymmetry. There is beauty, rather, in the way the tree balances itself in the air, despite any fractal irregularities.



Pencil drawing first, made with three different grades of hardness of pencil. Started with the softer pencil, drew in al the main trunks and branches, darkening and filling in as you go. The thinner branches at the ends of the main branches done with a harder pencil, pressing lightly, to suggest the feathering that happens at the ends of branches, smaller and thinner as they grow farther from the main trunk. The thinnest branches making a light halo of grey around the edges of the tree, feathering out to the pure white of the field in which the tree grows, the pure white of the drawing paper as white field. Drawn fast, looking all the while, taking time on the basic forms, then quickly filling in the details.



A calligraphic drawing, simple pure lines of black on a white field, details left out, just the main trunks and largest branches of the tree. Just something simple and suggestive. Drawn as an exercise in how much of the brush-tip meets the paper: starting thick and pressed down, gradually lifting the brush, lighter and lighter touch, thinner and thinner line, till it feathers out at the edge. Discipline of attempting to draw each branch as a single unbroken stroke, following thin and thick of the actual tree with the variance in the line. Drawn slowly, moving the brush on the page slow and steady, taking time to feel the pressure differences and how they change the line.



Just for fun, a superimposition of the two drawings together, pencil and ink overlaid, just to show how the observing eye sees the same basic shapes and forms, the same thick branches, even though there are differences in the details.

the Wild Hunt

Earlier I wrote about the mythic, archetypal pencil and brush drawings I had made during my last morning at the clinic, receiving the IV drug therapy, sitting for hours with a needle in my arm. What I didn't mention, when I wrote about making those drawings, was that I also had written a poem on the same themes, as accompaniment.

Increasingly I'm interested in multi-media. The pure two-dimensionality of visual art is more alive to me, lately, if it breaks out of the frame, to become three-dimensional, or if it's a triptych or series, or if it is haiga, poem-with-art, Complementarity interests me.

This poem was written after the making of those drawings, as a kind of reflection upon their themes. A reflection from another angle, in another medium. I find the resonance of art increases with more angles, more reflections, more directions. The more ways you look at something, the more rich and complete, and interesting it becomes.

A cinematic poem: a sequence of images, a non-linear narrative made up only of images. Reflections of the painted caves, the transformative mysteries deep in the dark underground. A prayer for those oldest gods and hunts known to us.

•



wild hunt hounds bay hunter's moon golden sky ring lambent
lone stag still water wading reflect evening sky light
hero effigy breath totem ancestor enter heart enter belly
altar stone hawk eye errand of rebirth
mark these walls with treasure of clay red uranic paint
hunter god barrow god ride tornadic sky howl
geese or hound those distant voices above bleak clouds
waning moon touches black hills liquid amber water blur
sorceror in limestone underhill spear rampant thrusts
make of us your shaman's dance sorceror's hunt wild and howled

Teaching Myself to Draw 7

Last week I went into the clinic for another IV drug therapy treatment for my chronic illness. I was anxious, and got little sleep the night before. Anxious because over the preceding two weeks I had developed a severe cough which had turned into walking pneumonia. I have a long history of bronchitis and walking pneumonia, and once you've had those you remain susceptible to them in future. I had also had a bad week personally, and was drained and tired. So I went in with some anxiety. The doctor gave, me some antibiotics, ordered a chest x-ray, and said I was okay to do the IV drug therapy. That had been in doubt, because the IV drug can aggravative pneumonia, and has the side effect of suppressing the immune system. But I got my treatment, got through it, and that evening I was able to play the Monster Jam gig in Madison. It was a long and tiring day, but I did better with it than I had anticipated.

While I was sitting there for several hours with a needle in my arm, this time out I brought my sketchbook/journal along, and some pencils. I was really tired from not sleeping the previous night, but too wound up to actually nap. I closed my eyes a few times, but I didn't sleep. Instead I made several drawings. On previous occasions I'd brought a novel to read, or spent most of my time talking to other patients receiving drug therapies. THis time out, for whatever reason, I was in the mood to draw.

For a few weeks now, I've been getting lots of images arising in my mind of iconic and shamanic beings. The kinds of images you see on the walls of the ancient caves of Lascaux and Trois Frères, caves in France full of the earliest known art made by humans. This suits me, as I am more interested in this kind of iconographic art than in being just another colored pencil artist who does photorealistic drawings. I am moving more towards iconic, mythic, and shamanic artwork as I continue to learn to draw with pencils. I've made several drawings from nature, which are indeed more realistic drawings, but mostly as exercises in technique, not as finished pieces. On this day of making drawings, I drew entirely on imagination, on the images I was seeing inside my own mind. The gods have been talking, and I've been listening.



This pair of drawings was made back to back. First I drew the stylized stag, then the drawing of The Wild Hunt. I am interested in exploring drawing the stag, the horned king of the forest, for its mythopoetic strength as an image. I've been feeling the presence a lot lately of The Horned One, Herne the Hunter, the Horned God, leader of The Wild Hunt that rides on Twelfth Night to chase the winter dark back to its home in the distant lands at the back of the north wind. The stag is a symbol of all that, and of the Horned One.

It came to me while making this drawing that the stag was standing knee deep in a quiet northern lake, reflected in the still water. So that's what I drew.

The drawing of the The Wild Hunt, which came next, was all about action, stylized shapes of hounds hunting across the turbid sky, under a fitful waxing moon. Again, not trying to be realistic here, but trying to evoke an archetype.


moon water haiku

This and the next drawing were warm-ups, calligraphic haiga made with a Japanese brush pen. Enso becomes moon becomes scene. Following the brush, wherever it leads.


moonrise

Finally, I made this stag and moon drawing, while still of thinking of iconic cave-painting style imagery. I drew it with the Japanese brush pen I usually carry around in my pants pocket. I was thinking of a sculpture made of driftwood in the shape of the wild stag of the hunt. This is the sort of sculpture, made of natural materials, that transforms one thing into another: truly transformational, liminal, shamanic, alchemical. Changing shapes.


waning moon
driftwood effigy god

Then I was moved to try something new. I had the time, after all, sitting there with a needle in my arm. So I pulled out the colored pencils, and added to the brush drawing.



I haven't experimented much with this type of drawing before, mixing ink and pencil drawings. This turns a corner for me conceptually, in terms of drawing technique and of subject matter.

Again, I am more drawn to iconic, shamanic imagery for making these kinds of drawing. I'm not really interested in making photorealistic drawings of dogs and children, or of anything else for that matter. I can always make an actual photograph, if I want to. So for drawings, right now anyway I am interested in drawing not only what I see—trees, the land, rocks—but what I see in my mind's eye—those archetypes and mythopoetic images I made here.

Abstract Realism in Photography 5: Lake Superior Shore

Photos from the north shore of Lake Superior, at Grand Marais, and at Temperance River State Park, Minnesota, August 2010. These are found photos, things seen when walking along the rock-strewn shore.

The north shore is a mix of glacial erratics and polished stones from when this was a very active volcanic area. There are few sandy beaches, although many of the rivers have small sandbars at their mouths; the beaches are mostly rocks ranging in size from gritty pebbles to fist-sized wave-polished rocks. Some of the stones were weathered to rounded and gouged forms by the glaciers, but on the beaches there is also wave-polishing happening; after all, as a very large inland sea, Lake Superior is large enough to have tides. Many north shore beaches display an incredible mix of color and shape.

The north shore of Superior along the Minnesota coastline, where you see it as a mostly straight line on the map, with terminus at Duluth, was once an active fault, uplifting the Sawtooth Mountains above the lakebed, and volcanoes everywhere. There's a lot of basalt, rhyolite, porphyry, and related rocks. The red and brown colors of many of the stones are from high iron content.



Driftwood, wave-weathered, cedar sticks and curls of aspen bark, litter the beach shingle. Abstract spirals made of natural materials. Most of the patterns and forms we find in art are also to be found in the natural world. The mind of making is the same.





Boulders and cliffs go right to the water's edge at the mouth of the Temperance River, which was named that by the early explorers because it is the only rivermouth on the Minnesota north shore that has no sandbar. The river flows past high cliffs, making cascades of waterfalls in stages down to the deep pools that open past the rocky beach right into the Lake.



On big rock outcrops at the water's edge, there are lots of intrusions into the basalt matrix: ribbons of white quartz, red rhyolite, black obsidian in spots. The red lines passing through the dark grey stone are like inset rivers, compete with pebbles making boulders in their beds.

I sat at one outcrop for an hour on a warm cloudy afternoon, and made a drawing of the red line passing through the grey, like a river.


Red Line (Temperance River State Park, MN, August 2010)

Left Out In the Rain

Let out in the rain one more time. Two meanings come to mind: left out in the rain, abandoned, to rust and decay into nothing; and, left out in the rain to be watered, to be allowed to fill up with nature's waters, then spill over the brim.

1.

Feeling aesthetically isolated, even alienated, is nothing new. "Alien" in the sense of Other, not literally an alien. Have always felt I've lived on that thin edge of insider/outsider, one foot in both worlds most of the time. I've been wondering lately about fitting in, aesthetically, artistically, and if it's really worth it. The usual doubts of practice, when Art is a Way. I've been wondering, underneath that, about the still unsolved lifelong dilemma I've had about receiving moderate to high critical acclaim as an artist yet being unable to turn that into any form of recognized success. Not that recognized forms of success are necessarily to be desired or sought out. Depending how you define success, of course. Still, it would be nice if people respected you a little for what you do best. And maybe paid you what it was worth.

A depressed economy, which tends to accentuate whatever forms of artistic or commercial narcissism are normally in play, is also a factor. I live for now in what is still one of the more economically depressed parts of the country. When the GM assembly plant in this county closed, it took a lot with it; a lot of people, and a lot of peripheral businesses. Most of that hasn't rebounded. The farms seem healthy, and the corn this summer is high and green. But people tend to view art as a luxury when they're worried about the rent; rightly or wrongly, even against all arguments about the social, personal and spiritual necessity of the arts, the bottom line is that poor people don't buy art. If they're aesthetically oriented, they instead make it for themselves. Folk art is genuine art, long before the big cities galleries ever "discovered" it. Folk music is whatever music people feel like making, at home, on the porch, in the living room, in the kitchen, wherever. It doesn't require a musical education to make good music. Musically I'm over-educated for my social environment, but when something needs to be explained about how a piece of music works, there's no one better.

What is the gateway? How can it open in both directions?

There is an element of chance. Lots of good artists miss their chances because they don't get noticed by anyone within the commercial arts machine—whether we label that the gallery scene, corporate patronage, o building up a group of regular private collectors. How do you define success? What do you define success as being?

I don't trust even my own feelings of envy, of sour grapes, when directed at the apparently successful careers of other artists. For me it's not a competition; although I know at least one artist who seems to find it necessary to be competitive with me, but I chalk that up to the usual artistic insecurities that we all are prey to. Maybe there's a reason I find myself in the land of artistic rejection. Even when you carefully tailor your submissions to a venue that you think is an ideal match, between the venue and your art, there's no guarantee. I have no doubt that some choices are political, and others matters of personal taste. Whoever wins a chapbook poetry contest, for example, is only slightly set aside from the pack of other applicants, many of whose submissions may have been of equal merit.

When one gets constantly rejected, though, a few choices seem to loom more prominently: 1. give up, go off and do your own thing, stop trying for even slight recognition, just ignore the whole rat-race; 2. keep applying, keep getting rejected, build up a tolerance for rejection, and learn to be comfortable with uncertainty; 3. work to become an insider, so that you have a better chance of being remembered against the background of all the other outsiders. The latter option seems to me to be too political, too manipulative; but maybe I am too honest, too diffident, too unassertive for my own good.

Obviously marketing is a factor. It's well-known that artistic success is not always determined by intrinsic quality but by who has the best marketing plan. I'm not a great self-marketer; I'm probably too diffident, too modest, too deferential. I tend to be a soft sell rather than a hard sell. It's not that I can't do a hard sell, but it does make me feel exhausted and demeaned. I'm no good in retail sales, that's well-established. I don't push hard enough, as I don't like being pushed.

That's the real truth, and maybe it's why I don't win the prize often: I hate being pushed, so I tend not to be pushy. And perhaps you do have to be pushy, competitive, and self-assertive. It's entirely possible that I've missed the boat on that one.

With no false modesty, many things I do artistically I do pretty well. I make some good art. I remember Kerouac once asked, before he became well-known, "Why can't they see that I'm good?" That's artistic self-confidence, although it can be eroded away by constant rejection; and Kerouac ended up being eroded down till it more or less destroyed him in the end. If you're good, and a sensitive soul—and being a sensitive soul was partly why Kerouac was good as a writer—the rat-race can be doubly hard on you.

Let us ruminate on two other factors: fear of failure; and, fear of success. When an artist has both of these in play, it can be paralyzing. Sometimes, perhaps it is better to go be a monk in the hills, and ignore the usual fray. Go do what you do, and find some other living while doing it.

Fear of failure is less crippling than fear of success. Failure after all is probable, even expected. Most artists fail, depending on how you define failure. It's an uphill struggle against all odds. There are few rewards along the way. Fear of failure makes some artists manic, and they drive themselves ever harder. That's how mediocre artists sometimes succeed when better artists don't: Work ethic. Obsessive self-marketing. Thomas Kinkade is not an artistic genius, just a painter with a gimmick supported by a major cottage industry; he succeeds financially even though most of his art is crap. It's not hard to be a better artist than Kinkade, but it's hard to put together and sustain the cottage industry.

Lots of artists self-sabotage rather than deal with the halo of demands that surround (financial) success. Fame, fortune, the fickleness of the audience, the tides of aesthetic fashion which can be more pernicious than anything else if you choose to be swayed by them. Sometimes success is just too much work, and the art itself suffers due to lack of attention. Lots of artists make dumb mistakes, or hesitate in just the wrong way, right at the cusp of becoming known. What are the rewards, after all? It can seem to be a burden rather than a reward.

Having an agent who helps you secure your next book contract might be more a marker of success than the number of fans who come see you at your opening, or on your book-signing and -reading tour. Forward momentum.

2.

I'm all wet. I'm just musing over the same questions every artist muses on, from time to time.

Most of this was brought forward to contemplate by encounters with an artist friend who seems to now view me as competition. Does that mean I'm getting better as an artist, for him to now feel insecure around me? It doesn't mean I'm getting more visible. He relishes telling me the dollar figure of his last major sale. He has a circle of existing collectors that don't mind paying all that. He's established, and has been selling his art for many years. And he's good, there's no doubt of that. I suppose it's that artistically he's moving into territory that I, artistically, have already colonized, and am good at. Hard not to make comparisons.

For my own part, I encouraged, and had some suggestions. His technical learning curve for new media is much steeper than mine for learning to draw; and I made at least one good drawing last week, which is turning a corner into his territory. But I can be encouraging because I don't feel competitive. Maybe that's my lack, here: I'm not competitive enough. Perhaps it's foolish of me, and I've always thought the work would be discovered on its own merit.

I don't feel in competition with my artist friend; or with any other artist, for that matter. I like collaboration, perhaps because I've played chamber music and jazz for decades, and like the mutual support of collaboration that arises in those media. My competitive artist friend has been drawing for decades, and is very good at it. I own none of his work although there have been a few pieces I would love to have owned. Though some of our mutual friends do own his work. (I wonder if that's happened because of some previously existing silent layer of competitive awareness? A subconscious steering clear? Not on my part. I never had the cash to afford one of his drawings, although he's outright gifted some of our mutual friends a drawing.)

I love learning how to draw. I've enjoyed the process of teaching myself to draw. I find most of the how-to pencil drawing books to be of limited use, because they mostly emphasize photorealistic drawing; reproduction of lighting effects, of subject matter, of content, as realistically as possible. While I understand that, in the how-to manuals, this is in the service of learning technique, I have no interest whatsoever in drawing technically photorealistically. I'm already a good photographer: if I want to make an image that seems photorealistic, I'll make a photo. What I want to draw is more purely about graphic arrangement, about interpretation, about mood captured in a subject, if you will about expression. I'm interested in what I've called abstract realism: forms and shapes and patterns that are purely graphic albeit only one step removed from the natural world.

I admit I can be artistically impatient.

I want to finish a drawing and move on. I want to do the next thing. I saw a documentary this year about an artist who obsessively recreated a celebrity image in minute detail in pencil and charcoal, spending a dozen years on one drawing. The end result was technically amazing, but emotionally sterile. Why reproduce a photo on the pixel level like this? Why not just present the photo? Twelve years? If I can't get a drawing close to what I want to do, in my sketchbook, in a couple of hours at most, I stop.

I resist obsession. I know that falling over that edge into obsessing about detail is dangerous and unrewarding territory, and I steer clear of that edge whenever I approach it. This isn't self-sabotage, it's self-rescue. I understand how artists can obsess on their work; I know that temptation. But that's exactly what it is: a temptation towards (technical) perfectionism that serves neither the art nor the artist. Perfectionism is for me no less than a vice, a dangerous terrain, a door that tempts madness.

As a recovering perfectionist, I prefer my art to have flaws in the way nature always has flaws. Clouds are not spheres. Trees never grow identically on all sides. The natural world is uneven, varied, and rather than the ideal conception of a rock or tree we only encounter actual rocks and trees that do not match the Platonic ideal. Platonic ideals are not useful to us as artists. One reason I so enjoy exploring fractal mathematics is that it can closely model the natural world as it is. Fractals are not Platonic ideals; they are non-Platonic, and non-Euclidean, and therefore more realistic.

So if I can't capture a moment, an object, a scene, a graphic image, in an imperfect drawing made relatively quickly, then I will resist endlessly reworking the drawing in an obsessive spiral of diminishing perfectionist returns. I will abandon the imperfect drawing as more realistic than apparent photorealism ever could be. The important thing in drawing is what details to leave out. You can never get it all in, so what matters is the telling detail. Similarly, I will abandon a poem that doesn't quite work, rather than obsessively revise it. A dozen years spent on one poem? That's insane.

Some artistic critics argue that this level of obsessive application to detail is what makes for great art—but that's usually a critical tautology, because the only examples of great art made by obsessive attention to detail are those presented to argue the point. In other words, presented after the fact of their existence. All this proves is that for this artist, the method of obsession produced great art. But one cannot generalize the art made by a few insane obsessives to claim that all great art is made by obsessives. Some great art is made by slapdash quick-working anti-obsessives.

But there's a paradox in play: the paradox of seeming spontaneity while extensive rehearsal has gone on behind the scenes. Kerouac is often cited for his method of "spontaneous composition," which did produce good results in his novels (I am re-reading The Dharma Bums right now, which I put near the top of the heap). But Kerouac was also a notorious sketch artist, who practiced his craft in daily journals, in letter-writing, in other forms of writing all along, so that when he sat down to write a novel his gears were already oiled and his mind was already full of sharp, descriptive detail. He prepared hard before he got to work. He practiced daily, and he had a daily practice.

I learned about mental practice when studying martial arts. Mental practice can make a huge difference. It has been studied and shown to be true, at least in Ki Aikido, that mental practice—reviewing the arts in one's mind, meditating quietly when one can, practicing ki awareness and sensitivity for example when driving—all make for better skills when one is back on the mat. Maybe you only get on the mat once a week. But you can practice the Ki Aikido principals daily, continuously, and when you get back on the mat in the dojo, your skill with the arts is as though you were on the mat more than that once per week. Don't take my word for it; there's a lot of anecdotal literature about this practice effect.

Mental practice applies to music, too. You run things over in your head, maybe drum along to music on the steering wheel as you're driving along, and when you next sit down with your instrument, your time is better, and so is your self-confidence.

I don't pick up the pencils and draw every day. I don't make photos every day; although I do almost every day. When I'm not "working" I make snapshots of people, and of flowers in my garden. Photographic sketches. What I do do every day is a daily practice of visualization: looking at things as though I were to photograph them, or draw them. The mental practice of composing against the edges of the imaginary frame. A daily awareness of the changing of the light. It's all about light, and how it changes. I often sit on my porch at dusk and watch the sky change colors towards evening, towards night. Some days I might mentally sketch, but don't do anything literally. I find it useful to build up that urge in some kind of internal reservoir until it tips over and floods out of its own accord, under its own pathways of energetic pressure release. Let it build up, store it away, till just the right moment. Then when it comes flooding out, it can be at its most powerful.

So that when you pick up the pencil or the camera again, you may have been left out in the rain again, but you're not as rusty as others might expect you to have become.

Teaching Myself to Draw 6

I was supposed to meet a friend for tea and conversation at the local Starbucks (of all places) this morning, just to hang out and catch up. Well, I got stood up. But it was a lovely morning, not a cloud in the sky, not humid, not too warm: a pleasant summer day. So I took my Earl Grey tea (I don't drink coffee, which is why Starbucks is not my usual hangout) and sat outside on the patio, at a table shaded by one of those big umbrellas, while I waited.

It was not a waste, and I wasn't upset about being stood up, because it was a pleasant getaway from home for an hour or so. I sipped my tea and wrote in my journal.

And I made a couple of drawings, and worked on a couple of poems.

This ash tree was the best drawing of the morning. Made my with my Japanese brush pen, it's a depiction of the ash tree across the parking lot from where I was sitting. The long fronds of the leaves were blowing gently in the breeze, making patterns of pale green over the dark shade of the tree's branches, against the pale cloudless sky.

This is a pretty good drawing, I think. It captures the subtle movement of the breeze in the leaves. It seemed proper to sketch those leaves as pointillistic dots, following the curves and lines they made while moving in the wind. I also think the relative thicknesses and forms of the branches came out rather well. I'm learning to control the thick and thin strokes of the brush: the main trunk was drawn in one stroke, from top to bottom, across the length of the page.

So I'm still teaching myself to draw. I'm liking the results more, now, when I attempt to depict something natural and real, rather than an abstract drawing or brush-calligraphy piece out of my imagination.

•

Here's my usual enso warm-up drawing. I've made it a habit, when starting out a brush-drawing session, to warm up, or loosen up, by filling a sketchbook page with enso. Sometimes something emerges from that, most of the time it's just a sktech page. This session I started out with a bunch of enso, as usual, and it quickly turned into a set of raindrop circles on the still water of a pond. The still moment when the rain has only just started, the drops just beginning to fall. That smell of fresh rain in the air.

Mountain Dream Drawing

In my dreams last night, the vivid last dream before waking, I am preparing to take off for the mountains; it’ll be cold, and I’ll be camping; my truck is all packed, I'm just trying to get away; people delay me with chores and chat, and slow down my progress; I take a wrong turn at the exit ramp for the highway into the mountains; so I pull off where I can get turned around, get gas and get going; I have a good chat with a park ranger overseer at the station who’s an old woman, practical and down to earth; eventually I find a gas station and get back on the two-lane that goes up the grade to the high peaks, up over a curving bridge and onto the climbing road.



I say I'm going to the Tetons, in my dream, but the mountains I'm going to are parked much higher up, like in the Colorado Front Range, towards Rocky Mountain National Park, a patch of white-capped jagged peaks at the top of a spine of mountain ranges.



I've had recurring dreams of being in the mountains; of going up, and coming down; of camping, hiking, traveling, driving. A recurring dream of being in a small city in a valley at the base of some very high mountains, then going up through a long valley which gets steeper and steeper till I arrive at a cirque valley hanging above the world; you can stand at the mouth of the valley and see forever, the air very thin and cold and bracing. When I was studying geology in the Tetons, age 18, we climbed up to one of the high cirque valleys, at the top of which was an active glacier, and looking east across Jackson Hole, and on into the Gros Ventre range, you really did feel like you could see forever. Maybe these mountains are the high mountains of my dreams, that I’ve been to in more than one dream, over the years, very high up, very isolated, exquisitely beautiful.

RiverFence

Land art sculpture made of found driftwood, on site. One curved piece at the base of the fence, evoking or representing a river.

Thinking to myself at the time, while hunting for driftwood to make into other art, later: If I lived here, in this region, my art would become even more shamanic, just because of the power of the place, the light here, and the materials to be found and used. Probably I'd just scare even more art-viewers than I do already; although I suppose one might argue that California is inherently more open to my kind of shamanic art than is the Midwest, still one doesn't make such assumptions lightly.

Later in the evening, sitting before a warming fire in the fireplace at the cottage, I sit down to draw and write. Using the new Japanese calligraphy brush pens that I acquired earlier in San Francisco, I make a drawing of the land art sculpture I made earlier in the day. And I draw from memory and imagination a stand of bamboo. I feel like this bamboo drawing shows that I've made progress with this art, as it is both realistic yet still graphic and symbolic.



bamboo cane still
clacking in dusk wind—
raven, where are you?

The drive to make art reawakening these past few days. Hunting for driftwood. Talking about art late into the night. Tonight, feeling the need for a greater silence, to be able to hear the voices of inspiration. A good result of this vacation roadtrip, during which I have made many new photographs that I feel are among the best I've made so far. A return to the road, soon, after these vacation respite stops in beautiful places, staying with friends.

The day before, wandering around the Mendocino Botanical Gardens, once again being followed by ravens. Walking out to the coastal point, past tall stands of eucalyptus and dense groves of shore pine, mushrooms sprouting everywhere after the heavy winter, red rhododendron blooming thick under the tall trees. Raven, following along, calling to me from the treeline.

•

Felt the need to Make things tonight. So as we sat talking, I wove a dreamcatcher medicine shield, and gave it to my artist friend. Later, sitting by the fire, listening to music, I wove two more before slowing down for the night. The fireplace suits my mood tonight: reflective, warming. So, today I've woven three dreamcatchers, made a few drawings, numerous photos, and a work of land art sculpture. That's quite a lot for one day.

I guess Mendocino County has inspired me. What else is this sudden overflow, this rush of creativity? I haven't Made much for a few months. Perhaps this turns a corner into restoring myself to where I was before last autumn's traumas and illnesses. Certainly I feel refreshed, now, on this trip—so that purpose of this vacation has been achieved. Certainly I've made many new photos on this trip so far: and as on the previous Western roadtrip, I feel like some are among the best I've ever made. It's good to feel as if one is getting better and better at making one's art, evolving, improving. Stasis is death; movement is life. (The fire pops loudly at just this moment.)

A return to life. Energy available to make art means abundant energy of life. A surge of intense art-making, if only for today, many things tripping out all at once—that's not new. It often goes in waves, in surges, in pulses and phases. Not every day. What feels new is the return to life, to be able to do this again, after a long time feeling dead and tired. So it feels good to have had a day of making lots of art—it feels good just to make art, to have made art all day. Restless hands given their freedom to whatever they do, that is Making. Being with artists this week who understand art-making, I felt no need to explain myself, or justify myself, as I made land art there on the beach; felt no need even to comment on what I was doing, nor to conceal; I did not need privacy or solitude, nor was distraction possible. That felt new to me, that lack of self-consciousness during the actual process itself of Making even though I was not alone. I felt utterly clear, utterly in the moment, completely accepting and open, completely unselfconscious. Recalling the moment, what I really enjoyed was forgetting myself—as usual, the materials told me what to do—looking and finding the right pieces and lengths and shapes of driftwood to assemble was natural and intuitive. Just being in the moment, making a piece. Nothing special. Responding to the energy of the place, making art from what was to be found lying close to hand. The hands, the soma, wiser than the mind, more sure and certain than the verbal analytical intellect, more responsive to the energy of place than ever words could be.

And that is why I am an artist, and not a poet. My default response is not verbal or word-oriented, it is somatic; what poems I do write try to convey and container that somatic response. Words just couldn't do the day justice, then and there, no matter how artificed they were.

These Few Things I Know to Be True

They say, whoever "they" are, that it's not wise in these contentious days to talk about either politics or religion, or too open about one's position on either. "They" say it only incites the fringe element to foam at mouth, even more than usual, and to target one for harassment, vilification, mockery, or worse. "They" urge us to be still, sit on our hands, don't make a noise, don't ruffle anyone's feathers, don't stand out, and don't state too strongly one's opinions lest they make one into a target.

Well, frak that.

This is what I want to write about today, so I'm going to write about it.



When I was 13, I very consciously and deliberately set out in search of what I framed, at the time, the "oldest religion" or "original religion." Being raised Lutheran, in a particularly rational and intellectual version of that faith, I had already been exposed at that age to beliefs and ideas that made no sense to me. I had already experienced several visionary and mystical encounters with Something beyond myself, beyond the everyday, and beyond anything my church ever talked about. Miracles and mysteries were something that had happened to Those People, from the Biblical stories, way Back Then, and couldn't happen now; or weren't supposed to.

It's always strange when a religion based on miracles in the past rejects them in the present moment, which contemporary rational Lutheranism tends to do. I suppose if I had been raised Catholic there might have been more of a framework for understanding my visions, more of an acceptance of them, and an ability to more strongly believe in miracles and mysteries; but if I had been raised Catholic, I probably would have been expected to enter the priesthood, which would have raised severe problems of a different nature. I would have run headlong into problems submitting my will to Church authority, and i would have had a severe problem with my sexual orientation. I am not celibate, and never want to be. I know at least three gay men who attended Catholic seminary, for at least a few years, before realizing it juts wasn't going to work out; every one of those men is well-adjusted and happy, and each of them is a profoundly spiritual individual with an active prayer life. I respect them very much.

When I was 13, I was introduced in Civics classes at my junior high school to comparative religion. We did units on the world's living religions, and we also studied the "dead" religions of ancient Greece and Rome. These are the foundation of much of Western culture and its values, so it was natural to cover them in Civics. I wonder if that's the way they're taught anymore. I remember I presented a talk before the class on the Roman Saturnalia, and its connection to later-formulated Christian festivals; it was my first understanding of religious syncretism, in which a major religion adopts the local customs in order to take them under its mantle, and co-opt them for its own purposes. (Haitian Voudoun, for example, is a syncretism of missionary Catholic Christianity and the West African tribal religions brought over by the slaves taken from their homes and sold into slavery in the New World. Several other of the Caribbean and South American "creole" religions have similar historical origins.)

When I was 13, I read Huston Smith's classic and irreplaceable overview of world belief systems, The Religions of Man. I also read a wonderful anthology titled The Choice Is Always Ours, which remains an important if little-known anthology of the universal human search for meaning and spirit. The anthology features thematically-organized excerpts from several hundred wisdom thinkers, ranging from psychology, to poetry, to scriptures from every mystical tradition, to quotes from religious teachers. The overall theme of the anthology was that there are many tributaries to the one river that is the human quest for wholeness, for oneness, for sacredness; yet all these tributaries truly lead to one ocean, the same ocean, the waters of our birth and life. The anthology was the first time I ever encountered Meister Eckhart's sayings, and Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry, and Carl Jung's psychological writings. Each of these encounters led to eventual thorough readings and re-readings of their collected works. The anthology opened many doors in my thinking; I can truly say that it changed my life, and continues to influence my perception of and thoughts about spirituality in general.

When I was 13, having read and absorbed The Choice Is Always Ours and The Religions of Man, two books that started me down a path of reading comparative religion and mysticism that I've never ceased pursuing, I began to sense, somehow, that all of the world's religious traditions, in their apparently irreconcilable diversity, also spoke to one single human quest for truth and Oneness with the Divine. By whatever name we call the gods, or god, by whatever "masks of god" we known them, there is something unitary and singular at the heart of it all.

So many wars have been fought over religious disagreements, which people are willing to die for, yet at the heart of every religion is the simply human encounter with mysticism, with revelation, with Mystery, with the Divine One. At the heart of each of the great religions there is a mystical core, an experience of Oneness, that is something that's available to every human being who has ever been born. It is our birthright as a species. All the rest is local detail.

So, when I was 13, I consciously and deliberately set out to discover the "oldest religion," the one that pre-dated all the existing ones, that was the oldest known human encounter with Mystery, and its unfolding. I set myself on a quest for the oldest truths that underlay all the more recent truths that everyone took for granted as eternal. Well, I didn't take them for granted, I wanted to look underneath and behind. In the church my family went to every Sunday, I was already looking for the man behind the curtain. There were doctrines, I had already figured out, that were not directly from revelation of the encounter with Mystery, but were human interpretations—and humans were prone to error, to hubris, to using religion for political ends, and worse. I had already seen all of this and understood it; although I would not have been able to formulate it the way I can now, years later.

I had already sensed that most religious rituals were habitual rather than inspired. That they were hollow if they were not heartfelt. That many took comfort from the ritual itself, and that the content of the ritual didn't really matter. I already knew that figures in authority were not to be trusted or depended upon—because I had learned from having been bullied that those in authority were often clueless or tacitly complicit.

What I later came to realize was that I was seeking the spiritual technology that is our human birthright, that is as old as our species, through which we have always been able to communicate with the non-physical planes of existence. I came to realize that I was seeking out those practices that underlie all religious practices: those means of connecting with the Divine, in whatever form It takes, or we conceptualize It as. The essentials of worship and dialogue. The root forms and the original experiences. Those things that probably had made us human, to begin with, and which were older than civilization. Those spiritual practices that are so old, so central, that perhaps they define us as human.

So I began to read in all the world's religions. I began to read everyone's scriptures and interpretations—and I do mean everyone. I've always been a fast reader, and I dug in deep. I read anthropology, folklore, ethnomusicology—which I majored in, later, in graduate school. I read psychology, theology, philosophy. I was a teenager in the 1970s, which was the beginning of the so-called New Age, and the personal development movements; it was the flowering of spiritual experimentation in the West, following the release of formerly unknown mystical texts from both East and West into the mainstream. So I read all of that, too. (In my library there are a lot of spirituality and psychology paperbacks from the 60s and 70s; many of these books seem to be relatively unknown these days, which is a loss in my opinion. Many of these books, I freely admit, molded and shaped my personal spirituality, and gave me the tools to understand and explain my own visionary experiences, and personal and idiosyncratic spiritual exercises.)

I found clues everywhere. I found a sense of how personal creativity is linked to divine Creation, from books like Rollo May's The Courage to Create and Matthew Fox's Original Blessing. I found some clues towards uncovering a core spiritual technology from Zen Buddhism, from the contemporary neo-pagan religions such as Wicca, from the Native American peoples of North America. (I know Turtle Island to be my true home, where I am rooted, if anywhere, even though I was also raised in Hindu and Buddhist India.)

Eventually those clues started to weave together into threads, and the threads began to weave themselves together into a tapestry—a bit frayed at the edges, at times, but nonetheless containing patterns that were consistent and revelatory.

I continued to have visionary and mystical experiences, from which I received guidance and inspiration. I have continued to do so. The earliest ones I can remember, I was probably 5 years old, when my family was still living in southern India. I can't remember any period of my life when some sort of visionary experience or altered state of consciousness has not been available to me, when I needed it. And there have been periods when the visions were taking over my life, and throwing me off-balance to the point where coping with "ordinary" reality was extremely challenging.

It's really funny if you think about it, and I doubt that the phone company cares that you forgot to pay your monthly bill because you were off somewhere having a vision! The biggest problem that I have sometimes had to cope with—and I am not at all alone in this—is being a mystic without a monastery: that is, having to cope with everyday life while not being divorced from it, not being off in a cloister somewhere where your needs are taken care of, where you have all the time you need to have visions and to engage in contemplative prayer. It's really funny, too, that all my life I've been given these visions, when there are probably monks off in a Carthusian monastery somewhere who have been praying all their long lives for something that comes so easily to me. Believe me, I don't take that for granted. I find it really funny, and I also am grateful for it, and humbled by it. There's a saying: "God is an iron." An iron is someone who commits irony. The Divine is nothing if not ironic and paradoxical, most of the time. Half of the challenge of growing up, spiritually, is figuring out that the gods want to laugh with us, not at us.

My experience and my research began to guide me to what I'd been looking for all along: shamanism.


Shaman's Dance

Within a few years of beginning my quest for the original religion, I came across shamanism, which comparative religion and mythology scholar Mircea Eliade, in his seminal book Shamanism, labeled as "archaic techniques of ecstasy." By now no doubt almost everyone has heard of shamanism; and, possibly, some who have bothered to read this far into this essay have taken an experiential workshop in shamanic practices. But in the 1970s and 1980s, hardly anyone knew of shamanism but scholars and anthropologists; shamanism had not yet gone mainstream. It was not a subject generally well-known or understood; I sometimes feel that it remains that way.

Shamanism is a form of spiritual technology as old as humanity—at least 40,000 years old, based on the evidence of the shamanic art left to us in cave paintings, pictographs, burial sites, and other surviving archaeological materials. Shamanism is practices of healing, of knowledge-seeking, of community-binding, that interact with the spirits all around us, and the Divine, to bring that knowledge and healing into everyday life.

All about the same time, around my twentieth year, I ran across lots of material on shamanism. I discovered books by Joan Halifax, Michael Harner, and several others: books that were moving at that moment from the purely academic shelves and onto the popular shelves. A lot work and wisdom has come into print on shamanism since then, and the shelf has grown from three or four key books, which remain key books, to several shelves of books ranging in quality and usefulness from beginner introductions all the way up to advanced healing work. None of us discovered this work alone; it was in the air, and a lot of people came to it at the same time. I make no claims for being a prodigy of quest, when it was more a matter of my personal needs being met by the world, when many in the world were searching for the same things.

Since there is now so much available to read on shamanism—most of it following on the heels of the contributions of those like Eliade, Harner, and Halifax, and often simply recycling their findings—I won't give a list of books here. Such lists are easy to find, nowadays.

Instead, what I'll say is that the shamanic worldview, which is remarkable and universally similar no matter where or when it comes from, is one that I now live by on a daily basis. It's my monastery, if you will. The shamanic worldview is the framework which gave me understanding of myself, my visionary experiences, and both my needs and my purpose in life. I interact with those other realities every day; usually very quietly and simply, with no drama or fanfare or announcement. Nothing is more ordinary.

My attitude about spiritual technology is that of an engineer of energetic anatomy and energetic interaction. My mindset is not mechanistic, however, but very organic, intuitive, and adaptive.

The point is: Shamanism is personal, and experiential. It is even experimental, in the scientific or engineering sense of the word: you try something, and if it works, you develop on it. You learn from experience, and any wisdom you accumulate is based more on experience than on any other mode of learning.

One universal truth that all the mystics tell us is that: Everything is always changing all the time. Nothing remains static, not even the dead. And everything that is, is alive. Everything. The Universe is a living being, and all its parts are alive. When you can feel that, know that, sense that, every day, in your bones as well as in your mind, you'll have some idea of what I'm talking about.

And since everything is alive, it all deserves our respect, our love, and our compassion. We are given amazing gifts of grace, once we tune into this. And there is no greater gift than to give it all back, thereby increasing the Universe's own constantly creative growth and change.


Shaman, from Spiral Dance

Thus my own search for the original religion—although "religion" is no longer the applicable term—was satisfied. This is a search I still pursue, still experience and practice, and see no end to the roads it has led me to discover. I continue to research, learn, and have experiences. I can say this for experience: given enough practice, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. I don't mean that it becomes bland or mundane. Rather, it become something you just deal with, daily, without making it into some big deal with a lot of drama or bells and whistles around it. You just live your life, as before, while being simultaneously aware of those other planes of existence going on around you at the same time. You pay attention to messages that come from those other planes, no matter what form they take—the ability to recognize those messages is something only experience can teach you—and you work with what you're given, and given to do, with what lands on your plate every day, and a little bit more. It's a life that's full of paradox and contradiction, yet those contradictions and paradoxes are held in dynamic balance by Mystery, on some higher plane of order and meaning. You don't always get to know what's going on, and you don't always get to know the end of every story you're a part of, however temporarily. You learn to embrace that. After all, Unknowing can be as great a power in your life as knowing.

Pen Drawings from Old Journals

Some random pen drawings, from my old journals. These drawings are basically just doodles, but still fun to look at. I don't consider them finished Art.

I used to do detailed line-drawings using Rapidograph technical pens. Pens that I first learned to use as a freshman student in geology, where we were expected to draw up our projects with precise, technical, draftsman-level skill; I spent hours on my project drawings, and I was the only student in the class who got a 100 percent grade for my project drawings. I used to make these kinds of drawings mostly on bristol board, which was firm enough and smooth enough to take the ink well without running, or watercolor board, for the same reasons. This ghostlike figure is the title page of one of those old spiral notebooks, a decoration for an English class notebook on creative writing.



This technical-pen style grew out of being able to draw extremely fine lines with the pen, combined with an interest in a pencil-and-paper math game called Sprouts, invented by one of those mid-century math-game geniuses I admired at that time, John H. Conway, who also invented the cellular-automata game Life. Believe it or not, I discovered Conway's games through reading science fiction novels such as Piers Anthony's Macroscope, then again in Martin Gardner's monthly columns in Scientific American. I liked the idea of using the Sprouts connectivity rules to control drawing style, and using the technical pens led my to explore this style throughout my college years.

The other drawing as done in my regular journal, half a page, using the Shaeffer fine-nib calligraphy cartridge pens I favored for many years, and still do. I have a backstock of pens and ink cartridges in my art-supplies chest of drawers next to the art desk.



This is just a moody journal drawing of the full moon and a planet close by in the night sky, done entirely in cross-hatch style. I was influenced to work with cross-hatching style by the great SF magazine illustrator Jack Gaughan, who was one of my favorite artists for several years at that time in my life. Looking up at the technical pen drawing, I can see some Gaughan influence in that, as well. It reminds me of one of his more abstract covers for Ace Books.

Teaching Myself to Draw 5

At Humbug Mountain, the mist clearing at sunset, the fogbank staying offshore till morning, the moon rose through the pines and cedars on the ridges, shining over the mountain's shoulder. I tried to draw it in the morning.



Broad strokes with a brush pen. An enso standing in as the moon's mirror. The dense, overlapping layers of trees.

Cleaning out the old house and moving to my new home, last spring, I discovered two boxes of my old artwork that my mother had saved. She saved a lot of my creative work, and I never knew. I'm grateful. I can see in this old art the seeds of some subjects I still pursue. I worked for some time in acrylic. It's interesting to me, now that i am teaching myself to draw, and expanding my media in the process, to realize that I was a better artist than I ever gave myself credit for. At that time, I had passion but not training, interest but no self-confidence. I can see that I was already pursuing visionary art, which would eventually lead me to making my visions visible to other people by re-creating them in Photoshop and other digital media. I was also pursuing space art, illustrating out of my imagination those things we might someday see from other worlds, other solar systems. I remember painting this acrylic now, although I had forgotten it in the intervening years, and only discovered in one of my mother's boxes of saved art. It's of a moonrise over a glacier on a distant, cold world; perhaps the glacier is the world's frozen atmosphere, and the black of space is visible from the ground. I used only black and silver paints.



Moonrise is an eternally fascinating theme. I'm sure I'll return to it, again and again.

Teaching Myself to Draw 4

Yesterday I went up to Jenner, CA, where the Russian River flows into the Pacific Ocean. This is well-known as a resort and vacation area. At Goat Rock Beach State Park, just south of the River mouth, there is an archway in a huge outcropping, out to sea some several hundred yards. I have photographed this location several times over the years, in different lights, different weather conditions, and at different times of day and year.



The strand per se was crowded with people, although no one goes very far into the water here, as there are dangerous and unpredictable riptides and undertows. (I discovered later that someone had drowned here the day before I was there.)



I took several photos of the water, the receding waves, the folded and faulted metamorphic geology, and driftwood: all similar, twisted, fractal forms.

On the way here, we stopped in Novato at an arts and crafts supply store, and I bought myself several very nice, very expensive Prismacolor pencils. I have been teaching myself to draw with cheap, ordinary colored pencils. I was told early on that it was a good idea to start with the poorer-quality materials, and learn my craft using those; that way, when I moved up to better materials, I would find them much easier to work with. I found this to be true almost immediately. The new pencils were smooth and sensuous, almost silky on the page, and extremely easy to draw and shade with. After taking lots of photos, and some video, I sat on an outcrop above the waterline and drew plein aire for awhile. The following drawing is from life:



This uses only two colors, blue and silver. It's pretty good, if sketchy. I feel like I have a long way to go, still, but I am able to convert seen forms into drawings a little more smoothly each time I sit down to draw now. I am going to try drawing this scene again later, using the photos as reference, for comparison. This is a loose sketch.

Today, I was sitting in a café on Mission St. in downtown San Francisco, sitting in the warm sunlight, waiting to meet up with a friend for conversation and snacks. I have found the archways in the islands along the Pacific Coast fascinating since I first encountered them, years ago. I keep taking new photographs of them, every time I go by. It's a topic that deeply interests me: what new worlds can be seen through these doors and windows into other worlds, into other light?



So it's no surprise that I drew the archway again this noon. This time, though, the drawing is in my straight-edged style, and drawn more from memory than from reference. It's interesting to compare the two drawings. The first is mostly realistic, while the second is abstracted from nature. It might be interesting to go a few more times through the abstraction process, till what's left on the page is lines of energy rather than a pictorial representation. This is of course one technique that the Cubists and other abstract artists started to explore almost a century ago, that led to more and more abstraction.

I am not interested in Abstract Expressionism, frankly; I am interested for now is continuing to learn to draw and sketch from nature more or less representationally. But neither am I interested in photorealistic depiction, or such draftsmanship precision that would take me days to execute. I enjoy drawing quickly, even if nothing Fine Art emerges from the process; I like the process of seeing what works, in the moment. And if a drawing fails, rather than trying to revise it towards perfection, far better to start over on a new drawing.

Teaching Myself to Draw 3

I was up at a lakeside retreat center on Green Lake, in Wisconsin, a couple of weekends ago, for two nights and days of music rehearsals and activities. In between the rehearsal duties and the social activities surrounding them, I had opportunity to make two or three more colored pencil drawings in my little sketchbook. The most successful, complete drawing, to my mind, was this one I made that was inspired by the recent lunar eclipse:



This was made from memory and observations I made while watching and photographing the eclipse itself, several days prior to making the drawing. (I'm interested in working now with images from memory and observation as well as from imagination and exploration.) I worked a lot with layers of color, in subtle shadings with thin layers of burnish, to get the tones in the moon itself. There's purple and green in the darker areas, although you might not realize it at first glance.

The night sky (the drawing's field, or background) was done with a technique I've been using since I began teaching myself to draw. It's a technique I feel a real affinity for, and I sense that it could carry my interest a long way before it loses its excitement. This technique uses a ruler-edge to constrain the pencil strokes to being all-parallel, all-linear, and/or to run up against a hard edge and no further. I have been experimenting with saturated graphic images in solid shapes, too, and filling them in with parallel strokes. Sometimes you use different pressure to get different thickness or saturation. Softer edges are really made with different pressures but the same stroke. Here's another drawing I made that same weekend that explores this:



My favorite part of this drawing (a brown saguaro skeleton at sunset, a more realistic image than you might think, if you've ever been to the Sonoran Desert) is that I made the cactus overlap the sun, and that I used two different angles for the strokes. This appeals to my sense of graphic design and strong composition.

These experiments with strict line-direction in pencil drawing, often using a ruler to constrain the straightness of the stroke, lead me back to the Graphic Pen filter tool in Adobe Photoshop. It's a filter that allows you to determine stroke length, darkness vs. lightness density, and stroke direction. By changing the filter's parameters you can get several different kinds of sketch effects. This can be useful for doing a pre-sketch as well as for making a final piece. You can see what an image might look like when using constrained uni-directional strokes.

For example, I made a photo of sunrise over the frozen white tundra of Green Lake itself, with the long shadows of trees in the foreground. The heavy winter snows this year have frequently presented landscapes that were purely black-and-white, all natural color desaturated and subdued; I have made several photos this winter that might as well be calligraphy or drawings. The sunrise through the trees was an image I wanted to draw as soon as I saw it: the stark black lines and angles, the white snow field, sun-flare beyond the trees all had me visualizing a completed drawing. I made some photos, therefore, that were meant to be references for drawing and sketching. Here's one, with the graphic pen filter tool used to sketch out the basic idea:



One of the advantages of Photoshop is its flexibility: there are usually several paths towards any given artistic goal. There are several paths for converting photos into drawings, for example. Often, this allows the artist to emerge, because your way of achieving a result might be unique. Photoshop is a flexible enough tool that many worlds of results are possible, and that means there's room for individual artistic exploration. Photoshop, therefore, is a drawing and painting tool like my colored pencils. It just operates entirely in the digital realm. (Until you print your result, that is.) I taught myself to make several kinds of drawing looks in Photoshop long before I began this colored pencil experiment.

For example, here's a sepia pen-and-ink look that I wrote a custom Photoshop filter to create. It's an effect that works particularly well with skin-tones and water and stone textures. This is one of my own favorite images using this technique:



After the retreat weekend, on the drive home from Green Lake, I took some time to stop and make photographs at Devil's Lake State Park, one of my favorite and most-often-visited places in Wisconsin. The air was thick with winter fog and the sky was as white as the snow.



I trudged through the heavy snow up to the base of East Bluff, where I have often climbed both trails and off-trail boulder-fields. The trails were too icy to climb very far, the rocks slick and snow-covered, so I mostly wandered at the edge of the bluff, and into the trees there. I made a photo of a lone pine tree against the white sky above a field of boulders the size of houses. Here's that image with the graphic pen effect in use—another image I want to sketch later on with pencils:



Now that I have begun learning to actually physically draw with colored pencils, rather than create a drawing from a photo in Photoshop using effects, I find that I appreciate all the more the time it takes to make a drawing; the tactile nature of the process, the touch-contact with the paper, the pencil, the ink-filled brush; the slower process that allows one time to sit back and look it over, to think about what to do next, to notice that this corner needs something more. I like how the drawing process slows you down and brings an image in the mind's eye into gradual focus. I also still like the speed of photography, and I have always practiced a slower-moving style of photography than many, in which I look at what I want to photograph for a long time before I make the image. Anything that slows you down makes the artistic process more contemplative. You might be looking at the outside world, but you are also looking within, and listening to both those silences and the inner voices that whisper inside them.

Photoshop has served me very well artistically and professionally for many years. It initially freed me up to be able to make some kinds of images I saw in my mind's eye that I had not the skills to paint or draw. Now that I'm learning to draw, I realize again that the tools you acquire do not supplant each other, they complement each other. They fill in the gaps. There are things I am learning to do with pencils that create satisfying textures that the digital domain cannot. Perhaps these tools of different realms will merge into a piece made in Photoshop that I then draw over with colored pencils. I am interested in, but not yet ready to attempt, a merging of these tools, to see how they can work together in collaboration and mutual support.