Gratitudes 2016

Gratitudes 2016

Every year I write Gratitudes instead of New Year's Resolution. This has been my practice for a number of years. I am going to start working on that. After the past actually fairly challenging year, and looking forward to having to redo all the civil rights and social justice progress we've made over the past fifty years, I'm honestly not sure where to start. I usually start small.

To be clear, I'm announcing intent, not completion. I will have to start somewhere, And I will start where and when I can.

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I am struggling a bit with Gratitudes this morning. I am also feeling somewhat emotionally fragile this morning, after having felt more resilient these past few days.

Some of this, no doubt, is that now that the Festival of Being Grateful at the Feast has been accomplished, and it was a good one, now we must face the prospect of continuing to be grateful when not at a feast. But that's when it counts even more. Anyone can be grateful at the feast; gratitude goes deeper when there's apparently less to be grateful for.

Some of this, also, is that one has had a few days of joy and celebration in each others' company, and is very grateful for that, and now one must turn to face the unsolved problems and unaddressed fears that still hover in the corners of the room, that will not go away, because the world has become a Scarier Place overnight. One has had the days of horror, followed by some healthy days of forgetting about the horror and focusing on the joy and friends who share and co-create the joy, and now one has to get back to work.

What I will NOT be doing today is Retail Madness. I have clean-up to help with, leftovers to enjoy, and people to spend the day Doing Nothing with. I do not plan to subject my still-raw nerves in any way to the annual Consumer Madness Blow-Out (that phrase bigger typeface and lots of exclamation points) that seems to possess people. But then, we live in the culture of the Religion of Money, no matter what lip service is given to other religions, cults, sects, and belief-systems.

I cannot help but remember what the second Bush Presidency said needed to happen after 9/11: You people need to go out and do your patriotic duty and spend lots of money on things you don't need, to help boost the economy back into health, and revive the American spirit. Linking consumption and nationalism is one of the earmarks of fascism. (I said that in 2001, and nobody wanted to hear it.)

Well, huge sales on Black Friday only make sense if you actually have money to spend on things you don't really need. You might want them, and that's fine, but needing them is another story. (To be fair, I have a few close friends, most of them tech people, who do take advantage of the HUUUUGE SAAAALES to get tech stuff they actually DO need. That's just clever, creative timing about shopping, as opposed to consumerism per se.) And still, you have to have to disposable income to get things you need, even on sale. This year, as with last year, I must lay low.

Am I grateful for any of that? I am grateful that I still have some choices in life, including choices about what not to engage in. I am fearful of the times changing in such a way that choices continue to be legislated away from me (which if you want to be fair has been happening my entire lifetime; but I don't want to be fair about that), making me life harder rather than easier, creating more chaos at a time in my life when I can barely summon the strength to cope with existing chaos. I could list those fears, I've certainly thought them through in detail, and right now I don't want to.

Can I find something to be grateful for, in the current political climate of the public ascendancy of the rhetoric of hate and selfishness? That's a challenge. I suppose I can find something in the spinning coin in which Hope is on one side of the coin and Despair is on the other: hope seen in many people rallying together to fight for their rights and refusing to normalize fascism; despair in that those civil rights we spent the last two generations fighting to acquire will now have to be fought for all over again. That's the true dynamic with Hope/Despair (I am amazed that this isn't so bloody obvious to more people than it seems to be): it is the Tao, always spinning, the seed of the light born out of the darkness, the seed of the darkness always born out of the light. The Balance is the dynamic that keeps it spinning, which is good, because if it ever comes to rest permanently on one side, well, that's when things *really* fall apart.

I am grateful that I had a terrific Day of Feasting and Giving Thanks. (Spare me the postmodern cynical undercutting of that with whatever complaining you were thinking of replying with.) (You see: the spinning coin.) Thank you.

I am grateful that I don't have to do much today, the day after, either. Thank you.

I am grateful of who I am spending these days with, and where, and why, and for being provided with a haven in which I am free to spend my energy this morning on introspection rather than struggling to survive.

I am grateful that I don't have to struggle to just survive, this morning, this week, next week. Thank you.

I am grateful that I have the opportunity to spend my limited energy, this week, on creativity, on activism, rather than on struggling to survive. Thank you.

I am grateful that I do have friends who care, and are able to help me out when I really need it, even in small ways. I have needed so much support, and it has sometimes made me desperate (the fearful Despair side of the coin), and therefore not easy to be around. I acknowledge that.

I am grateful that I have learned to swallow my pride, and just fucking Ask For Help. I am still learning how to do that elegantly rather than desperately (thanks in part to the mentoring of Amanda Fucking Palmer); my apologies for when I have failed on that front.

I will continue to need support, going forward, and I worry sometimes about continuing to ask for help, because I DO know that everyone else needs help, too. I give it where I can, and pay it forward where I cannot. I will always be grateful, even when the clawed and scratchy-voiced thoughts dominate me that try to tell me that I am not worthy, and it is an uphill battle to remember that I AM.

I am grateful for neediness. Because I need to be needed, as much as I need to be supported. I need, like breathing, to be useful. John Cage spoke many times about how being useful is one of the most important values, underlying so many other definitions of what it means to be a "good" person. "Good" means nothing, because that is usually a Tribal morality concept in practice. "Useful" transcends good, if you just think about it for a minute.

I am grateful for opportunities to be of use. Even when I am feeling scared and desperate, and am bargaining for my survival, that does not negate that I am being of use to someone, even if seems like a barter or trade. Being useful helps me fight against the clawed and scratchy-voiced thoughts about being unworthy.

I'm very grateful that my multimedia installation in a corn crib at Silverwood County Park, titled "The Temple of Deep Time," created in 2014, was one of two installations extended far beyond the original time frame of the original project. I spent some time this past summer on maintenance and improvements, and am glad to see it go forward. Thank you.

In many ways, the past year or so has been, well, horrible. It's the art-making, the music, the art installations, that have kept me going. Sometimes the creative work is the only thing that keeps me going, so I'm very grateful to have had it. To keep going, I need to do even more. Thank you.

I'm very grateful that I've been offered so many opportunities in the past year or so and been asked to create location-specific landscape art and multimedia art. It's been fulfilling to be able to create, and I've been honored to be given so many opportunities. Thank you.

You want to know to practice Gratitudes?
What is the one thing you most hate doing?
Go do that.
And be grateful.

I am grateful for all of the people who have given me places to stay, this past year and a half of homelessness. Just having minimal security frees up so much of my energy otherwise spent on just surviving. If I have days and weeks when I don't want to go on, a lot of that is because I've been spending ALL of my energy on merely surviving, and none of it on anything that moves me forward, or feeds me creatively and spiritually (those are intertwined), and Despair looks like an endless tunnel of merely struggling to survive, with no point to it. (FUCK nihilism. FUCK you.)

I am grateful, therefore, that I have had a morning hour of science and solitude, to be able to hear these thoughts as they percolate up through the cracked and bubbling dolomitic bedrock of my recent experience. I am still catching up on being able to have this morning silence and solitude, which for me is as necessary as breathing, as necessary as host times out in the desert when I can Just. Stop. and listen to the stillness. This is my therapy. This is what keeps me sane.

I am grateful, also, therefore, to have access for now to a working kitchen that I don't have to set up, tear down, move, and spend all my energy on just making it work. Food security is a major relief. Food security is something you take for granted till you don't have it; just like being homeless.

I am grateful. Oh, I am still fearful. I am still fighting dire Despair, and depression. And I am grateful to have had even a few days when I had the strength TO fight, leftover from everything else I have to deal with.

Let's make this an Arts & Crafts Day.

Playing and Making

Music performance and composition:

Lots of us play musical instruments, or sing. I play adequately, and I sing well (albeit not this week, thanks to pneumonia). But I was not a performance major, practicing several hours per day. I was a composition major. My urge has always been to Make, rather than recreate.

I do believe you have to be able to do both. I can read music like a sonofabitch, and I could do so even before I went to music school. I've been musical since I was 4 or 5 years old. I started piano at age 6 or 7, and I started singing in choir and chorus at that age, as well. The Lutheran church in Ann Arbor that my family went to had a music staff who were at the University of Michigan, and we did a lot of ambitious music in church choir: before age 24 I had sung probably a third of all the Bach Cantatas, some more than once. So I have some pretty good performance chops.

But I'll never be as good a Chapman Stick player, or bassist, as several of my friends are. I don't put in the practice time. (I'm not a slacker. In fact, for most of my adult life, I had an undiagnosed chronic illness that sapped my strength and willpower, and which I will spend the rest of my life recovering from.) There was a period in my 30s when I was in several bands that focused on improvised music; so you could say I was composing on a weekly basis, and playing spontaneous music. But most of that went direct to recording, and was never notated. It's only in the past five or six years that I've begun seriously notating written music scores again, and I've been prolific throughout this period. (Within the limitations of chronic illness and post-illness, always.) When I was in my 30s I did not suck as a player, but in fact I'm a better player now, even though I play gigs less often: time and experience do that, no matter what age you begin. I don't have as many opportunities to play, which sucks, but on balance I'm musically satisfied because I'm writing more.

My focus was always on Making. On writing music. On composing. I have been reading a biography of Wayne Shorter, which made a comparison between Shorter's meticulous writing of music and Joe Zawinul's habit of improvising a piece, then transcribing it, and declaring it done. Actually, I do both. Both of those methods work for me. Most of the music I recorded in my 30s and 40s was never notated, but it WAS recorded, and stands as pieces. I did on occasion transcribe music I had recorded and made it into a score others could play. ("Night/Fire" on my album The Western Lands was done this way.) If I had enough energy, or an assistant, I could transcribe most of what I recorded in those years, and give you a score you could play from. (But I don't. If I have any regrets about surviving chronic illness, it's that I never had the energy to do what I wanted to do, and so much never got finished.)

You see, that's been the trade-off: I will never learn to play as many songs as many of my friends do, and I'll never play them as well as they do. (Mostly. I do have my moments.) But most of them don't compose as much I do, either. That's the trade-off I observed way back in music school, where I was majoring as a composer: what your emphasis is, is probably what it will in future. Bruce Cockburn, the great songwriter, once said something that really stuck with me: "I don't know many songs that I didn't write." (He then said, "But this is one of them," and launched into Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." A song, I might add, that I also know, that I didn't write.)

In music school I focused on making new music; all of us music school students who were not performance-track were required to play or sing, and have declared instruments, but even then in my piano and percussion minors I preferred to focus on new music. (Or music so old it was new all over again: hence my minors in Medieval and Renaissance music.) In music school, and after, I was involved with a group of composers and performers who presented concerts of new music several times a year; some of us were both performers and composers, and traded hats as needed. It was a very fertile ground upon which to write and have performed new music scores. It was also the time in which I began to learn to play jazz, and improvise.

Im not sure why I wanted to write about this, today. Maybe it's because I never stop thinking about music, no matter what else is going on. Maybe it's because I see some of my Stick playing pals and other musician pals having all these minor and major successes in their musical lives that make me want to stand up and cheer. And I do cheer! And then, sometimes, I think about how the touring musician life was never one I could take on (undiagnosed chronic illness, for one; opportunities, for another). It makes me very happy to see some of my friends out there on the road, and to get to their concerts as often as I am able (energy permitting: I'd go to a hell of a lot more concerts if I had the strength).

I genuinely enjoy hearing my friends make their music. I love hearing what they do. I'll never play as well as they do, and I'm okay with that.

And then I go home and go back to writing. It's just what I do.

What I'm For, or How To Discover Your Purpose In Life By Failing At Everything Else

When I was young, I wanted to grow up to be a scientist.

I spent several years on that, training in the sciences, especially the earth sciences. I pursued that goal all the way to college level classes in geology and chemistry. What stopped me was math studies. I placed in advanced math till the eighth grade, and then I got stuck. Later in life, my Mom said it was because of the math teacher. She had seen it at the time, but had not been able to change it, or talk to me about it; she thought there were psychological problems in play. I had really liked my math teacher at the time, for example he liked to play Beethoven's Sixth Symphony during class while we worked, but he did somehow derail my confidence in my math studies.

I'm not really sure how that happened. I only remember that after 8th grade math, I felt stupid rather than smart in math studies. I had little confidence in my own ability. When it came to college entry exams, I scored nearly perfectly in Language Arts, and only at 50 percent in Math on the SATs. This was after scoring in the top 1 percent in every test battery taken throughout my school years. I still somehow scored in the top 5 percent overall for college entry exams, and placed out of both English and Foreign Language requirements, by getting top marks in Advanced Placement classes for both. But not for math.

I was a gifted child who didn't want to be one. I was one of those child prodigies. But I was bullied for being smart, for being a teacher's pet, for being different. I wanted nothing more than to fit in, to be liked, to be accepted. Well, that never happened. I continued in the sciences, till college, and loved doing geology in the field, partly because I loved being outdoors, and then I realized something.

I wasn't meant to be a scientist.

Well, I was, and none of that work was wasted, but there was a thing in me that could never be suppressed or ignored or set aside. It just wasn't possible. It was too powerful to ignore. It's too much more of what I was, and supposed to be.

I wanted to be a scientist. But I was supposed to be a Maker.

I was born to make art. I'm a natural creative. It's the thing I do best. (Really. I can barely handle mundane tasks like managing money, by contrast.)

It took me a very long time to accept that I'm supposed to an artist, a composer, a worker, a person who makes things. New things. A MAker

I say this with neither pride nor humility. I am neither egotistical about it, or falsely humble about it. It's just a fact. Making things is what I do best.

It's really the only thing I'm any good at. I've tried a lot of other career paths in life, and mostly failed at them. I'm looking at a future of failure again, every time I try to fit in, or be accepted, or be like other people. Fitting in never worked in school, when I was being bullied, and it still never seems to work in my adult life. I seem to fated to always be "other." Again, that's just data, not ego.

In mid-college I changed majors from science to the arts. I switched from geology to music, and transferred to the Music School. Almost everyone tried to talk me out of it, including the Dean of the Music School. But the fact is, I had been playing music since I was 5 or 6 years old, singing as a boy soprano soloist. I began piano studies at age 7. (That was inevitable, as Mom was a concert pianist and music educator. Both my sister and I studied piano. I think it made us better thinkers overall, as later education studies seem to suggest.) Everyone wanted me to continue in science, get a good job, and continue to be an amateur musician. But I couldn't do it. In fact, I had been composing music, and had even had a few pieces played, since I was a young boy. I had won awards for short story fiction by age 16. I had gotten interested in photography at a young age, and got better with every year. Even when I was out studying geology in the field, all summer long in Wyoming, my very first college class, when I returned home I had already taken so many photos in the mountains that people started to notice them. I was a gifted child, and stood out, even though a lot of the time I just wanted to disappear.

After music school, my first job after graduation was ironically with Mathematical Reviews, a monthly review journal, where I got in on the ground floor of the desktop publishing revolution, and became a computer graphics expert, a digital type designer, and more. Working in corporate graphic design jobs was creative enough to be fulfilling for me, and I did it for many years, but it still wasn't enough. A book design company, one of the best places I ever worked for, allowed me to use their gear to teach myself Photoshop, and become even more of an expert. I also started to win awards for photography and digital art. I worked there till they corporately downsized. The book publishing business collapsed starting in 2000, and has radically changed since then. Nonetheless, I still have all those skills.

And corporate employment just never seems to work. I can never seem to make it work. It's like it's prevented. And then my life changed due to chronic illness. I suspect those corporate doors may be forever closed to me now.

So I've got no choice, now, but to go forward with no hope of success but with my only choice being to be what I am, a Maker. I make stuff. It's all I'm any good at. I don't know if it will be enough to sustain me. I guess it's time to do what I'm good at, and forget about the rest.

It's pretty scary, because I've developed trust issues. Really big ones. I guess the only thing I actually trust anymore is Making, in which I never seem to doubt myself, and in which I always have full self-confidence in my ability and need to make things.

I make art of some kind every day. (Well, some really bad days I can't. But that's a symptom of a dark day. I hate it, but I try to get past it.) Even if everything else falls apart, that's still true. ON good days I make things, on bad days I make things, I just make things. I guess that's how to tell that's what you're for: it's the thing that you never stop doing, even when all the rest has been taken away. So that's what you do. That's what you're for.

And that's all I can do. It's all that's left. Wish me luck.

Poiein

hardly possible to ignore
each eye-opened dawn awaking
world born first time anew each day
the first day new creation
rebirth yes too but also
each day new day each moment a new

first hours each morning chill
maker arises from dream—
spinning wollen thread hiking mountain vale
cooling purple-red stories out of day's=blood
hiss of summer's wind-tossed trees spun into melody—
to make new day something out of nothing
birth creation reconciled gap between
mulberry and morning-glory
all green-gold before first tea

what will it be today
scarf or hummingbird cloak
irony of a night soul forced awake
at dawn or at least when sun hits tent
creative friction anew
in span taken for tea to steep
what will you maker have made
by then
so rarely spinning words from hoard
when melody alone fulfills
tease meaning from the film flicker
cinematic sequis spun into light
rope burns and orgasmic joy
rhythm creaking swings of childhood
symphony of vertigo spin till fall on grass
druids shrouded in acid hazmat cloaks
long silence of birdsong sibilant pines
each new day younger or older than the last
unpredictable change of hair red gold white

how did we walk this far again anyway
by each awaken make a new day
so far beyond where cardinals stay
aflicker red from green to grey
such habits pull my hands and break
a form down

to nothing is my dawn allegiance
creation's light fall on what he makes
each morning formless until most made
first artisan celebrates each day anew
first day of creation every day
birds flicker in the fever of living
each second vibrate pulse into being a billion motes
time of slow god and slower hanging tree

pull back now
these darker screens on which to paint
careful what you make manifest each early dawn
last moods that linger shadow all your day
what maker creates both dark and light
a round of wheels cycles spinning tops
magnetic field and solar wind
elegant particle dance
no wonder old ones imagined sun gods in such light
when every day's a new creation
new imagining new world new life
what will he make fresh awoken
this first hour of new universe made
dawn of new life lived

Are you an Artist or a Maker?

I tend to think of myself as a "maker," because "artist" carries a lot of baggage around what people assume an "artist" to be. This is as true for artists as for non-artists.

(Point of order: Not everyone makes "art" or "fine art," or even "arts and crafts," but everyone has creativity as their human birthright. We are all creative in little ways, and in other ways, even if we do not "make art.")

Although I can call myself an Artist, because I have made "fine art" that has hung in galleries and walls in homes, and I do practice several artforms and art skillsets that are recognized as being "fine art," including music composition, poetry, painting, photography, multimedia, and so on, I tend to prefer to use "Maker" because it's a more neutral term. I make stuff. Some of it is art, some of it is just stuff that a creator makes, or a gadget engineer, or an artist making a sketch.

A lot of the baggage that "Artist" carries is cultural stereotypes and hoary romanticized clichés: you have to suffer for your art; artists are lonely, tortured souls who alone in starving squalor; artists are inherently disorganized and incapable of managing their lives; artists are depressed or suicidal drunks; and so on. Note how many clichés about artists are negative rather than positive: that's the cultural narrative since the early Romantic poets, and it's a narrative that's never been more than 25 percent true. For one thing, if artists really were that tortured and depressed all the time, they'd never actually have the energy to make their art.

Even the associated cultural narrative of "the artist's heroic struggle against the world dragging you down, to produce your masterpiece" is more myth than fact; because even artists like myself, who work more from intuition rather than intellect, still make art as a daily prctice, as a mode or way of being. Part of making things is just to make them, every day, as an ordinary activity. Like going to do your job.

For me, making art is a very positive thing, not a negative thing. It's not work I have to force myself to do, or fight to achieve. Making art is as necessary, and as easy, as breathing. It's not a heroic struggle, not even when I'm struggling against physical ailment or depression. You can view making art as therapeutically balancing or expressing life's many problems (glass half empty), or you can view it as transcending and overcoming life's many problems (glass half full). The truth is, making art is what you do, whether you're having a bad month or a good one; you just keep making art, no matter what. It can be your everyday salvation, it can give you reason to go on living, it can be the routine, the one constant in your life while everything else is falling apart.

Ironically, even though there are many "positive thinkers" out there who probably think I'm negativity personified (probably because I reject their simplistic aphorisms in favor of more nuanced and realistic overviews), in truth I'm very optimistic and positive about the benefits of expanding creativity in one's life to the utmost. I do think it's good that we all make art of some kind, even if no one but you ever sees it or knows you do it. The purpose of making a painting isn't to become a famous painter, it's just to make a painting; fame is often quite accidental, and capricious. And fickle. I make a lot of sketches and other little things that no one ever sees; they're not good enough to share, period. (The only reason you'll ever see early drafts or sketch versions is because I'm interested in the creative process for its own sake, and I sometimes like to examine a piece from inception to completion to see what happens during the process.)

For my recent art installation, "The Temple of Deep Time" (one of ten corn crib installations at Silverwood County Park), I had an overall conception, an early and immediate vision that I had when I first visited Silverwood, and saw the spiral tree rounds and the corn cribs there, and the end result was in fact very close to the original vision, and written proposal. And in order to get to completion, I had to use almost all of my skills as a creative person (the use of combinations of which is the very definition of "multimedia"), including: graphic design, computer work, photography, drawing, carpentry, math skills, a little bit of programming (in collaboration), getting up on ladders and doing construction, weaving, lighting design, electrical wiring, laser and solar technology, research into weather and solar annual variations, music composition, recording studio production skills, illustration, typography, paper arts, woodworking, calligraphy, and more. Even with this list, I've probably left something out.

So all of that went into making this art installation. And I did it all in about six or seven weeks, from inception to completion. (With a few details added later.) and last night I spent several hours doing long-exposure night photography (which I have taught) and HD video, to document the night-time aspects of my art installation, The Temple of Deep Time. The piece is about time, in multiple ways, on several layers, from past to future. Every element and aspect of the piece is a meditation on time, in some way. That is why I included a laser light show, and a music playback system: music is a timebound art, it has duration, then it ends. Music is an artform you cannot experience without time. It's only appropriate that it both in or porters time-bound arts as part of its design, and also requires being documented over time, using time-shifting as well as time-bound technologies. I will at some point do a time-lapse video of the installation, as well.

To make this art installation I used many skills beyond those (assumed to be) reserved for fine art. In truth, I don't draw a strong distinction between making things and making art.

All of this is why Maker seems to suit what I do better than Artist. If we must have labels or titles or categories. Honestly, labels and categories are for theory, which serves to describe what has been made. But I don't think about any of this when I'm making. I just Make.