Papier-Maché Art Bowls

Another new direction for my art-making. I've been thinking hard about how to break out of the two-dimensional limitation of most visual art, especially the photographic print. I have several ideas that combine photographic prints with sculpture, with multimedia, with multiple displays of parallel work. That combine imagery with form, that break out of the two-dimensional frame into the realm of sculpture, and of multimedia.

I've always liked paper arts. I've long been interested in hand-made paper, art books, and hand-printing. I haven't pursued this interest very deeply before now, although at times I've wanted to make my own paper; and I think I may be able to explore that craft this winter. I have been setting up a crafts worktable in the basement, to be able work on several projects as time permits, from woodcarving, to paper arts, to candlemaking, and more.

Someday I would like to make an art book. I want to make the paper myself, print my written words on the hand-made paper, sew the binding, make the covers. In other words, a completely hand-made art book, containing original images and poems. Obviously, like most art-books, a limited edition. A lot work to make, and not intended to be mass-produced.

My artist friend A. had the idea to explore papier-maché recently, which I felt immediately enthusiastic about. I sought out some gluten-free recipes online for making paste—most papier-maché is, like wallpaper paste, a combination of flour paste and water—the most effective one being made from white glue, like the famous Elmer's Glue-All seen in many schoolrooms, mixed with water. (Two parts white glue to one or one-and-a-half parts water.)

That very night, lit on fire with the idea of making a paper art bowl—decorative, artistic, not for food, certainly not waterproof—I made two. I have a stash of really good art papers, most of them designed to run through a printer. I've made some laser-printed art-books with some of this paper, publishing a limited run a few years ago.




I tore this purple paper stock into strips, and made two papier-maché art bowls. I have a set of three or four blown-glass bowls made by another artist friend of mine, when she was working in the University of Wisconsin glass lab. I used two of these glass bowls as molds. I followed the instructions of one of the papier-maché recipes I had found, and lined the mold bowls with petroleum jelly. This worked well, but had the downside of leaving some traces of petroleum jelly on the bowls, which took a while to get off, after the bowls had dried.



To make a paper bowl like this, you tear paper into strips, soak it in the bonding material (the white glue with water, or paste) for a minute or two, till the paper is pliable, then form the strips into the mold. After making the paper bowl in the mold, you can sop up the extra wetness with a paper towel. The bowls need to dry for a minimum of 24 hours, typically, before they can come out of the molds without falling apart. Once out of the mold, it usually takes another day or two before they're completely dry. Once dry, they are quite firm, strong enough to hold shape, even strong enough to be containers for other materials. (Not food!)



All in all, for a first effort, I'm very satisfied. I'm still learning what I'm doing. I expect to do several more simple bowls, while I learn what I'm doing, then move on to other forms. Perhaps some plates, platters, and other forms that have relief could make interesting molds. I have seen some square Japanese plates, for example, that might make very interesting forms. Maybe even something like a wall sculpture.




Next, I made two more experimental bowls, made from strips torn up from old photo-prints of mine. I have several boxes full of laser-prints on paper, made from my photographs and digital art. Most of these I made when I was working at various graphic arts jobs which happened to have printers that they let me use. Laser prints, while quite crisp and permanent, are on standard printer paper, not photographic paper. That means I can't really sell them as photo prints. So what am I to do with them? Why, recycle them into other art.

So I made two more bowls from these laser photo prints. The interesting thing about using the photo prints this way is that I can make different images inside and outside; so you can make a themed piece of art using more than one static image.

I tried lining the molds with plastic wrap rather than petroleum jelly this time. This worked very well, as the finished bowls popped right out of the molds after drying, and the plastic wrap left nothing behind, unlike the petroleum jelly. A day more of drying, and the bowls look very good. Abstract yet representational.

One of this second group of bowls uses photos I've made of my small collection of vintage typewriters; the outside of the bowl is typewriter keys, while the inside uses photos of other parts of the typewriter.



Bowl of Type

The second bowl uses photos I've made of nudes in nature—part of an ongoing series of photographs of the nude male form in natural settings, which I began in 2000 and still continues. The photos used for this bowl were made over two or three years of camping in northern Minnesota. The different models were all friends who agreed to pose for me.



Bowl of Eros

As i said, i view these as experiments. This is brand new art for me, although I have been intrigued by paper arts for several years. I've seen lots of beautiful paper-arts pieces over the years, which can be sewn as well as glued, containing swatches of fabric, of woven paper, of feathers, and other materials. There is potential here for making something more shamanic, as well. I find myself also moving towards abstraction rather than representation; even the bowls made from paper would be cubist, or refracted, not perfectly pictured. Layers and nuanced complexities and resonant associations of image, word, meaning, context.

Prayers

Prayers (2008), arrangement of photographs and digital prints

December 1st is World AIDS Day. Honoring this day is as much about ending prejudice against those who are living with HIV (we all know someone who is) as it is about education and prevention. The Red Ribbon symbol is everywhere, and if you see it now, you'll know why.

I was invited to submit my artwork to a World AIDS Day art and education gallery exhibit in Madison, WI, and six works were accepted. The connection was made by a friend of mine who is an artist, and who has lived with HIV some several years. He encouraged me to submit my work, and he also has some large oil paintings in the show as well.

The show is sponsored by the UW Health HIV/AIDS Comprehensive Care Program at UW Hospital and Clinics in Madison, Wisconsin, and is part of AIDS Action 2008. The exhibit is described as: "The featured event of AIDS Action will be a community art exhibit relating to the personal, political and social aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic." The exhibition will be shown from December 1 thru 5, at Common Wealth Gallery, Madison Enterprise Center, 100 S. Baldwin St., Madison, WI. There's an artists' reception the last day of the exhibit, Friday evening, December 5, during which some members of Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus of Madison will perform a small group of unaccompanied songs.


Prayers

I've been photographing friends and acquaintances since 2000, as part of my nudes in nature series. I realized in going through artwork and photographs to submit to this show, that one thing that tied together many of my male nudes in natural settings was an attitude of prayer, of contemplation, of connection. I've never concealed the truth that much of my art contains mystical and transpersonal content; I've never pretended that I wasn't interested in mysticism, shamanism, and depth psychology. Naturally, your interested show up in your artwork. Yet as I was going through images to present for the exhibition, I realized that a great number of these photographs were thematically related, and the theme was prayer. So I gathered several prints together, arranging them intuitively until everything felt just right. The title of this new piece came so easily, it was almost comical in its obviousness: Prayers.

This is one of six pieces of mine that were accepted for the exhibit, and are now on display in the gallery.

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One of Joni Mitchell's most memorable songs of recent years, for me, is Sex Kills from her album Turbulent Indigo, itself one of her best albums. Mitchell is known for her razor-sharp insights into world issues such as environmental degradation, social injustice, and violence. Sex Kills is a song about AIDS, about how love turns to death, about how the rich get richer while the poor die because they can't afford healthcare; and much more. It's a summation, a snapshot of evil, of how by our selfishness we destroy each other and the world we live on. Here is the song's first verse and chorus:

I pulled up behind a Cadillac,
We were waiting for the light,
And I took a look at his license plate,
It said, JUST ICE.
Is justice just ice?
Governed by greed and lust?
Just the strong doing what they can
And the weak suffering what they must?

And the gas leaks
And the oil spills
And sex sells everything
And sex kills
Sex kills

The anger in the song is, as usual for Mitchell, wound together with love. The observation of degradation is bound up with compassion. Surely we can do better than this; surely we can care for each other more deeply, and more sanely. Sex Kills is not just about AIDS, but AIDS is included in there.

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I wrote a short poem some years ago, in which the dead and the living coexist, merge, and meet one another. I've posted this poem before, but I want to repeat it here, today, in honor of the circa 33 million who are now living with AIDS, and the over 25 million who have died from it, making HIV one of the greatest pandemics in human history.

involuntary words

little prayers we say,
little strings of words
like pearls around the necks of the dead,
little automatic movements of the eye
flicking towards half-seen things on the peripheries of vision,
hands curling around in warding signs;
out of darkness come the white trees, suddenly there—
we give a little exclamation, a puff of exiled breath,
and riding out with it float the white tongues of fear;
shimmering in green light,
the hummingbird floats above the pool,
we give a soft cry of pleasure
as its flickering iridescence vanishes;
small red leaves swirl about the mossy shelf above the water,
stirred by children’s unseen hands, little girl ghosts
who watch from the shadows and giggle;
alone and silent
while rain comes weeping down,
we speak quiet words over the stone,
pearls strung together by song,
a little laughter, a small child’s wide eyes;
and you, beneath the stone,
do you hear it? those little prayers
and unnoticed sighs; they ring for you through the silence,
the darkness, the silence, the voices of the soil,
the sounds of the living,
given to the dead.

Light and Space

If I were 20 now, if I had the chance to do it all over, to start all over again, I would probably go into architecture school.

I am constantly, vividly, viscerally aware of how light and air fill an enclosed or an open space. The way natural light moves on a surface, or in a room, is transcendently beautiful, with no other adornment. A bare wall, at the right angle to the sun, is beautiful all day long. Reduced to its purist forms, architecture is a container for light, and thus for spirit.


Santa Fe, NM

I might also work in interior design or landscape design. The goal being to create spaces for contemplation, quietude, meditation. I create these spaces for myself, most recently in my new home; I also gather them to me, as memories, in many places I've traveled to, or visited.

I like natural materials. I like wood surfaces that have been weathered by sunlight, rain, and time. White sunlight on grey cedar shingles. Light rain on whitewashed wood. I like the pure solidity of reinforced concrete, but also the aesthetic of chaotic weathering. A rust stain below a steel pipe on a concrete wall has spirit. Skin on stone.


Temperance River, MN

The color white, in design and architecture, is not a void. it contains all colors, and reflects them all. It responds to the changing light throughout the day and night. A whitewashed building on a Greek island's high hill. A white picket fence. A white chair under spreading trees. A white canvas tent on a high mesa after a light snow.




camp, Arroyo Hondo, NM

I like reflections. I am not found of mirrors, but I love windows, pools of water, glass, wet stone, and the they way they all reflect light. If I were to design a terrace, I would have inset lines and curves of moving water channeling through the stone pavements; narrow enough to be easily stepped across, but wide enough to reflect the sky. I once had a dream in which I was on a terrace made of red desert stone, into which had been incised narrow channels through which water was flowing, reflecting the clear blue sky with small white clouds; the overall shape of pattern was a labyrinth.


dawn, Flambeau River, WI

I like light to come through. Skylights over shower stalls in a high-roofed bathroom. Small rectangular windows at odd places in corners and clerestories. I have a photographer's eye for light—I have noted more than once that I am aware that many of my landscape photos are really photos of the sky—and if I applied that to a building, or a public space, light would always be getting in. Light-pipes to underground subway stations.


Taos Plateau, NM

We divorce ourselves, without imagining the consequences, from the natural cycles of night and day. We use artificial light even where we don't need it. We use harsh, direct light, because we imagine it to be more efficient and illuminating, simply because it is direct. We create enclosed spaces, indoors, all too often to block out the outdoors, the natural light, perhaps to prove our dominion and control over it.


adobe building, NM

Night finds a way to get in, no matter what. A single lamp is better than a brightly-flooded room. A candle in the right place, reflecting off the walls, is better lighting than a row of flourescent lights. We don't honor the dark enough. The shadows in a room, at night, are as important as the objects and angles that make them. They're very much alive.


Taos, NM

If I were 20, and had it all to do over again, I would probably go into architecture.

Certain Places

Certain places call to us, speak to us, stay with us even after we've traveled on. They linger with us, their spirit has touched and followed us, and when we return to them it is always with a sense of homecoming and familiar welcome.

Such places are sacred.

Sacred to us, even if they are not recognized as such by the traditional authorities of church or state. Everyone has personal sacred places, even if they do not call them such or ever talk about them: places of refuge, of home, of spiritual homecoming and replenishment. We need such places. They are where we connect to spirit, to self, to whatever there is that is greater than us. We go there for renewal, reinvigoration, resurrection. When we visit, again and again, we leave with a new vigor, a new lightness of self, and a return to our most core values. Everything inessential has been stripped away, leaving us with who we really are, the ordinary, daily dramas and mundane cares that we get so caught up in having fallen away and left us lighter.



There is a beach in Redwood National and State Parks in northern coastal California, that is one of my most sacred places. This beach is the southernmost extension of Redwoods, along coastal Highway 101; it's the very bottom end of the park along the highway. Other branches of the park stretch up into the coastal hills, up the river valleys and along the ocean shore; there are many beautiful groves of redwood trees in the park, some of them very close to the road. There's a visitor center and some archaeological remnants of the native Indian tribes, just north up the shoreline from this southernmost beach. A little further north, the road turns inland and passes through small towns, past lakes and estuaries, and winds up into the coastal range amid the giant redwood trees.

The first time I ever visited this beach at Redwoods was in 1993, when I drove from Wisconsin to the Pacific Ocean for the first time. It was my first visit to California and Oregon. I was traveling with my friend John on this trip, a three week road trip, there and back again. The next evening we would arrive in San Francisco for a three-day visit.

That morning we had started the morning in Eugene, OR, and driven through the Cascades out to the coast, then south down Hwy. 101. It was a hot sunny day, and when we stopped for sightseeing moments, or for food, we were not alone in being shirtless in the heat. We arrived at Redwoods later in the day, and after driving down the long tunnels of tall trees south of Crescent City we arrived at the beach.

In those days camping was allowed on the beach, and there were square concrete firepits with metal grates you could use to cook on, or just build a campfire in. We camped by one of these, setting up the tent. The ocean was pounding surf into sand and gravel less than 50 yards away, the tide going out. The wind off the sea was cool, and would turn cold after dark, where late at night we would huddle together in the tent under the blankets for warmth, and make love together.

The sunset was golden and lingering, the sky clear. Mist from the powerful waves came up the beach, from where the waves crashed hard against the cliffs and sand bars. All night the stars were very bright and cold.

We built a campfire, and the wind whipped it over hard, the wood burned fast and strong. I took nude photos of John posing in front of the fire before it got too cold, looking like a caveman emerging from the tent into the dark night. very primitive and atavistic. We loved the fire in the dark night, with the ocean roar nearby. It felt very powerful, as though the gods were walking, that night. Something very old, very ancient, rising in our blood, past all the layers of civilization, from the time in human history when people crawled with reed torches into caves to leave sacred shamanic paintings and handprints on the cavewalls. That ancient, that dark, that beautiful.



I later used this image to make the Fire God card from Spiral Dance.


Fire God, from Spiral Dance

Later in the night, we were awakened in the tent by a bright light. At first we thought it was someone's headlights shining down the hill from the parking lot onto the beach, or a farmer's yardlights from further inland. When the light didn't go away after awhile, we got out of the tent together to investigate, and climbed up the low hill towards the parking lot. There we discovered that the full moon was rising over the inland lagoon, rising slowly from behind the inland coastal mountain ridges.

It was All Hallow's Eve, Samhain, Halloween, the time when the veil between the worlds is thinnest, and spirits walk the land, the time the dead return to visit the living. And it was a full moon. We got back in the tent, shivering, and that's when we huddled together for warmth, and made love till we fell back asleep. Again, something dark and ancient in our blood, rising past the layers of civilization, something urgent and primitive that could not be denied. I fell to sleep exhausted but feeling very much alive.

It was a night of deep magic and ecstatic awe.

In the morning, the sunlight was bright and clear. We wandered down to the waterside. The tide was in, and I took photos of John chasing gulls along the surfline, wearing nothing but his shorts. (Neither of us had brought a swimsuit on this trip.) It was another hot autumn day, as we drove down the coast, arriving eventually at our bed-and-breakfast in San Francisco's Castro district sometime after nightfall.



Since then, I have stopped at this beach for awhile every time I have driven up or down the coast. So I have stopped there several times by now. The next time I was there was after I had moved to California in january 2005; I drove up the coast that spring, for the first time since 1993, to visit friends in Portland. Of course I instantly recognized the beach when I got to it. The place was thick with strong memories for me. I stopped for awhile. The firepits were no longer there, and camping was no longer allowed. Well, it had been twelve years, and things change. I asked a park ranger later and was told that camping had been disallowed as a conservation measure, to keep the region more pristine and environmentally managed.



Every time I stop at the beach, I walk around for awhile, take some photos, go down to the waterline and cliff that juts out into the water, with an arch worn by time into the crumpled, colored rock. Usually, I pick up and take with me a few stones. I take here to just reconnect with the spirit of the place, to be silent and contemplative. Sometimes I sit and meditate, more often I just stare into the distance, watching the light, letting the silence gradually fill me up, till I become as still inside as a deep forest pool reflecting the moonlight in its black waters.

That first visit, in 1993, in the morning light as we wandered by the surf I found a beautiful, perfectly polished flat black stone. Made of basalt, very fine hard crystalline dense volcanic rock, the waves had worn it smooth. Such rock takes a high polish. I put the rock in my pants pocket, and carried it in my pocket for many years. It gave me a tangible link, a physical connection, to the beach.

On the second visit, twelve years later, I still had that same stone in my pocket. I took it out at the shoreline, and washed it in the surf, recharging its connection to the place I had found it. I contemplated leaving it there, as a returned voyager coming back home; but in the end I couldn't part with it, and took with me again. I wandered the beach for awhile, and soon found another rock, made of the same high-polish basalt, but shot through with white quartz crystals in thin lines of radiant nets. I put this new stone in my pocket, and have carried it there ever since. The original stone now usually lives in a pocket inside my backpack, in semi-retirement, where it continues to travel with me part of the year.

i have carried in my pants pocket a stone from this beach every single day since that first visit to the beach, on All Hallow's, 1993.



The stone in the center of this arrangement is my original stone, from 1993. The smaller stones were ones I found on my most recent road trip, September 2008, that caught my eye this time. Each is unusual in color, shape, or texture. Each feels like it has a connection to this special place for me.


Serpentine Cross, Redwoods Beach, CA

As I now sometimes do, in places where the land speaks to me, where I feel a certain energy of place calling to me, I made a piece of land art sculpture on the beach, and left it there for time and the weather and waves to destroy. This one is tiny compared to some I've felt called to make. just a line of green serpentine stones in a sheltered corner of the cliffside above the waterline, with a red rock above, and a white rock below. (Serpentine is California's state rock, and is made of ophiolitic peridotite that has been infiltrated by seawater, chemically altering the dark mafic rock to often brilliant green, shot through with veins of other colors.) To me, this arrangement looks like a cross, but also like a Thunderbird symbol. The Thunderbird is an appropriate spirit to find at this beach, I feel, as it too is connected to the magic and beauty of places life this. It seemed right and true.

I still carry a smooth, polished rock from this beach in my pants pocket every day. I still feel connected to this beach, this certain magic of place, to the light and energy there, to the sounds of the ocean and the smell of the sea wind. I will continue to visit my beach, whenever I'm passing through the area. We are connected, at some deep blood-wise level. This is a sacred place for me, a place of power. And also a place of learning, of new life, of growth into the integral human being I still strive to become, that I want to continue to evolve towards, with every moment of exaltation and memory, in the light, in the air, sea, mountains, the ocean of time, the seasons marked as growth rings in the old, old trees.

Katabasis

into the out of to edge and earth seadrumming drift on shore to end of day
out from surf to sand flow foam into cavecool arc windlight in inscape
of end stark in to back roof of mouth cave stone stain silt and flood
down coast down hill down trail to silt sand falling cliff span
sit wetdry sand all over seabreeze light over naked skin
sun bury pink burned skin sandfoot hardstrung
gale into end weather earth sea down coast in
ruins canyon slip wade to sea stone arch
wind spin cave in arch breathing sea
seals fathomless eye watch shore
estuary flow to tide out edge
past arc of secret archway
slip down night fall
cool under trees
sun down to
gold light
down
sun
to

sun to sun earthspirits wind through beach caves
last nude swimmers walking through surf come in
through tunnel cave to starlight shore same ocean same
and in last light turn dance upcliff face feet certain sure
ancient dreamstone in line of seastars gulls kelp bladders
strewn everywhere to be found naked under the sun
the books of tide and sinew

into
lost beat
come heart
to live inscape
come wind to earth
begin long arc return
to sun star tide sea shield
moon and cave drift whirl
in arch spin naked in seafoam
silhouette and stones of the ancients
visitors to shore retuning inland harps
strung with wind a life spent nailed to shoreland

and every sunburned prayer an emptiness of sign and seal
strange witness to the lemniscate of inward summer freed

Beltane (a poem triptych)

Bather

his shoulders,
turning beneath
the pound of the falls

his limbs, as long
and awkward and powerful and restless
as a new-born colt’s

his chest,
a marble sculpture
only time can erode

his sex a rainspout,
God’s design for the apex
of a water-creature’s wave-slipping

his eyes a gray seal’s,
music-loving, lambent,
often mischievous

his grin the radiance
of forest mornings,
the river’s promise to the rocks it breaks



The May Field

the sweaty work
of fastening a belt about
the boy’s middle

the loose shirt
over the limbs: the festival shirt,
bright and flowered,
a bower on the shoulders,
on the breast a third sun rising

new white linen breeches
flash in the sun,
a rhythm of running

he leans over his legs
to lace his buckskin boots,
new-cut for the day’s wandering

he has his lovers,
lads and lasses, and his blanket
will not lie cold by the hearth tonight

born at the dark solstice,
the pride of seventeen summers,
he loves laughter;
his only lack
is darkness’ deep patience,
the barrow-waiting, the long sleep—
but time will bring such shadows,
and the toughening
of his bard’s tongue, an edge to his wit



Night Revels

these fires, tall on the hills,
beacon the day’s end;
heart and bones warmed by dancing,
skin flushed, breath quickened, flames
blush the young ones leaping

the fair festival clothes discarded,
bonfire and naked dance are enough;
some stand blanket-wrapped and watching,
but he tires not

the bower-god’s son,
he horse-prances,
mane-tosses, wild-leaps,
long-laughs, deep-drinks of wine-sweat

even old men who lifelong love their wives
lust for him, tonight,
in this banefire-light,
the rampant green god himself awakened

all night the fires spiral
every hill a flickering star
echoing older lights, these circling lanterns,
the Northern Star

Erosion

dance of gull over cliff,
surge of wave below—

argument about seagrass, the spin,
tidewaters bloom against sun and sand,

seals stalk sun on their rocks offshore,
lifting head and tail when wavesurge
overmatches their anchorage;

I need to breathe this sea-air,
make it a place in my shoes
that I can always walk beside;

constant winds make shouting
waves into spray that coats skin, hair,
very being, layers of gypsum and silt—

how did we achieve this reckoning?
the astrolabe of the sea, a sextant of gulls.

I go back to the sea, I go in by this archway:
worlds opened beneath my feet—

I fill it with soul: waves of gulls rise
to skyfather, attitude of sun on sea.

nothing to be done: this portal, opened,
alight, filled with glittering stars
and acceleration. I had a dream—

it burnt in my hand: two holes in what once
was seafloor to guide my dreaming:
broken teeth and wasted effort.
sun filled me, and the portal
closed.

across an envelope of tunnel vision
pelicans fly, small dots in the wiry firmament:
too close to lean into, too far to snow from the air.

I had every intention of dying here.
instead: liberation.

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Here am I, then, amid the darkly pitted rock,
myself tectonic, drifting, spurned
                                                    by tide and sea
surrounded, enflamed, ineffectual,
a brace of stones at waterline,
toppled by wave surge into green depths,
sand buried, immaterialized.

I remain alone.

Even the gulls avoid this place of biting flies, where
stars turn in sand sparkle and mirage,
skate across encrusted feet.
An epitaph for crabs.

Waterline.
                The rocks stand, sentinels—
lines of driftwood, wet black of a dog’s nosing—
mark the boundaries, osmotic, permeable,
between this land and another
land made of water.

Red cliffs scale in white mist, shedding
rough marks to become rounded
windstones, portals the wind rushes through
for solace.

I erode.
I become my true self,
that thing I am when all else
is stripped away, burned off, charred,
starved, chemically eaten,
faulted, broken at every joint,
weathered down to nothing,
where what is left at center
is both nothing
and who I truly am.

I come alive.
I am in this moment,
and this moment, and this,
no other moments, no sense
of other times.

Do the gods dwell
only in those who are ready,
prepared, the lineaments
of proper form and ritual all emplaced?
No: the god dwells in everyone,
in everything, immanent,
transcendent.

Pick a name. Any name will do.
I call You by Your true name,
which only I know, since it is
my own name, my inner, secreted Name.
We are these mirrors.

Here in my desert cave,
I stalk you:
relentlessly, without ceasing,
to become that which
we already are.

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Written during four days camping at Joshua Tree National Monument, August 2005, where the temperature got into the 100s every afternoon. I spent part of each day in a cave made by boulders falling together, eroded into rounded lumps, providing shelter, and windowed views of the hot, clear sky.

Inspiration (The Western Lands)

Inspiration, experienced as an instantaneous flash, can be delightful and invigorating and can generate a lifetime of work. Giving birth to a line of poetry brings with it an incredible rush of energy, coherence and clarity, exaltation and exultation. In that moment, beauty is palpable, living. The body feels strong and light. The mind seems to flow easily through the world. Emily Dickinson said in this regard that the poem is exterior to time. Improvisation is also called extemporization, meaning both “outside of time” and “from the time.” —Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts

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When you need to, you can focus utterly on sound. Musicians learn to do it as part of their training. It becomes habit. But anyone who wants to can practice it.

It’s easy.

Just pretend that your life depends on the next sound you hear. —W.A. Mathieu

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As I walk, the wave’s thunder slowly shifts—no longer the mantra of a drum, now a soft knock on an inner door: “Let me in. Let me in.”

What happens next is difficult to explain and difficult to write. I guess I simply open the door. In an instant everything is changed and yet nothing is changed. I’m still walking but here, on the edge, for a moment there are no walls. I’m part of the confluence. Old boundaries and definitions blur. I feel fear, then great beauty, then peace. I don’t know how long I walk in this state. —DeWitt Jones, photographer and columnist, Outdoor Photographer, August 1993 issue

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One of the most magical experiences I’ve had in my adult life happened on All Hallow’s Eve, 1993. It was at the southern beach campground at Redwoods National Forest in northern California; there used to be cement campfire rings along the beach, under the shelter of the road, where you could set up a tent and spend the night. My travelling companion and I had built a bonfire in front of our tent. The stars were shining through the fog rolling onshore from the Pacific Ocean. The surf was at low tide and rising, pounding the grey pebble beach less than a hundred yards away, an ever-present roar in the near distance. The full moon rose then, like a brilliant silver beacon slicing through the night. It was so purely bright a shade of silver that at first we thought it was yard floodlights from a farm inland. Before the fog covered the stars completely, we had the three original nightlights all at once: starlight, moonlight, firelight.

My traveling companion posed nude for me in front of the tent, his body lit by warm firelight, the flames blown by the steady wind off the ocean. It was a moment that summoned ancient blood-memories of cave-paintings, pre-historic nights and fires, and the archetypes of the hunter and shaman. Eventually, I developed one of these photos into a card in the Spiral Dance series, Fire God:



Later, when I awoke in the night, the full moon made it seem as bright as day inside the tent. The wind was whipping the tent, and when I briefly stepped outside, the night was wild and full of stars.

In the morning I walked along the edge of the high-tide surf, photographing driftwood and seabirds, and collecting a set of small, flat, polished black stones: volcanic flakes that had been weathered by tidal surf into smooth organic forms. (I carried one of these beautiful stones in my pants pocket for years afterwards.) In amongst the black and grey stones were a few scattered white granite stones, which had weathered into smooth lumpy shapes like half-melted ice blocks on a lake after melte. There was now a stronger wind from the sea, and the sun rose golden and hot on the Day of the Dead.

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All this occured because I had been invited to present a paper at the American Folklore Society annual conference, held that fall in Eugene, Oregon. I used the opportunity to take my first vacation in several years, and chose to drive out west rather than fly. Together with my traveling companion, I spent two weeks on the road in a compact car. We camped out as much as we could, before the winter weather settled in. We visited a lot of beautiful national parks during the drive, and viewed a lot of amazing scenery. The trip had many memorable moments, including camping on the beach, and visits to the Badlands, Bear Butte, and Yellowstone, where we camped one crystal-clear and frigid night, and woke in the cold pre-dawn to run naked and blanket-wrapped into the car to warm ourselves with the car heater before getting dressed and breaking camp.

I took many good photographs on this trip, some of which ended up being used as the album artwork for my first solo Stick album, The Western Lands. (The album's title track can be auditioned here.)

It was an inspirational trip. Inspiration means in-spiring, or breathing in: the life-breath, the praña, or ki, in-spiring oxygen-laden air for the life of the body and spirit.

As a musician, like every other musician, I get stuck sometimes. My fingers feel clumsy, and my note choices stale. Soloing is an effort, and I hear myself playing mostly cliches. At times like these, I feel like a beached whale, unable to return to my element, gasping for air, dying under the weight of my own body collapsing. I get stranded on a plateau, unable to chart how to climb the next stretch of mountain.

When I get stuck musically, I turn to other activities for inspiration. I take a bike ride through the autumn woods. I take my camera and spend an afternoon or evening capturing light on film. Or I write. (Lately most poems seem to come out as haiku, or haibun.) Very rarely, I paint. I've recently take up caaligraphy again. (A fine pen or brush is a wonderful thing.)

In other words, I renew my musical self by exploring other mediums of creativity, of doing/being. Rather than beating my head against the same wall of being stuck, I step back, re-frame the problem, and turn to other activities for revitalization. The fundamental definition of meditation is “doing one thing with full attention, with your whole being.” When I get stuck musically, I most often turn to photographs or to poetry. An afternoon walking and seeing with the camera is a form of meditation for me.

Creativity thrives on inspiration, and can’t exist in a vacuum. All of my experiences feed into it. Everything you see and feel becomes raw material for making music. Sometimes I write a piece of music as a commemoration or crystallization of a particular image and its associated mood(s). It’s a response to some aspect or facet of my inner and/or outer life. (19th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins coined a word to describe this feeling of the intrinsic patterns of essential characteristics in both objects and the multi-sensed re-creation of the object within the perceiver: inscape.)

When we write pieces that are memorials—that is, memory evocations—we recreate the feelings, the images, sometimes even the smells associated with the memory. What you seek to remember is evoked by the creative act. Musical pieces (or photos, or whatever) that succeed as artworks successfully evoke in the audience something that, at least in part, came from the artist’s outer and/or inner life.

Another way to kick yourself loose, if you’re feeling stuck, is to travel. My trip to the ocean and back was very refreshing, and generated experiences to inspire me for months to come. Taking in new vistas is like breathing the freshest air imaginable: it charges the body and mind together. Travelling out west was ultimately a journey seeking inspiration and renewal. (It was also a reminder of some truths that it’s easy to lose track of in the whirling hamster-wheel, narrow-focus lives we so often fall into in our urban workplace or academic existences.)

On the drive back from the western states, it had snowed over the Great Plains and in the eastern Rocky Mountains. Snow lightly covered the weathered hills in Wyoming. Watching the low clouds and oncoming snow flurries, I wrote this tanka:

a transformed landscape
dusted this morning with snow—
trees huddle for warmth

branches hunched together shivering
winter strikes us in the bone

Later, I picked dried stems from purple sagebrush near the roadside. The snow here was about two inches deep, and the brilliant sunlight was blinding. I picked the sage to carry back with me to remind me of the Big Sky if I got caught up in the hamster-wheel of Midwest suburban life again: I would burn it and be reminded and revitalized. (Nothing can evoke memory like the sense of smell.)

From experiences like these, we’re always able to renew ourselves, to find inspiration: from the pebbles on the beach, grey and wet and shining from the surf-spray at low tide; from breathing in woodsmoke from a hickory fire; from the searchlight moon overlooking the playa. Magic night inspires Li Po’s Quiet Night Thoughts. Breathe in the praña, the life-breath.

I drive out west, and I can suddenly breathe more freely: the sky becomes the Big Sky, and vistas of “mountains and rivers without end” stretch away forever. I go out west, and the rhythm of the wheels on the road propels me across time and space. I go out west, and want to stay there (and know I can’t, for now). I go out west, and I return inspired.

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Recommended Reading:

W. A. Mathieu. The Listening Book: Discovering Your Own Music, Shambhala, 1991.

Sam Hamill, trans. Longtime Companion: Japanese Poems of Love and Longing, Shambhala Centaur Editions, 1992.

Matsuo Basho (trans. by Sam Hamill). Narrow Road to the Interior, Shambhala Centaur Editions, 1991. (This is haiku master Basho’s masterpiece, a travel journal composed in haiku and haibun, which is also a journey to the interior of the soul.)

John Welwood, ed. Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path, Shambhala, 1992.