To Love

I was romanticizing pain this week, opting for a life in which loss and pain are welcomed in exchange for a deposit of depth. I said to myself I choose tragedy. Then I went to work…

__I answered the crisis line."Hello, are you in a safe place?""Yes, but I am loosing everything… And you know I would take my life, end this struggle to keep from drowning. I would, except for it’s a sin and I won't get into heaven..." This week she's drowning. All the fighting to keep a home, to be loved, to live, will be over in her eyes. She was sitting in a room without color. In delicate voice that hung like smoke in the air she said "...life is hard. If you have a good life, please enjoy it for me. Thank you mam for listening."
__Later that evening a woman in the lobby is looking for someone or something. "Do you need help? Would you like to talk?" Her story spreads across the tiny room into the hallway. She's crying, her face hidden by shadows and hair hanging like a disheveled nest about her head. As her story and tears reach me, she apologizes "I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I'm going to die...I'm going to die anyway. I'm sorry..." She’s beautiful and soft. She's a mom. She's my age. She just found out that the man she loved knowingly and willingly brought infection into their home. He's been living with HIV for over 10 years and never protected her, never told her. She tested positive just as this year began.
__Down the hall a kindergartener is "playing with toys," showing the therapist how he's been played with. He's only five and has experienced things that old men die never having known. He sat across from me earlier in the evening. His eyes were baskets of hope. I looked at him and considered his simple state. He imagines himself driving through the city in a fire truck, causing the tail end of his truck to sway as he turns onto the next street. He hoses down imaginary fires, unaware of the hellfire in his own home. His mom just tested positive for HIV also. He has a tiny sister who probably carries the same disease. His father has abdicated every function of his role.

…where people show up at our door many times carrying only their pains and losses. My decision to welcome pain came from a place of seeing how we fiercely deny our pain and avoid the pain of others, unable to live deeply because we are escaping reality. I was wrong to say I choose tragedy. Instead I say, I choose to see the pain, to hear it, and to know it. We are invited to love but we cannot fully love until we are able to look with eyes opened at the victories, the promises, the births, the revelations, the losses and the pains.

Seer

Life is brought to a silence until the rhythm within the movement of friends, pictures that line the walls, music played in public spaces, and chance occurrences and conversations emerges. The grand orchestra resounding in this sweetest whisper extends an invitation.

Colors presented separately, forms individually contained converge into vague imagery and are refocused. Then the moment speaks not only for itself but echoes into tomorrow and breathes over a day that has already passed. When our joys and grief, boredom and hope become more significant in the company of each other the lines find their place on the canvas, the words gather on hidden pages or in the lyrics of a song, their veil unmasked.

It is here that the contours of your face are understood, where truth spills from the heart, where life not only moves through you, you stand and move through it.

About the keys, the cage and the bird

Last Fall I was playing a q&a game with some friends. When asked what I would title my autobiography these were the words that surfaced: The keys to the cage and the bird i flew with. Somewhere between bible imagery, my dreams, reoccurring images in my 90's art, and daily illusions or delusions this thought about people being trapped like birds in cages started to provide a context for my interpretation of the lives of various individuals that I've encountered and my own life.
I imagine that my story will be about finding truth and fighting for it (the keys), about deception , manipulation, loss, fear, pain, bankruptcy...(the cage), about the bird I met (will meet) and his own freedom story.
My black bird debuted back in 98. She was caught in a big yellow dress on a postcard I made for a friend. Today she wears the yellow dress. Today she is me. And today is the day that I will begin to tell my freedom story.