Tomorrow is Orchard Oculus day at Carkeek Park. I have completed the twenty-five paintings with their accompanying mobile elements, packed them up, even baked some apple muffins (thank you Strudel Grandmother!). We head out at 8am to start the process of hanging them from apple trees, taking photos and video, hanging around to see some friends and maybe make some new ones. The pieces will be up until 7pm and then we take them down again and bring the whole thing home.
After a while you just give up on defining a stable identity and just find ways to be yourself more completely. This work, and especially this initial sharing-with-the-public phase, is a way to be myself. It’s a bit pedestrian to say that labels like “singer”, “writer”, “artist” are absurdly confining and have little to do with reality. But living into that is kind of profound, even if only for a brief time, such as I am experiencing this evening. Tomorrow when I’m out in public with my work, some cross-currents may arise. But I can’t engineer that: I’ll just have to keep circling back to myself and take it as it comes. Openness is the key.
Whatever I learn from this, whatever these pieces have to offer, wherever this particular journey or any of my multiple parallel journeys lead:
O Birther of the Cosmos
Focus your light within us
Make it useful
(Neil-Douglas Klotz, Prayers of the Cosmos)
