it's a gorgeous issue- Chris Gustin's belly wrapped in opaque vellum- yum! Gwendolyn Yoppollo breaking it down like I never could, and I'll be chewing on Hunt Prothro's anti-treatise for a while. And here's a kiss for Denise Gackstetter, who is an excellent yoga teacher, I can attest.
I have been enjoying a silent retreat for the past twenty days. No phone, no news, not much email. minimum contact with people, little music. read Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind by Maura "Soshin" O'Halloran early on and didn't really end up reading much more than that and new yorkers, even though I had intentions of doing nothing but read, write, meditate, yoga, make pots and cook a little. At first I was all rigid about it- up at 6, yoga till 7, sit till 8, tea, work, clean, lunch,nap, read, all planned out. HA! maybe I was jet-lagged but I was dreaming wild dreams, waking up at 1 am, wide up till four, then falling asleep sitting up. In the studio, I had this great design idea for evolving the lickable plates, but quickly found that I needed to do a lot of recycling and deep cleaning which turned into making saggers and flower pots out of old messed-up clay, and then the weather was suddenly 50 degrees and sunny so I was outside hacking away at the garden, and in the process I decided to turn my filthy attic into a living space so I scavenged ship-lap fir boards for that project and up-ended everything - everything- yesterday found me upstairs in a tool belt squatting beneath the rafters heaving stepping-stones of teeter-totter boards encrusted with a century of dirt around so that I could walk on something so that I could lay out, at long last, a permanent floooooor.
how did up at six, yoga till seven, sit till eight turn into fir floorboards flying in a windstorm?
at a certain point, I found a phrase to describe what I was trying to do- "clean the filter". of my noggin, that is. all the noise, the analysis, the fears, the ethers. all the self-ness. all this energy that I've been spending trying to Figure It Out and using crutches to walk through mud-bogs. dumb. not regret-dumb: in the video game of life, you have certain tools, certain points to cash in, certain handicaps, and I did my best with what I had. I'm just saying I think I'm through the worst of the marsh, and ready to resume kicking ass. who knows, maybe at this level, I have to battle Kafka's cockroach, but hey, embrace the man within, right? no, I think I'm done with existential crises. I'm not an intellectual, and I don't really want to be. I am happiest when I am making things. material things. not idea-things. I am happiest when I am bringing the material to its beauty- a vision that I had of myself in the attic was sweeping a belt sander over the floor for hour after blissful hour, watching the grain come back to life. and then rolling the urethane over it, aaaaah- rain in the desert.
it's part of a much bigger question- what kind of a leader am I? how and when do I step up? I think it is inevitable in the coming years that there will be a watershed moment (maybe tomorrow on Inauguration Day!) when we as a people need all those capable of leading to really step outside their comfort zones and do the thing on peril of death. Even the ones outside The System, like me, and the ones with monkeys and the pirates and the queers- everybody. I don't know how many people have described me as bold. I'd say bull-headed to the point of stupidity, but hey- I love to make things but I have other gifts as well. what I'm trying to do is make the space, physically and metaphorically, available. scrub the brain-filter. scrub the floor. dust off the charisma, iron the forehead, shake out the soul, lets roll, baby, lets roll!
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