in community

Hello, I have been making art on the white board.  It’s fun.  In the kitchen of this lovely house we live in, in community.

prophecy

It’s funny to show up in community, have a perception of how things are, and it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Kind of like that experiment where the teacher was told at the beginning of the school year “these three kids are gifted, but please keep it secret–please pay extra attention to them and nurture their gifts.”

So the teacher did, and the kids flourished.  But it was a lie–the kids were chosen at random.  But treating them as gifted helped them become gifted, right?  Or we’re all gifted and just need someone to pay attention to us and love us.  Oh, here’s something about it as Pygmalion.

Loving someone very messed up has its challenges.  Hahahaha.  Yes, and we are all very messed up, if we’ve lived long enough.

What flavor of messed up do you like?  I like calm, brilliant messed up.  Less violent and more anguished.  I like weird messed up.  Therapy, self-awareness, creativity to make the damage more productive.

influence

I show up in community and feel scared of being judged, harmed, encroached on.  And I forget that I will judge, harm, and encroach on others, no matter how hard I try not to.  My tiptoeing does not work.  I hurt people no matter how hard I try not to, in ways I had no idea people can be hurt.

We’re all changing each other all the time.  It’s exhilarating and terrifying.  Sounds like life.  I’m breathing with it.

This art started as a drawing of Kali standing on Shiva.

I drew it because I had some energy and put cauliflower on the shopping list, but I spelled it Kali-flower for fun.  So that happened.

The drawing has gone through many versions since then.  Kali and Deadhead I revisioned as winter friends.

Their heads were the sun and the moon for a bit.  But the moon looked more like a speckled cookie.

Beets were on the grocery list, so I took the two heads and turned them into beets.  I found a purple marker, which helps.  Oops, never photographed that one.

Then yesterday I put a black worm emerging from one of the beets.  Then today I turned the worm into part of an antler for this antler dog and sad robot.

They are my favorite yet.  I’m happy to feel strong enough to risk making something.

art

Art can say what nothing else can say.  Is the tone of the house reflected in these drawings?

No, I don’t think it’s a one-to-one correspondence like that.  But the tone of the house affects me, and that gets into the drawings somehow.  Yes.  Where does truth come from?  How does it show up?  Like in a dream, truth in art shows up sideways.

I’m happy to be in community for as long as I can.  After Las Vegas I said many times to Ming, “Maybe we should get our own place and just Rest for a while.”

But Ming needs people around.  I struggled to find a way we could both get our needs.  We applied many places.  I messaged countless craigslist people.  We filled out forms, asked, suggested, learned about scams, planned, guessed, met with, made phone calls.  Got our hopes up–got let down painfully.  I looked at maps to see how far a place was from another place.

I imagined countless other lives in other places.  This is the one that worked.  For now, it’s working.

Happily I make art here, tell the truth as I can, and see what happens.