alone in the dark

solstice has passed. the christ consciousness has been born--as has the trickster--for there can not be one without the other. i am here, alone, in the dark of the poet tree house--in the heart of the open floor that is waiting to co-create paris. it is all it can be in the whirling yes of the unfolding now. i am here. we are here. this is here. we--the cats and me. the black hut is swirling with alchemy class plans and combining the symbolic process and alchemy acts through totem fruit, totem food selections. we will make and share a feast of processes--mixing and matching the buffet table as something comes whirling up. it is what we do--make things up--borrow from ideas and experiences we've shared and co-created and then whirl them out in a wider world. whirling out in a wider world. whirling out in a spiral of even expansion. whirling out in a time and tide of change. whirling out in the dark. i have an image of a lone dancer, dressed in black, with a whirling skirt, doing her dervish thing. it is funny and not. it is here and gone. it is sky pulsating with soundless sound sonic booms away. what am i saying? i am showing up again at the page--because i gave everything up to be able to and i have been avoiding the confessional of my own writing. i have been hiding. i have been wanting to make sense in the outside worlds and have, in my wanting, not been able to traverse the barriers between me and my fulfillment. a strange thing to say on the edge of entering the phd program, finishing the ma program, helping friends complete their thesis papers, and co-creating this venue for the expansion of community. i continue to co-create. i am not sure why these achievements ring hollow next to the big bass drum of family gone wrong, but they do. i am still reaching outside myself to achieve and achieve and achieve. achieve is different from ache. ache is different from ache. i am in the spin of thinking and not again. wanting to write something, yet not knowing what that something should be--what form that something should take. in the bookstore on fourth street today with bethany's family, i considered whether there are enough books already in the world? whether everyone who loves them buys some they never read? whether the ones that did not get bought in my journey around town will ever be useful to someone? whether any of those ideas in my head as a result of reading them, writing them, needing them or fostering them are really good ideas? authentic ideas? my ideas? what is it that language does and doesn't do with the feelings between people? how can those feelings turn back into what they once were? what they might be? what they could be again? what they will never be again? what am i writing now? it doesn't matter. i am writing now. here. again. and tonight, this is enough--to begin. again. again. at my beginning....

she called it sculpture

In the pay-what-you-can gathering where i previewed the format for the art of writing, sharing and performing poetry class i'm offering on thursday nights, 8-10pm, beginning the 14th, 4 thursdays in a row--she called it sculpture. she called it something there in the wet set of yest that makes itself whatever it is when it makes itself up. i am, what? exactly? thinking about editing. about organizing. about throwing things away. about making product. about making necklaces of story and sitting quietly on the ground and being myself, like mama tree, there on the sidewalks of san francisco, making and teaching and doing her unobtrusive thing. i am not brave enough for mama tree's life, but i am learning to be brave enough for my own. and this poetry offering is a beginning. and i am full of expectation and hope and possibility and joy and desire and willingness to grow for four thursdays in a row with the gathering tribe of willing participants edging toward sculpture. an elegant solution.

i wish i could want

i wish i could want it
the dissolution
i want
the freedom
i want
the courage
i want
the life
i want
i wish i could want it
more than wantlessness
floating on a salty sea
of expanding horizon
where
is the other side
of over there?
now that i have jumped
the fence
collapsed as it was
the barbed wire
not even ancient
but rusted just the same
fence post
laying
face down
in the muddy truth
of sacred ground.

i lay in the sand
face down to the tiny particles of
remaking themselves
bits
of dirt
and bodies
of crusted dead
shells and seaweed
and underwater worlds
of pure alive

why isn't it easier
to discern
who
the predators are
in my life?

how i can curl
up
into
sleep
and make the world
go away
for as long as i
can agree
to sleep
in this
peaceful state
of still dreaming.

i want something else now
what is it?

recovery

words
write themselves
on virtual pages
of non-existant
existing still
in the uttered unutterances
of throat chackras
full of unsaid things
unsayable even
in the day
of this night
of this day
of this night
of this day
of this night
so many string themselves together
distracting from the essences
of whatever it is that comes
from wherever it does
whoa
to finish the un
of not
what?
why
must i
put his
memory
in
the
metal
bin
of
thisturday
thaturday
what
makes itself
as offering
in the middle
of the
holy
knot
untying
its unbreakable
broken
promise?

12

i turned myself in on the same day she turned 12. i created the thing that will live in the library and represent my gradual school journey. i handed my thesis to the woman who became program chair during my tenure and we rejoiced a little in the triple goddess signatures that make up the norns of my dream team. i am done now. i am a bit of a thesis writer, it seems. i've been offering my witness and flow support for my colleagues and i really like the work. all the 12s are behind us now--and i have nothing to do but fit into these new jeans. i am five sizes smaller than i first started and so much bigger than i ever imagined i could become. life turns toward the unknown rising of the setting sun. i am here. she is 12. ta da!

no longer home

i'm in my husband's house
where my children live
and i'm in the spin--the vortex--of how i felt before i left.
all those feelings are still here--still igniting and whirling and angry and gross and tired.
exhausted really.
and i consider opening all the doors and windows and sending those feelings on their long holiday.
and i get lost in the suburbs now.
i go on the endlessly long route to nowhere and use up all the gas.
i get lost on all the iterations of bollinger canyon road--
confused and turned around by the endless string of windemere parkways north and south, east and west
i get lost.
zoey spins, too.
enters the "i don't want to go to school if i can pretend i'm sick and be with you all day" dance.
and i meet her in it--
'cause we love playing hookey and eating crap and watching movies and doing what we can to get away with our day out of time.
i buy her bras.
we go to the dollar store and rent movies.
we buy crap--but it's a dollar--so somehow the crap seems like its worth it.
and i whirl and spin.
it is crazy making for me here.
there is no place that feels like me--like mine--
and yet everything that is here is half? mine? including the debt?
and so i whirl and roar and gurgle and sputter and freak out.
we put in "the lovely bones".
we watch the movie.
i notice, she notices, that it's symbolic language that connects the inbetween and the living.
there is a tree like the girl's supposed heaven on the opposite hill.
it was the woman who built this house--it was her heaven, too.
i walked there one day--talked to raven from under the tree--left offerings of gratitude for being the thing opposite me on the hill of my never once belonging.
it is gone for me--the miracles of this landscape--and yet i remember and love and want and long for the romantic ending to my whirling.
it isn't coming.
it will never come if the emotions i felt here can't get released from this house.
we talk about the paperwork in the middle of the unfortunate night.
we will file the paperwork.
i dream about getting a bike and a job at the mall by the water in alameda.
i want to wake up and go to work and get a paycheck for awhile.
this, too, will pass, i suppose.
i am not who i was and i am not yet who i will be and i feel like that damn child trapped in the inbetween.
i feel like i might die in this chrysalis--though it feels, too, like my wings are wet from the locust i've just become.
i consider the owls, who are back, bigger and more alive than every.
i am done with that spiral of underworld for the moment.
i want to come up for air and normalization.
find a twelve step group for my co-dependency and enabling.
start over, again.
or not.

i breathe on this red couch--and i watch this gorgeous girl child of mine in her headphones and sniffles, taking notes and connecting on line with some one or thing that makes her smile. i observe but do not investigate. she's doing math homework. it's 9:30. i'm so glad we stole the day.

sorting and sifting the gifted box

when i first arrived in the hallway, during my first? no. second offering--the one where i had empty matt boards and a long string and a map i found in the parking lot and an old bulletin board where i invited colleagues to find themselves on the map, tell the story of how the got to school, write what they were doing here, make something visible in the frames of space that were available for envisioning visibility, there, on a pedestal next to the beam that connected the floor to the ceiling, i had a box. it was my box. my messy box of pins and needles and tarot cards and string and plastic toys and funny giveaway possibilities of treasure.
it was a good box. i brought it to the early kaleo and elise classes. i offered up my part of the abundance and enjoyed when people sifted and sorted their way through the excess to retrieve their shiny, shiny.
over the course of my graduate degree i have learned how to sort a box.
i've learned how to take a box of anything and put it together in a medicine wheel or mandala or any of the other fancy spiritual names for a circle on the ground. i've learned the prayer of intentional placement. i've learned the feng shui of duality and integration. i've learned the ebbo--the cleansing--involved, always, in cleaning off the life left in a thing and setting it free to live. i've learned the power of placing ritual objects, the activation a little time, attention and touch can give a thing, the extraordinary ordinary miracles of stuff engaged with, enlivened, and then ordered neatly in a place they go--a home--a room or compartment or place all their own.
yesterday, i situated myself on a blanket by the bamboo in the garden of the foam god. i intended to weave--which is always what i do now--in no particular order--with no particular pattern required. robbyn came down, gave me a box, and it was my privilege to sort and sift and enjoy and make and play with all she offered.
there were love bird whistles, green, and lots of them.
there were shells collected from the oceans she had visited.
there were beads of plastic letters.
there were barbie doll heads and red cowgirl boots.
there were dominoes.
there were rocks.
there were dried roses and a wad of carnation.
there were glass vials.
there were glass vials filled with colored sand.
there was one clock.
there were tiles.
there were dreams and stories tucked in, breathing in a labored way for all that was stuffed inside the quiet of that treasure trove.
we all have these boxes--
and there were two yellow candles in purple glass caverns waiting to be lit.
i found virdell, asked her to light one, and then pass me the lighter.
i put my flame next to hers and set the center of the circle.
two candles separated by time.
the gold clock between them.
and then the birds in their paired up ways.
and then everything else sang out their place in the circle
moving in symmetry
and imperfection
and landing in relationship to the center, the whole, the guys right next to the piece ready to be placed.
and as i layed these treasures in a medicine wheel on that blanket on the earth--
and moved and danced between the objects in my counterclockwise way
and heard the whispers of what was wild alive
and what was ready and dead enough to burn
it was my joy
to put things in the fire.
to let what is dead go up in smoke.
to tell its story of having lived
in the curlicues of air
rising up and out of visibility
into the ether
of remembered
prayer.
it was my joy.
it is my joy
to know how to do this work--
of sifting and sorting boxes
and replacing contents
in their ordered whole
and giving life back what is still belonging
to this side
of the up in smoke.

and today, i come to work in the black hut and find myself doing the same ebbo with gifts for the studio/gallery space we house here in the common era, the c.e., the come explore space of becoming.

and i realize this is my work--the sum and point of all i do.
i find, receive, sift, sort, cast my gaze, bring my lover's touch to the life of the object, put it where it goes in me, thank it and all who labored to bring it all the way into being in my presence, honor it for its willingness to play with me, and put it all back where it goes.

this is what i do. this is what gets done. this is it.

thank you, dear robbyn, for your box of treasures.
i am grateful for the exercise
and recognition
of all i've learned
since offering my box...

flesh

grounding in the morning after, i sit at the gifted table. there are such treasures on the street. i am reminded, the gifts are under the stories. the stories of a thing are not related, attached or embodied as the thing itself, being itself. i consider what it is to be in *my* body. to come to know *my* embodiment. to find its center without the aid or acceleration or energetic response of anything else. i consider what it is to just be myself with myself and to let all the stories i have about neeeeeeed and want and fear and anxiety and loneliness and lovelessness go back to where they came from--poof--like the kids did with their poofers--children in the room running with their magic sticks poofing things into and out of being. wands, i suppose they were. sticks with happy ribbons freed from plastic cages and dark spaces of lonely and waiting to be used. these were on the ends of their sticks--stapled? glue gunned? time travels from the here to the now and disappears again. i sit. i move toward the bath. i love to bathe.

in the body

in the body, one knows when one is hungry, tired, lonely, afraid. one can tell what one is feeling--because the sensation lives in the body. in the body, there is weight and gravity. in the here and now, there is no story. there is the sunflower laying in the water on top of the blue candies of glass in the clear bowl on top of the celtic dance of a diagram woven with cat hair that covers the free from the street table surrounded by four chairs that lives here at the edge of the become yourself kitchen. in the here and now there is sweat from the ice cold water now disappeared from the clear glass standing on the blue of the tablecloth. in this moment, here, i see my hands doing their thing on the keyboard of witness carefully pressing the one key and then the next into words on the white screen. in the body of this now, i find my way back to this blog and i let words travel. i realize in the space and time i have not been blogging that there are things i want to say and things i don't want to say to others anymore. i am uncertain of the state of the purge--of the seductive way the truth likes to tell itself in dramatic shades of unloved and unloveable. i'm interested in retiring that story and maybe even all of the stories so that i might free myself to ride the energies as they present themselves. the world continues to spin. the stories continue to tell themselves. the hours continue to pass. the who and what i become in the empty hours of the now--the unwitnessed, unwitnessable now, it is something invites the quote he wrote, put on the back of the card he made for three antlers that lived in the studio:

by Magritte:

everything that's visible hides something else that is visible.
we see the word as something outside ourselves, when,
actually, we have only the imprint of it in our heads.
Thrust from the earth toward the sun, a tree is an image
standing for a kind of joy. To comprehend that image we must
be quite still, like that tree. When we move, it is the tree that
becomes the spectator.

In the forms of chairs, a table or a door the tree continues to
keep watch over the agitated spectacle that is our life. Later,
when the tree has become a coffin, it disappears into the
ground again. and when it is consumed by flames, it vanishes
into the air.

i think of stilling myself.
i think of falling silent.
i think of being quiet enough to breathe
quietly
here in the moments that arrive as now
watching the blue green chord do its dance in the breeze.

i breathe.
i sit still.
i put my head down.
i wake when the phone rings.
i answer.
i move now, toward the ever opening door.

starting and sifting the offerings of over

i'm moving things.
i'm moving things and organizing things and shifting things in the become yourself space, in the sun gallery studio while we teach there, in my self as i face the ocean.
i'm still not comfortable in my own skin.
i keep manifesting places to be and people to love me and when they do i somehow remain too much--to practiced at the persona of myself and not enough my comfortable self.
i don't know how to be comfortable as myself.
i don't know how to get out of my stories of myself and just be.
still.
as i close the doors on this master's degree in transformative art, i don't know how to just be.
being is all there is to human.
and today i admit i don't know how to drop into the human being of my self.
self.
self.
self.
self.
self.
self.
self.
self.
self.
self.
i sit in the supply closet at become yourself and sift and sort and take things to the offering spot for the adjoining studios.
i do not know how to love myself yet. still.
and this is impossible...to teach or share or be for another until one can come from knowing how to do this for one's self.
i share the journey outloud as a means of confession.
i continue to need to confess....

the church of the farmer's market

we started life today at the "please love me a little more quietly--and preferably after 9:30" request--waking, knowing today was our day to hang our art and be in our space together thinking and dreaming and imagining the what's next. we moved slowly--into the unfolding day--and decided to attend the church of the farmer's market in jack london square. we found a gleeful elizabeth on her birthday--heading off to hang glide and survive. we nuzzled our mentor, there, at the jewelry booth with the dealer that adorns her with the exact hue of turquoise blue that is the reverberating truth of the woman that holds such powerful circles. we bought stuff to make dinner--almonds, berries, the gorgeous pasta, some carrots and other such things. we walked by the water. we looked out in dreams. we shared stories of theme songs and imagined the become yourself solid gold dancers. we dreamt womanfire out loud and talked about the pussycatdolls i don't need a man song as if it would one day be true. we fell into a gallery and then dreamed aloud the kinds of men we're looking for...without really looking for them. we came home to become yourself, had the last of ms. aksen's initial circle offering for lunch, and then fell into nap and laundry respectively. we woke, went on another outing to see the island beyond the island between the here and the there of the airport. we found the glass house by the water that makes for a beautiful teaching space. we circled back home and hung the artwork we've collected from the friends we've bought it from. we harvested the basil from the happy plant that lives on our counter. we hung yemaya on the front door. we put up cate white's dirt clods and rainbow piece. we hung ms. aksen's portal. we put up the mirror and moved the little secretary under it. we ground the basil into pesto with pine nuts and yummy hard luscious cheese. we set the table and lit the candles. we each read a poem before the meal. we ate and decided the meal was so delightful that we needed wine--from the silver fairy cups we both grew up with. we toasted this delightful day of unfolding dreams. we adjourned to the gallery/studio space and made collages into this late on this night. and it was a perfect unfolding of a lovely day of artful touches to an otherwise ordinary life. *this* is transformative art. living life creatively, making the most of every ordinary moment, sharing deeply from the well of what is loved. we decide dinner party instead of overwhelming event for next week. we continue to unfold into the grand of the opening.

the only upright card in the reading...

when i was 23? the cards that leapt off the shelf in the groovy seattle bookstore began to teach themselves to me. that was 21 years ago....
my deck, ralph blum's norse tarot, has been a constant companion since then and i turn to it when i'm ready to hear some unadulterated truth. i do not read commercially--or do any of my spiritual/metaphysical stuff for money--but over the years, i have shared reading and intuition and stories about what i see with friends who can use what they can classify as wisdom for their own situations--and leave the rest as my own particular world view. but tonight, i turn to my own cards to find what they have to say to me.
today, we showed up as the black hut with some borrowed materials from sun--tablecloths an old wallpaper sample book--and some new materials we purchased on behalf of spread kindness, and we did our art thing in the wind with the families assembled in the pittsburgh family center. maria and her family brought backpacks and cupcakes and ideas about kindness--and we arrived as the black hut and did our own personal brand of irreverent sharing of art materials and truth. truth as we see it, at any rate. truth, the way we can share it out loud in banter and joy and sting and bite and overwhelming love. the abbot and costello versions of just sayin' it like it is.
in my little blurb about who we be, i said, after mark's eloquent explanation of kindness, my little piece about sometimes we are and sometimes we aren't--and extended my invitation to make a mess. and then the families came forward and made their prayer flags with ideas about what kindness means to them--and we laughed and made and enjoyed and got messy when the wind wanted to blow the plates into and onto the bodies of the people, all dressed up to receive their backpacks.
there were lots of moments--beautiful moments--when we were all who we were in a natural conglomeration of givers and receivers and sharers and art makers and mess makers and laughers and enjoyers. and then we exhausted all the photo ops and recorded all the "what kindness means to me" soundbites for youtube. and then we went for coffee.
and we drank coffee.
and then we showed up like ourselves and steered the conversation into uncomfortable places of truth and dare.
and we were who we were.
and we laughed and told truths we might otherwise have kept hidden, deep, in the dirty corners of our own psyches.
but because we invoke this sacred clown--who tells the truth to the naked emperor and makes possible the rich and beautiful tapestry of levity for the profound, and lays open all the wounds still oozing and pusssssing under the surface of things, we were all able to find some way to be and laugh and ease up on this earnest kindness thing.
we all want to show up good in the world, it seems--
but sometimes we aren't.
and when we aren't,
we're better.
it is always like mae west said...
and invoked the sex goddess and laughed out loud and spoke in my southern accent to soften the blows of the goooosh and whooosh of truth zinging across the table and it layed some people way more open then they might have gotten otherwise.
and this, i suppose, is good.
it was good for me, at any rate.
and so i thought about all this, when i met someone i could have bedded if he smelled better and cruised around oakland thinking if i was brave enough to find some event to attend and meet someone's eyes across a crowded room and before that stood outside the studio of my captain to casually invite him for a drink if he had opened the door either one of both times i knocked or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or...
the truth is, even in the starting with over, i have know idea how to do what is next in this part of the unfolding future of my life.
and so i sit in the tiki bar at the end of my street and i draw on the bracelet i've made myself from a cardboard tube reclaimed after pulling all the tape or string or...what is this cardboard tube from? i forget.
but i doodled on it, as if my magic markings would make it beautiful.
and i looked as my dear friend and medium posted the pictures of us--me in my large gifted t-shirt--looking matronly and wide as i laugh out loud in the pictures of us being us at the spread kindness event.
i am not a sex symbol anymore.
i am not going to find my next someone looking like a starlet.
it will have to be me this next one wants...
me, the wide way i am now--
no longer wide eyed--
no longer young--
and even before that, it will have to be me that wants and loves and adores myself enough to allow for standards to replace desperation.
i do not have to bed men who don't smell good just because i want to feel desired....
oh, god--these confessions of the pubic sort are...
what?
self-indulgent?
where is that line?
between sharing the real? and creating the drama? and indulging the self in ways that are not transpersonal?
transpersonal...
this is the idea for the art, life, sharing, writing, being alive in public...
that my journey is a mirror and a microcosm and a connecting link in the stories that spin off from here--
me, the biggest butt of my own jokes...
fat bottom girls played from the juke box in the tiki bar tonight, where i met the bartender and we shared stories of the neighborhood.
i thought of the gorgeous queen who penned the words, sang them out, stairwayed his way up and down heaven--isn't that what the club was called in soho? where he was reputed to be? down in the dungeons of ecstatic yes? where there were whips and chains and pain to be enjoyed by all those who like that sort of thing with bravery enough to move their fantasies out of the fantastic realm and into the twentieth century? it was the twentieth century when freddy mercury was doing his beautiful thing?
it's the twentyfirst now.
i arrive home after spilling my second drink in such a way that i felt comfortable to drive the block back home.
i come into our BECOME YOURSELF space and light the candles for the prayers i'm praying for myself and others these days.
i sit at the black hut reading table and lay out the cards in the way my grandmother showed me.
she taught me solitaire.
a hundred different forms of solitaire.
i used her games to teach me the cards when they first gave themselves to me--way back there in time.
i layed them out--pulled out the major arcana as they fell out of the deck.
the one and only upright card in the major arcana is the fool.
i am the fool again--
again at my beginning--
heading out to meet the new initiating teachers in my unfolding world.
i am, again, the fool in my own deck--
the sacred clown--
the abbot? to raven's costello? or are we both the fat ones?
fat bottom girls you make the rockin' world go round....

performance art? women's spirituality?

performance poetry? performance? ceremony? ritual? margaret spoke--in a final blessing--"it is done"--for the thesis--just turn it in. then, we talked about the future. a phd at ciis? in women's spirituality? "let's get honest," she says in her life leveling way, "that's what you're REALLY doing...". i consider. i feel so close to what is possible for myself and my life in the black hut. i see what is unfolding at BECOME YOURSELF. i navigate this divorce thing with the support of a creative community. i look out the window at the container gardens in the shared courtyard of a whole community of artists. i am close...where are the cigars? i consider. i consider. i consider the man in the opposite kitchen in the yellow shirt turning on the knobs of his gas stove. i am writing again. i am writing the first blog entry since the last blog entry i will never get to take down? for the computer that is no longer mine. disappeared on the day--the june 30th day of completing the completable. i am complete. is this true? am i complete with my master's program? with my marriage? with this moment in this time at this window looking out onto this little corner of the world? it is curious to be writing again--and writing about whatever comes. i was trying to describe this to the poet i live with. she and i share poetry in all the awkward moments of trying to figure out how to stop talking about things that don't matter. we go to our shared library where we have co-mingled our sacred books and we pluck what is ready to be spoken. tonight, ee. i look at his picture on the cover of his 100 selected poems. i look to see who selected them. ee himself? i consider, if i saw him on the bus, would i have known the depth of him? what do poets do for their day jobs? i consider. i consider stories and ideas and dreams and the uncashed check for $25 for winning the poetry contest--the chaparral poets--proving to myself that poets do, sometimes, get paid. i still have the first $25 i earned as a poet--or i never had it--as i never cashed the check. is having the check the same as having the money? i think not. i consider. we are nearing the end of our art teaching summer camp gig at sun. we will not renew our relationships in on-going ways there. it is bittersweet--like all of life. like chocolate. like my husband being in cabo with our children for the next seven days. i consider the bath. i consider the bar with the dusty blow up frog on the roof--close enough to walk home. i consider the bed--cozy and waiting. i consider that i have never just dated anything for very long--that i am one for falling in love with love and the one i'm with. i consider that i do not know how to start over--and that knowing how or not is not keeping me from having to start over. starting over. starting with over. ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. yes. a theme for the blog.

oh, god of second chances...

and so there is opportunity to begin again, and a class assignment to have a blog, read others, make comments. and so i revive what i began the very first night of the jfku experience as it made it self up with me. i begin after coming to this part of the end--this beginning of the end of the gradual school journey. god, i am so dramatic. i am always talking about beginnings and endings as if they are somethings--some threshold, which i suppose they are--some way of starting something. gotta be starting something, gotta be starting something. it's interesting the way the brain works now--with youtube videos and the ding, clang, ring of bells and the sounds, always the sounds, of the ambient noise of my surrounding life. i think of it all in terms of transformative art. i am forever talking about john cage. i like the whoosh and boom of it. i like the sounds of the songs that can not be sung as songs. i like the web of interconnection punctuated by footsteps down a long hallway while a noisy keyboard tries to keep up with the synapses firing their sing song nothingness as play. meaningless play, that means everything.

i am spending my days with my collaborator at the sun gallery in hayward turning 6 and 7 and 8 year olds onto transformative art.

there are lots of old school teachers who taught it their way that sort of hang around wishing we were more obviously structured--or so i imagine.

and there are kids and parents who get their own kids and just need and want a place to let their young artists come alive.

and there's us. arriving in my painted mobile studio. raven carrying one of his many animals. we arrive, sit in circle, be ourselves, do what we do, open the cupboards, provide inspiration and permission, and notice the flow of energy that comes up from these 21st century kids.

they are smarter, as they arrive, than we will ever be.

i should speak for myself.

i watch them put themselves together, replay for us what they've heard at home, find their amazement at the answer, which is always (if they're asking me), yes. yes. yes, you can do that. yes, you can make this. yes, you can use this. yes. yes. yes. yes. and no, i'm not going to tell you how to do this, how to make this, but if you ask what you're making how to make it, it will tell you.

i say this.

i say this often.

i say this multiple times a day.

i notice that i am forever in the play of this.

i notice *this* as transformative art--whatever this is--some combination of yes, permission, freedom and everyday art materials and the story journey that takes place privately in the act of making inside each precious being who journeys toward making. these story journeys are sometimes shared--sometimes evident--but always recorded in the making of the making of the thing of the thing.

it is always collaboration between the hands and the imagination freed and the space that sets the stage for this freedom.

What is Transformative Art?

Transformative art is an individual or group expression of the body, mind, soul and spirit as they transition through life. Transformative art connects the creative doer with the inner and outer worlds of the self and the other. It is through this expression and creativity that conscious awareness is opened, leading to deeper wisdom, health and balance.

Welcome

Woohoo! Thanks, Elizabeth. Next stop, what IS transformative arts??? :-)