Lying in the Mud Waiting for Rain

Another sleepless night. Now I know what it feels like to get thrown under that proverbial bus. It's an experience that has a demoralizing quality like no other. The wheels start to spin and dig their muddy ruts and there seems little chance that the bus will ever extract itself from the pit to roll forward again. The gears grind and we lurch from side to side.

I truly think I'd rather be under here than on the bus at this point. I think I am going to welcome the role of scapegoat and run with it. I think I am actually uniquely suited for the role, and that it fits me well. Blame me for everything. It makes sense.

Part of my minutes-taking love is the sacred role of impartial witness, observer of all, interpreter, person who frames things with honesty. I try so very hard to do that. It's a spiritual practice to me. I think of myself as someone who pursues rationality, contructs sensible and productive narratives even when there is chaotic action to describe. I don't think this is delusional, though of course tonight I am working over my delusions in fine detail trying to see if I am really the dissembler I have been accused of being. It doesn't fit with who I believe myself to be.

But I'm a person who understands being really wrong. I am the gullible innocent, and don't try not to be. I think it's part of what allows me to approach that level of honesty I try to get to. I can be fooled. But I can also see patterns and repeating attempts to confuse and I can articulate them. Not that it helps. People who haven't seen the patterns tend to not believe in them and the more the description extends, the more the listener can edge away. There's an instinctive discomfort to get away from things that one doesn't have the capability to follow or understand. Gaslighting comes into play. The sensitive noticer becomes the one at fault. Protesting adds more words. Someone who exposes misconceptions in such detail must be constructing one. People throw up their hands and won't believe anything.

Lots of metaphors I could use. I wish I could tell the story in concrete detail, but it's depressing and the best strategy is to endure until more pressing matters arrive to wash the bus down the lane despite its broken parts. Pack up the tools and pick up the next piece of work. There's still plenty to do, and there's no better way to rebuild trust than to pick the work up and resume doing it. Start sawing, start stacking, get that woodpile lined up straight and don't forget that winter will arrive whether or not all of us are ready. Summer will flee while we fret and analyze and fiddle with the details of things that are going to have to creak along somehow. With or without us.

I have the strength to be the scapegoat for awhile. I've made enough mistakes that I certainly deserve blame for some of them. I made my kid eat school lunch, for heaven's sake. I'm guilty. Blame me.

Dump all your blaming and your shaming and all of your accusations, dump them right on me, right now. You get two more minutes. Get it out. This is a limited time offer, but it's wide open. Blame me for every little thing. Let's all throw it all out there and then we can let it go up in smoke. We can bury that hatchet once we chop all of our flaming blame into little tiny pieces and stomp on it and make sure all the fire is out. Get it done.

And then we can get back to work. We still have a lot to do, and we're still stuck with each other here in our little mud pit we made. We're still going to have to shove each other around a little until we can get comfortable for the long haul. We keep finding a lot more problems to pitch into this soup. We keep trying to make something beautiful happen with what materials we have.

It's always worked before. I've been through this: being wrong, being blamed, being seen in the wrong light or called hurtful names or bruised with the thrust of someone else's defense moves. It wasn't about me then and it isn't really about me now. It's about our need to climb up, out of the pit, and the way we sometimes step on each other when we do that. It's nothing personal, that muddy boot on your shoulder. You're supposed to climb out too. At some point someone else will reach back and give you a hand. It's not a story that has an end to it.

Hardly a story at all. Someday I'll tell you the details, maybe. Probably they don't matter. It's when I tell the details that people start edging away and thinking I'm too serious about it, too intense, maybe even hysterical. Been there? Let's keep trying to make a world where that doesn't happen.

Jeez it's bad

I haven't been writing, Perhaps you noticed. I don't have a theme or a subject I've been mulling over, or something compelling I just have to say. Probably shouldn't start, but I remembered that when I am troubled or rootless it has helped to write. Don't have that faith at the moment, but something has to be different than watching Colbert while I doze off in my chair and then going to take a hot bath, read for a few minutes and wake up at dawn to worry some more.

So many things are falling apart. I had an hour or so of feeling good this morning but that was killed by another long and difficult meeting. All the meetings are long and difficult these days. When we laugh it is with ironic detachment. We don't let ourselves feel much, we save that for when we lie in bed in the morning and feel like we don't want to get up and we don't want our stomachs to be tied in knots any more. It seems pointless to cry about it.

We probably don't all feel that. It's going to be sunny so there's a little glimmer of hope that says maybe I'll get some happy moments. I will, because I am easy to slay with a flowering shrub so when I walk downtown for one of those meetings I walk under those flowering chestnuts and past the quickly changing neighborhood of mollis azaleas and rhodys and sometimes even see a plant I don't recognize or hadn't noticed before. There's one dogwood I have to check on that's glorious. And I have a pair of Bewick's Wrens in the neighborhood, and a bushtit's nest in my fir tree. So there are those things.

I get a little thrill by the Little Free Libraries but I don't have time to finish the paper so it isn't a good time to get more books. I smile at people but they trouble me with their desperate energies and their transparent faces that I try not to really look at. Every so often I see a person who seems okay, but only rarely one with no worries. Maybe in the summer. We've had a lot of rain.

It's the beginning of my busy season. By some miracle of discipline I finished my big order on the day it was due but I didn't feel the love like I used to. I used to muse how each shirt was given its meaning by my hands and would go off to be treasured forever by the lucky hard-working volunteer who got to get it sweaty and hang it from their belt when they weren't working, make it into a quilt or wear it until it falls apart. I used to feel a connection with each person and be happy to see them wearing "my" shirt but I'm pretty heartbroken by my Fair world these days. Some of those people wearing those shirts are pretty hateful toward some of the other people wearing my shirts and some of my shirts shouldn't have ever been printed I guess even though they were done with pure intentions and no malice. They were made to bring us together but I guess "us" has changed. And we might have broken up, not sure, because we're not answering each other's texts.

It's not just Fair that's broken, the Market broke too. I'm pushed into leadership I was trying to move away from, a little, to get some peace for myself, to get to garden, to get to read, to get to do my work that I will soon have a ton of. I've been bullied and manipulated, and in fighting that off I took on another big challenging task, to change the bullying culture. My efforts will be tiny drops in a sea of meanness. Tomorrow I go in to watch more bullying and see if I can inject a tiny bit of wisdom or helpfulness in the midst of it, but I don't have a lot of hope for that. Maybe. Sometimes things don't go as badly as I expect. It's not all dysfunctional behaviors people should have learned about in grade school. Lots of people are trying to do their best, but they don't always know what that is. Sometimes things are a relief.

I'm so far behind in transcribing minutes of meetings I can't face it long enough to make a list. I'm going to have to work all of my days off for weeks to catch up, and we keep scheduling more meetings. I'm either in charge or being the note-taking witness, or both, and it's all urgent and it's all uncomfortable as hell. And listening to it again while I transcribe doesn't usually make it any better.
And making it about me is the exact wrong thing to do. Some time in the empathy tent would help perhaps, but as soon as I clear one worry away a new one springs forth. At least with the minutes I get to leave things out that shouldn't have been said.

There's no hope of being inspired. There won't be a special peach tote bag this year, and the only hat design I can think of is "Someday we'll laugh about this" but it comes with a derisive snort. We're nowhere near the laughing stage. Selling is still fun, especially to the students who love my hats and say things like they're the best thing they've ever seen in their lives, but all the tourists want to move here and you know how that boom town story goes
. I get a few hours of pleasant feelings on Saturdays but probably for the next two months I'll get a lot of concerned or angry members coming to criticize, try to get some reassurance, or simply to let me know they have no idea what is so hard about what I'm thinking and feeling, because they have the simple answers. It has been a long time since I thought there were any simple answers.

So yeah, the plants and flowers, and the birds. The humans are not doing so well. Who would have thought one evilly stupid person could have spread so much shit over everything, even the things that are really not related to politics? Who could have predicted that we had so many bullies waiting to be empowered who are now gleefully causing chaos everywhere? They must have been holding it in. A truck with a confederate flag drove right by MY HOUSE yesterday. Colleen, to her credit, yelled at him. I couldn't even raise my voice to do that.

At least I truly do have a few allies in this with me, a few people who know how it is and are working for the same goals as I am. Fewer than I would like but maybe more than I know. Some people are doing better than I thought they would. Some new people will come along and be even better than that, I think. Rising to the challenges is always gratifying on some level. Plus I registered for the parade and asked the Radar Angel Jell-O Artists to be in it with me. 

And then I remembered that it might be a lot of work. The fun part might be really worth it, but to do it well means I have to use that discipline I am so good at and stick with it and make it happen. It's again, up to me. Did I really give myself another challenge when I am feeling so unable?

Yes, yes I did. I decided that I didn't want to miss the parade and the chance to be a Queen, a chance that might not come again like that. I feel overwhelmingly vulnerable, and the wrong thing to do is make myself more vulnerable by revealing what I really care about that might make me look a little not exactly normal, revealing what I really care about that makes it something I can't afford to lose, something I have to work to protect and save and make whole again and somehow preserve to care about some more.

I keep thinking about the practice of filling the cracks in broken crockery with gold. Taking something precious, that's ruined, and putting something even more precious on the line to make that point, that this is treasure worth saving, that we have to hold it together until the gold hardens and the piece will stand on its own again. We have to. And we will.

Because that is what we do. We rise to challenges, we work harder than we want to and we work long hours and sometimes the hot bath is the best thing we have to count on. We make do with that until things get better. We didn't really think we lived in a rose garden without thorns.

This is hard on me. This is hard. I will try to do my best to make it less hard on you, and you can try to help me, and we will do the work and put our world back together. At least this small corner, we will preserve and protect. We will make our Market stronger and more polished and even more full of vital life, that which has built us and we have built, and we will ripen our peach too and somehow hold onto our flamingo family as well, somehow we will hold our friends until they can stop being hurt and angry. Somehow we will do these things, carefully and slowly and we'll make it last as long as we can. I'm not letting go of any of it. I'm melting gold. 

Here I am, in the late night, melting my own heart so I can push it back into shape. That's what I wanted to do. Thank the dark, thank the pain, thank the heart that can still beat through it all. There will be summer, a parade, lots of them in fact, there will be some laughs, there will be some results of our work, and someday we will laugh about all this. There. Fixed. Goodnight.
  

One thing finished, a pile of other things to begin

It was a terrific Jell-O Art Show as usual, and I marvel every year at the way the limits disappear and I am able to do so many things that I would normally avoid...the persona of the Queen takes over and I can extend much more generosity and social ease than I can do as the hermit worker that I really am most of the time. I'm still feeling vulnerable and depleted but also buoyed and rewarded for all the efforts it took to get to today.

I truly do dedicate myself to the show and the Angels efforts and serve as this essential link to the gallery and the public that strengthens the show and the community...and I was doing this to a degree for the 24 years before I was Queen Gelatinaceae of the Jell-O Art Realm but in her embodiment I can carry several hidden roles and still end up loving it. The depth of emotion in the troupe and in the art of performance itself is something I am still learning about. This was only my fifth performance (I was crowned in 2012) and I still have a lot to learn about the fear/fun divide so that I can spend less time in the fear part (manifesting as worry) and more in the fun. I simply love the costumes and props part, and will spend hours at home working on that. I love to sing and dance, but wish it didn't come with anxiety.

Making the Jell-O Art itself is getting harder in some ways...I have less interest in playing with it and more interest in some deep artistic process and statement, so the theme is important to me, even though I don't follow it in some discernible way sometimes. The theme, Fool's Jell-O, was wide open and I was in a zone of deception and imitation...thinking about how fewer birds come to my yard, whales are still being massacred, and the obvious present assault on our planet is really our biggest problem. Combine that overwhelming anxiety with the antique bell jar that created a space used in history for preserving things from the passage of time, or keeping them safe from the effects of the environment, dust, light, etc. worked to give me this kind of simple concept and elegant presentation which wasn't really what I envisioned but did satisfy me.

Practicing greater simplicity is a goal and the script was more streamlined as well. I wish I would have crammed more jokes into it and done this or that, and I didn't give myself a solo or lead to a song, but played a supportive role for the most part and held down some of the emcee and director duties to be responsible for the flow and action. That worked mostly, with quite brilliant assistance by the fabulous Jester Jacque who gamely stood at my ear in case I didn't have it down. She also helped me with the parallel duty to sell my shirts which is something that doesn't fit with my Queenly duties during the public show. I like to try to recognize and congratulate each artist and let them know how much we all appreciate them and love their work. I work with the raining Slug Queen or whomever represents her, to try to get them the right space to give the benediction, and do lots of tiny things to keep it all afloat. Of course I am not the only one doing any of these things.

A big thank you to Bee who held down the shirt table and apparently did most of the work as lots of shirts went home with people! Next year will be the 30th show so I don't mind that we have a few left over. Thanks also to every single artist, young and old, and to the staff and volunteers of the gallery who are wonderful to us and improve the show every year. Having seating in front was great and a lot of people really appreciated it.

There is no way to encapsulate the gratitude and appreciation for the rest of the Angels who are each and every one amazing with their generosity of time and talent. It's important to acknowledge that they do it for love. It takes a lot of meetings and practice and it's hard as hell for that to all be over in less than a half hour and consigned to our rich history. They find the parts they love to do, be it dancing or singing or playing ukes and kazoos or making costumes or promoting the show to their friends and families. 

Indi deserves an entire book for her many contributions as the true goddess and glue of why we are still doing this after all this time. No one wants to let her down! She is patient and wise and kind and without her it would not be what it is at all. The funniest part of yesterday for me was that a young TV reporter was trying to interview me with a tight deadline and the whole time Indi was behind her dancing and making big gestures which I could not look at but also could not ignore. My peripheral senses kept asking "What would Indi want me to say?" and "What is she trying to tell me?" and it kept me guessing and even brought tears to my eyes once to the dismay of the reporter. I don't think she ended up using the interview at all and after I looked for it on the website I realized she didn't have any lights or a real TV camera...she was using the interview as notes for the little article she did. It was terrible but it's awfully rude to say that so I won't repeat it. I can be so mean and nasty sometimes. I want to be understood! I do not want to be quoted in a terribly grammatically incorrect run-on sentence that I swear I didn't say! But yeah, it doesn't matter and since it was the only media coverage we got I should be a lot more grateful. We'll make a bigger splash next year when there might not be a sportsing event grabbing all the attention. If there was a spot of me talking on TV I didn't see it, and I'm okay with that, too. Roger Rix, who is the official photographer of the Slug Queens, did a fabulous group of photos that you can see on his Flickr stream. He really captures it so well you can almost hear us.

I have three weeks of things to do in a week starting tomorrow so although this is my chance to get my photos processed and posted and write all the things about all the other artists and what they brought, I'm going to go outside instead. I have weeds to pull out there. I can't write about everything at once the same as I can't do it all at once. I will try hard to follow through. I can't even get into my deeper feelings and document all that I learned, but I'll hope to return in not forever to do more of that. I hope to get a video in a few weeks and will try to post more photos. Stay tuned I guess. Probably you are outside yourselves, as sun is rare and we need it. Be well! See you back on the Park Blocks next Saturday!



 

Scouting for Truth

I do love having the framework of Jell-O Art in my life, especially now when I need something so deeply creative, so buried in that part of my psyche. After 30 years of it, I've long passed the point of thinking of it as something wacky or trivial. 

I know plenty of you do, but that hardly bothers me now. Art is art, no matter the medium. As my vehicle for self-expression, it has taken me far further into art than my craft of screenprinting, or even writing, as it uses my whole brain, my body, and my visionary projections. Skill is involved, and the regular problem-solving that any effort takes, from doing dishes to changing the world. It lies on the spectrum of creativity in a not only solid, but delightful way. The fact that it can jiggle does not make it fall off that spectrum.

It does hurt me a little that people think I'm silly. I rarely am, actually. I'm pretty hard on myself about all of the ways I am illogical, and have developed a quality of scanning for a greater truth. I heard a TED talk about this, about the different operations of a "scout" personality as opposed to a "soldier." I shy away from military metaphors but see this more as an explorer scenario. You walk into an unknown woods on your way to an unknown future home, and the scout is looking at all the plants to see if some are familiar and might be food or building materials. The soldier is thinking about the miles walked or to be walked, about a tent site, about enemies, and wondering when the scouts will come back with the needed information about what lies ahead.

The soldier trains to follow leaders and rules, to do what is written in the book. The scout looks at the leaders to get a sense if they are leading in a helpful and honest way, to get to the destination intact and healthy. She looks in the book to see if there is some guidance that might apply to the current situation, although she keeps in mind that it might not apply and might need a little revision or variance. She knows the rules, but won't follow them to her peril, but rather decides repeatedly what the next step might be, according to the gathered impressions, facts that are available, and ways to interpret the facts that might be questioned or shifted to be seen in a new perspective.

Simplified, but I had the insight to see that I am a scout. Of course I still struggle with the good girl and rule follower that I was raised to be, but that scout spark was always in me and caused me a good deal of trouble as the second child in a family of five children, four of us girls. We were raised Catholic with reservations, indoctrinated but with plenty of seeds of doubt sewn as well. We worked together for the family goals, notably on Saturdays when we all cleaned together while we sang. 

We also fought for dominance in hidden as well as scratchy and bitey ways, but that felt bad and at some point I stopped competing with oppressive forces and started going around them. Parents only have so much attention and approval to dole out in the capitalist consumer society. Dad had to go sailing to deal with going to work, Mom had to keep everything shiny. Both of them were scouts. We were supposed to be soldiers, like all little kids, but you know how those things go. Or went, in the 1960's and 70's. The Fifties were soon over.

Nothing was idyllic, but it was functional and my scoutiness was satisfied through science and nature, as I spent most of my time in trees, on trails, and on the water, when I wasn't inside a book. I was good at school so made short work of it and gained the skills to use my mind to articulate and evaluate. I loved diagramming sentences, writing lab reports, and creating a system of order, but at the same time I was thinking about other possible results, other facets, other versions of what I thought I was observing. I scouted my way to here and still kept looking back, still try to see that inner landscape that helps illuminate the outer one.

Who knows what parts are nurture or brain patterns that were instinctive or inherited, what parts are damage and which are gifts? I tired of analysis with professionals after years of it. It was productive but when it came to changing myself my stubborn resistance didn't respond to authority. As soon as the therapist assigned a task, I was on the way out of the relationship. I would comply to a point. I am really not a follower, though I can certainly cooperate and have a sister loyalty that comes in handy. If your mind is large enough to question things, I'll want to see inside it. If it is too small to allow any shifts in perspective, I'm not going to bother trying too hard.

I'm a natural complier, since I like peace and space to create, but I do not submit well to authority. If I comply, I still resist inside. I will, intentionally or not, subvert and find a way to do what I feel is best, based on what I know is a wide range of gathered detail and a solid perspective of "what if?" I'm not going to act based on your assumptions unless I have also come to those same conclusions, or can allow that they might be as valid as mine. At least until we can gather some more relevant facts.

Which is not to say I am not gullible and coerced, because nothing inside my brain is so neat and tidy that I can't be fooled. So I am often fortune's fool, or someone's victim, and it does hurt when I figure it out. I actually have a very developed process around it and do many steps of analysis each time it happens. There's a brain pattern and a behavior pattern and I feel that it is a human's duty to other humans to recognize our inner workings that way. If you try to run your control and domination fantasies on me, I will resist, call you out if I can, and work around you with all my might, unless I can avoid you altogether. I don't need it and it damages me to deal with it. It's one of the things I am most sure about in a shifty unsure universe.

To be evolved humans, we first must recognize the patterns that trip us, and the ways we allow them to be set up or set them up ourselves. We have to find ways to stop ourselves from making the same mistakes, scan our woods for better solutions, clearer paths, ways to gain skills to avoid following the wrong leader or the flawed rule. Then we have to have some courage about changing course, communicating if we can, forgiving those who were in error, and ultimately, forgiving ourselves and moving forward with an improvement in functionality if one is available to us. If we can grow that way, which we usually can if we are willing to apply the effort.

Humans are so small so often. I include myself in this. It's easy to complain, to blame, to feel outrage and anger at perceived injustice, to make a judgement. These fall-back emotions come when we are not sure where we're going, not sure if we have a clear way forward, and we get scared. We all get scared. We generally make the mistake of going into a defensive stance...like a soldier. We prepare to fight, and when we fight, we must win. We must dominate.

Yeah, no. Domination is everything wrong with what is going on in our world right now. People making choices for other people based on lies, poor fact collection, biased observations, and illogical assumptions, will make choices that will not serve us. They will pull back the scouts and pick a fight with the people who are cultivating the berry bushes right there, because the soldiers are simply hungry right now. They won't find the communal patch that everyone is welcome to pick from. They won't even think that there will be one.

Reading about the slave-breeding history is still my dominant field of study, and I happen to be reading about Andrew Jackson, and as a scout I certainly see the spin of racism and where it wants to take us. It's all about profit and domination and we are mired in it again, despite the advice of the many scouts out there looking for ways to treat each other better, to not repeat the mistakes of the past, to not go down a flaming hole to hell in the next few years. We may have to live in hell someday, but we don't have to go quietly, and we can drag our feet the whole damned way.

It's my feeling that there are many more scouts than soldiers in my generation, due to the lies we were told in our formative years and our subsequent explorations for a better version of some truth. I would venture to say that this is true for every generation, as each has had some galvanizing experiences that helped them see lies and spin. Maybe the younger people are the most clear of all of us...that could well be true. I hope it is. Lots of them are watching, and lots of them are speaking up too.

I have gone from despair about politics through that shock and awe campaign and am there, solid, in hope. It might be somewhat foolish to base my future on hope. I had a hard time trusting Obama about that, but it makes for a lot better path forward than any other motive. In my smaller worlds, I am not so sure hope will serve, but actually am placing my faith in education. I want these scouts to have all of the available knowledge and accumulated wisdom of our human existence to help us stay on a path that will keep us alive, and with a modicum of happiness and joy, and keep us holding a bit of faith for the future, a core of hope that will convince us the hard slog is worth taking. 

Like the pioneers or Lewis and Clark, there will be some self-serving interest in there and inevitably some greed to assuage our deprivation, and it won't feel balanced for a long time, if ever. But all of the scouts are out there, on the edges, looking with their sharp eyes and applying their sharp wits and learning, learning, learning. Taking notes. Doing research. Asking hard questions. Speaking truth to power. 

And many of them are making art, some privileged few with Jell-O. I know, it's food (kind of) and an animal product (but made from the things that are thrown away) and you think it's silly and a distraction from other more important kinds of art. But bend your mind to the idea that it's the essence of what is true. Clear, colorful, wiggly and alive, made to bring only 
joy and delight, made for you, made from our hearts, and really really not what you used to think about a showy commercial product made of industrial waste and chemicals that destroy health and life that is owned by a major corporate dominator out to kill us all. Some people even think it tastes good (I don't eat it if I can possibly help it.)

Let's not die from it. Let's have a laugh about it. Thanks to all for the Ides of Trump, that was fun and exactly the kind of thing that is super effective on a soul level. Our souls are hoping we will keep our heads under control, and the weapons locked up. See you on April Fools.