the play in darkness, taboos, money, rebirth, sex, and transformation

day 52

reversed ace of wands

67 degrees, thunderstorm

last quarter

cycle day 16

I’ve been super stuck and the pressure is inviting me to reach toward folks for support. It’s good but it is also intense.

Assigned questions:

In a practical way who am I? And what do I want to be or do? No opaque language. I am x and I want to do y because z

Take a yellow pad. Write I need x to live. Money exercise. Budget.

I think I need ____

Twthf; each day reach out to one person to have coffee, lunch, studio visit, someone I might want to work with.

Response:

I had to look up “practical”, that’s how distant I am to that word right now. Definitionally, “concerned with the actual doing or use of something”. So the question is: who am I, as concerned with my actual doing and use?

This question makes me cry so perhaps that’s a start. I’m a person whose interface with the world seems to be (in comparison to other humans whose perspective is impossible to know) of a highly sensitive nature. This makes contending with this question of doing or usefulness feel heroically awful. I feel a lot, absorb a lot, am sensorily present to being. This seems antithetical to actual doing and usefulness. Or I maybe it doesn’t, but it does makes me responsive to inputs which keeps me on shifting sands. Or maybe in water? Probably both. In any case, volatile.

Okay, but what is it that I do. I may have to parse this sentence out because usefulness seems much too large a question just yet. I meditate. I arrange materials in space to create environments. I write. I listen. I dance. I connect with the people with whom I interact. I rest. I walk. I read.

I don’t know that any of this is useful but I know that I am at least minimizing the harm I might do. That’s as useful as I think I might be able to aim. I think taking care of myself so that I am able to be present and responsive to other beings is useful. I think dwelling in the Way is useful.

Ugh. I’m getting on my own nerves here so I can imagine I’m getting on yours. I’m not trying to be obstinate. I’m legitimately struggling with this question.

The next question: What do I want to do? I very much like everything I currently do. It just doesn’t seem to fit into also being economically viable which causes stress and I don’t like that. I think if money were no issue I would like to do everything I currently do but with an increased quality of attention (mostly won from disengaging with worry). I want the things that are most important to me to have the most space in my life. I want to wake up and be responsive to what it means to be a part of one breathing organism. I want the things I do to be dependent on what is asked of me by the act of existing relationally, through emergence. I want to rest when I need to rest. I want to be of service when there is need. I want to listen for the invitations of each moment in accordance with the Way and respond. I think a religious order might be a physical environment conducive to what I want to do. Except I don’t want to live separate from “laypeople” I like interacting across a wide range of humans and cultures and I don’t fully agree with any existing ordination (unless there’s something I don’t know about).

Okay, let me try again, in less opaque language. I want to listen to people and connect with them in their suffering and in their joy. I just want to be alongside other beings so that we might better hear what it is to be rather than do.

Okay, let me try again. I want to write and share that with folks. I want to be still out of doors and indoors. I want to move my body in joy. I want to attend to a simple life of eating well, waking well, sleeping well. I want to make environments that are functional but don’t serve the purposes of colonialism or capitalism. I want to be a part of healing the nature-culture divide by having time to attend to my own healing and by a humble place-making practice. I want to love and be loved. I want to be frivolous with creative impulses in solitude and with other beings, I want to invite and be invited into collaborative conversations.

I’m interested in doula-like work. Supporting folks in the chasm spaces.

Perhaps I want to labor, broadly and freely, but with a concentrated and devoted quality of attention to our collective well being. I’d like to have my basic needs met so that I can give my full attention to care. Wholistic care for the little place I inhabit. I want to nourish and respect the land, water, and air that sustains me through slow living. I want to create a shelter, a home, that nourishes and respects the spirit of being human.

Perhaps I’m saying I want to be in the ministry but not in an evangelical sense or in any rigid doctrine. Perhaps I’m saying I want to do not-for-profit work. Perhaps I’m saying I want to conceive of a singular project that I gather myself toward and then seeing where I go from there.

Okay, from that little jumping point, let me start again.

Right now I want to speak (and live) into the possibilities for a higher quality of life within the structure of capitalism. I want to refrain from reproducing life patterns built on war and exploitation. I want to be working in and for Appalachia. Not really because it’s more important or interesting than anywhere else but just because this is my home. I would like to have funding that allowed me to meet with folks. Like office hours and coffee dates where I bear witness to our becoming. I would like the time and space to make a slow, accumulated work about one place.

Pace yourself, I imagine you already need a break. I acknowledge that I am a tiresome student. How is this so hard?

Okay, what if I tried again, this time unabashedly. Can someone please pay me to be a member of my community. As a member of this community I will commit to practices that cultivate compassion and wisdom. These practices include mediation and study. I would like to be invited into a niche because as it turns out, I’m highly relational and it feels absurd of me to presuppose what purpose I might serve. I will gladly write a book or make an animation. I would gladly serve as host to a space. I like connecting with people in one-on-one encounters. I like  paying close attention to how things look and I like making slow-paced but wildly imaginative interventions. I’m asking my community for a niche.

Can I please request that I am not too strictly imposed upon? I very much don’t want to be micro-managed and am able to be most consistent when things remain flexible.

I am a healer. A knitter-together-er. A knot tie-er. A tangle-maker.  I want to live simply and warmly counter-cultural because I love humans and I want us to live better now, and into the future.

Lord have mercy. What does this mean? What’s the project. Can there be an anti-project? Can someone pay me to do no harm, I want to share with others it’s just that I think that is probably best attended to very quietly and organically.

Okay, so say I live this life. Say I figure it out. Do I need to have a project that shares it? Or am I really more of a minister than an artist and perhaps sharing is not the aim?

The sad thing is that I really have tried to answer your questions and I really am this stuck. I suppose admitting this is a first step but I don’t know where to go from here.

I have voices in my head that are telling me I’m not so special as to be exempt from the work that the rest of everyone else has to do to make it by. I hear a certain someone from my past telling me that this is all well and fine but I just need to get a job and live within the means that allows.

I don’t want that to be true. I don’t want that to be why I’m here and how I’m here. But I suppose it’s possible that I need to be broken. I suppose it’s possible that I’m spoiled and entitled. That I’ve lived off my parents and then a husband and now is the first time I’ve encountered reality. I suppose it’s possible that it’s time for me to grow up and get on with it. It’s possible that I’m delusional now and have always been.

I don’t want that to be true and I don’t think it is true. But is my next experiment to stop making it harder than it has to be? To accept that I will spend the majority of my time laboring for someone else’s profit, building a world that I don’t want to build? Is it time to accept the confines of a schedule and find the joy and meaning in whatever it is that I’m tasked with? Am I just another ugly product of my culture who thinks work should be meaningful? Maybe I’m being a brat about it.

But I think not. I think it doesn’t make sense to work for a pay check that provides a quality of life that, at best is won on the backs of others, and is at worst, miserable, rushed, and hollow. I don’t want to squeeze meaning out of break times and I don’t want my children to inherit that either.

There’s a part of me that wants to do the assignment better than this. There’s a part of me that wants to condense this into a respectable paragraph. But there’s a bigger part of me that really wants to get to the bottom of this. So I’m going to let myself be seen here. Torturously, so. I’m going to subject myself to a point of view I might not want to hear. That has hurt me in the past and I’m afraid of my fears being confirmed. That it really is just me, maladapted me. That there isn’t a place for me, in this form. That the real growth is to get a fucking job, any one I can find, and get on with it. Shut up about art and ethics and revolution. Get the job and see after that.

This assignment has it’s roots in my asking about guidance for an art project. Is that the wrong starting premise?

I am a capable problemista. I am from Appalachia. I was raised “gritty, resourceful, with a well-developed instinct for problem-solving”. I am totally overwhelmed by the financial burden I have. Do I need someone to help me? Am I not capable? Do I need to radically alter my life so as not to have the burdens? Where is the art? Does it matter? I know I can’t manage to think about anything more than money til I decide on that though.

11:06 pm

I started my day working through this question and am just now getting back to it. I don’t have the time to edit down as I know it needs editing, I apologize for the tedium. By the end of this day I sorta decided that my sentence would be: I am a healer and I want to invest in placemaking and community building both as a private practice and a public invitation because I think that is what is required for our individual and collective thriving. Perhaps what that looks like in this very next season is advocating for alternative housing solutions (geodesic domes in my yard) and changing my building from residential to mixed use so that I can offer it for community building as it intersects with ecological intelligence. I think I need to ask my community for what it needs/desires and where my gifting might intersect in dissolving frameworks of division. I would like to conceive of a project that is service oriented and raise funding without needing to (totally?) rely on profit for sustainability.

I did my budget too. I wrote the break down on paper which is downstairs and too far away for my tired brain to retrieve but I will send tomorrow.

Thank you for the assignment. I’m sorry it’s a more giant job than maybe you anticipated. Absolutely no rush on getting back to me. I’m going to reach out via instagram (since its so late) to someone in the political/community building/city planning/not-for-profit sector to fulfill my final assignment for the day.