O Coast

Was I here to serve something great or just driving through?

There had to be more that I could do than just try to transcribe the ocean’s everlasting poem, I walked further

It got darker the sand wetter and behind me was Mars burning through the darkness, circled by a thin shell of light, ferocious red, as if he too wanted to peel away the heavy veil and peer beneath

At the water’s edge I thought of how thin and changing the line is between the enormities of 2 life spheres

I wanted to convey more than just the pictures of the path to the edge of the world

somehow summon terror and beauty of being alone, being alive, being deathless, being together

The Rising

 

Bruce once talked about

the difference between

believing  that one’s soul

has an independent destiny

and understanding that

Our souls are all somehow

tied together and that we

‘All sorta rise and fall

Somewhere Together’ ..

I’m not sure

It’s a spectrum, but through

the lifework of Springsteen

I have been swung toward

the latter – A great Family

of souls both beyond our

comprehension and right

there among us in the dark

crowd of ancestors and

friends like Joey Hold’m

ready for the lights in the house to go down

and the Boss to count one two three four

 

2005 .. Ttown .. Final show

of Bruce’s solo Devils & Dust

tour my second show and

my dad’s very first

with Joe and Karishma-

Bruce dedicates ‘Long Time Coming’

to his children up front and begins

his ode to breaking the chain of

destruction and abandonment

and forging one of fulfillment

family , health, and love.  I feel

A profound feel of time felt

simultaneously from my father

and I, a joy of being alive together

Here present and ready to

‘Bury our old souls and dance

On its grave’

Bruce calls out

‘We are all going to the same place!’

The River

The River is a promise with dams and dreams, a journey within fighting to become flesh, fighting the squares of bars in time and spirit, fighting all broken things into roundels and river stones

The River is beginningless memory (as you never can see the beginning) and the narrowing future, widening for this present moment, an endless movement of breath into song and dance into body, and being in this motion is an unlocking of illuminations

The River is a place of spirit, a traveling kiss, a mother’s eyes, from some small tear in the sky to the great violet light of the ocean. In following this river we are returned somewhere familiar and endlessly new, with love, a light old as the soul of the universe willing a world, in following this river into our wilderness, here freedom

Sea Lion Caves

‘Sea Lion caves in the dark..’  -Sufjan walks us to the edges of the land, everything glowing in a half light, He holds our hand and lets it go, leaving us alone at the entrance of a pure darkness, a void, a cave of swimming lions, it’s slippery here at the mouth between the ocean and this emptiness, shimmering blues and greens await our eyes, growing black holes into each other, we do slip, pulled in by a wave, we are taken away, by understanding darkness we become underwater illumination, what we see in this strange room of music.. spirits momentarily leap from the water and everything returns to you.. somehow..

that’s what we attempt to do in our art.. Fit the feel of the entire ocean into a dark room

‘the simple fact is that forward steps and backward steps in the ghost cave in the mountain of darkness are just one bright jewel’

-Dogen

The Fam

The Family

goes beyond Life

and Death

Perhaps that’s what

we can all strive for

the attainment of a welcome

a door opening into the circle

some Great Family of Spirit

beyond life.. the dancing

gravity

of Love

 

Perhaps it’s just for a feeling of

Family

that be the root

of all pursuits

This Wheel’s on Fire

Was alone when I woke knowing I’d missed some work I was supposed to do

I wandered the blue mist through steep cobbled streets and the mall alone confident and lost.  I was thrown awake again after doing something forgotten like opening up a seal and was being hurled towards the hotel wall by an undeniable abyss of light, not darkness, pulled through the bed from a tentacle or woven rope of energy that struggled like a giant squid at the seat of my spine *ubanda being hunted and dragged toward the ocean’s roof by a sperm whale wild with a hunger not belonging to the ocean, as if a spool of fire fused to my lower soul was finally being furled madly into a vomiting black hole

In the emergency I grabbled Nilaya and we both were being pulled into the power too unknown and she like an underwater iron kept me on the dream’s horizon until I could shake myself into consciousness, though all the rest of the day she was invisibly cross at me because there was something I had known about or done to call this event upon us that I couldn’t reveal but now as I’m trying to remember I can’t.  She took me up the hill to a theater which had shown a play she saw when I had dozed off about the Lakota and heroin.  What was making me feel embarrassed about being afraid to be pulled into the carnivorous death of the sun?  Somehow it always felt like there was so much left to do.

I woke and my left arm was gone, I looked over my left shoulder and it wasn’t there, but then I look above my head and found it like twisting over me like a pasty deadlock and I put it back over my body and stared awake above wondering what I had uncovered and what truth was it I had hidden and forgotten where.  First light was streaming through the yellow dinosaur glass onto the painting I did when my father was lost in the White Sands desert for an eternal seeming afternoon.  I heard my phone buzz later seeing it was actually my father writing from Switzerland  ‘EVER! felt u – we’ll call u.’ When my arm came back I put it around sleeping Nilaya and I held her as my twitches from the nightmare buzzed into her warm unaware presence.  Later I told her she had saved me from Apocalypse (not the one dressed like Mr. Freeze in that terrible movie) yes she saved me but was somehow unsympathetic.  ‘That’s real Love .. or .. something.’ She said and I imagined John Lennon writing a song, holding the emergency of art making so near.

Whale Rider

Monday painted the green blue of seeing the sky from underwater.  I put Galgibag sand and pine needles, green iridescent dye, Cobalt acrylic, alcohol and set it on fire.  In the fire I threw Red Holi pigment, and blew the fire out.  Beneath the canvas was a hoop, which could be the mark of a lifetime, whose absence marks the infinite, or when lifted presents the world of spirit, the brokenness of the hoop connects us and indicates a wholeness that engulfs us.  When a piece is on fire, decisions are made from emergency, true and from the body.  The fire unites the materials and all the colors burn together and become warmer and darker.  I was painting the moment when the girl let’s go of the whale and disappears into the blue green.  There is a smog of the whale’s blood, beached for so long and not wanting to ever leave her dying pod, her family.  The green was wrong- too forest-so I painted it all blue, then it froze overnight and the next night it rained the mess into pools and blue mesas.  To leave the painting out for the storms is to let go, and give up control of its visual and emotional destiny, It’s to grasp the hand of the storm and become the storm, the painting gives into the truth of change and impermanence, and the storm becomes visualized and in a way is the agent of change made permanent.