Another Year ~ Another Chance to Keep Breathing and Living and Loving.

My New Year's resolution is to relax. Which is easier said than done.

Happy New Year!

Oh, Time! You just keep flowing… there is no stopping you; there is no stopping us. We just flow right along with you. How relaxing it is to let go of flailing around and trying to swim backwards or sideways or any of the contortions we make to feel like we’re in control.

I’m not knocking control; certainly not in specific extremely helpful ways, like keeping your hands on the steering wheel so your car doesn’t drive off the edge of a cliff.

But in the big cosmic why are we even here way, we are not in control. Did we make ourselves? NO, we just showed up here in whatever strange and wondrous circumstances we found ourselves… with people who also did not make themselves, or their circumstances, or their DNA or ancestral imprinting.

This is a strange world and people are strange. We’ve always been strange and flawed and scared, and scary too. There may be a few places and a few bank accounts that make a few people feel more safe and protected than most of us feel, at least in a external way. But high walls and money can’t protect anyone from the interior experience of being alive.

What does it mean to RELAX?

I’m getting better at feeling my body’s energy. When I pay attention I can feel where I’m clenching my body. And I can consciously relax. But what happens when I divert my consciousness elsewhere? I need my unconscious energy distribution systems to support me in my work, in my living. There’s no quick fix to soften what is congealed… time, sweetness towards self, the humility of asking, a willingness to feel beyond fear, into the wellspring of fear, with love and kindness. And gratitude.

Relaxing, as I’m describing it right now, does not mean plotzing. It may involve exuberant activity. It means flow… allowing energy to flow through the body without too many barriers of fear or trauma-based tension. Oh, my dear friends, so much easier said than done.

I find it impossible to ‘relax’ in this way without coming to terms with the universe, with my existence. What are the terms? It’s not just letting go, letting flow; it’s having faith in the big goodness, the big sweetness, the big rightness, that underlies all the tragic sturm und drang of this world.

Faith is letting go—letting go of trying to protect myself in ways that hold me back from full-hearted feeling and doing. Faith, for me, is a poignant, almost bittersweet feeling. It sort of hurts. It’s hard to let go of way past sell-by-date methods of self-protection. Faith is an aspiration, not any kind of done deal.

Doing is as doing does…

This is the year of doing, of daring to do, and seeing what happens. I keep coming back to the sense that what matters most, or what will make the most difference, is a deeper engagement with self, and I also understand that it is the mobius strip of feeling/doing that is the game here.

Of all the projects I’m working on now, the one that scares me the most is the webcomic, Daisi & Jane, because whenever I manage to push my way through the force field around my studio, and sit down to work, it asks so much of me.

It asks me to be a system, or a conduit, for translating complexity into a coherent hologram. It asks me to have a faith in myself that does not come easily. It asks me to be an artist.

Artmaking requires the kind of relaxation I’m talking about—allowing solutions to problems to arise intuitively, from the body, rather than being browbeaten by the mind. Mind is there of course, but it’s a servant; not the boss.

Where am I going with this?

When I started this publication a few months ago, I had no idea what it would become, and I still don’t know, but I know something… I know that I want to share process in artmaking and in living.

I find other people’s sharing of process so helpful. It’s not that I want to be or do exactly what they do; I just want confirmation that I can notice and embrace my own experience. I want space, and I want space for you, too.

Sharing the minutiae of art-making is a way for me to look at systems and processes in a more targeted and probably meaningful way than my usual impulse to talk about the big everything all at once.

Most of all, sharing my process gives me courage. Instead of feeling that I am supposed to make something perfect (which is not going to happen) all by myself before I show it to you, sharing my experience of trying and failing, or succeeding, or just getting to the next place, helps me to accept that I am always learning, changing, growing. There is no need to hide this. It’s the path. It’s the only practical way to get anything done.

A New Year

Whether or not we are marking a new year, there’s no time like the present. It’s the only time we have. In spite of, maybe because of, all the sadness and fear and suffering in this world, let’s do our best in this new year to inhabit the moment, to love the moment, and use the moment to share that love. My love to you, dear ones.