Archive for the ‘Observations’ Category
Experiencing Bliss
Today is the birthday of a friend, someone I’ve not seen in quite a long time but a friend none the less – someone who is very close to my heart. I have that little reminder that pops up on the side of my Facebook page to thank for that notification and I have her to thank for lifting a veil, for calling me out, for changing my life.
It was maybe six or seven years ago (how time flies!) when we first met and there was some chemistry there. So we had a thing and I had a thing for her. We spent a bunch of time together all of a sudden, just like that. I was in my usual (at that time) space-surfing-no-home-to-speak-of mode, painting, partying, traveling a bit here, traveling a bit there. She was a painter and pretty focused on a Tibetan Buddhist path. At that time, I think she was in school, I don’t remember exactly. Anyhow, this is all just auxiliary information. The point is: there was a spark, a fire, a reflection, and I respected her.
A conversation one evening went something like this:
“Michael, you smoke a lot of pot. You’re stoned quite a bit.”
This was certainly a fair, inarguable observation. In truth, I would hazard to guess that I’d been stoned for 300 days a year, at the very least, for the previous eight years. Illuminating when you add it up like that. I had, in any case, gotten high at least once a day for those three hundred days. Some of those days – in the midst of the painting binges for instance – were spent in such a haze that there was no in or out, high or low – it was just one long sustain and all I could do, or think of doing, was keep myself there. While I may have felt I was productive in my painting, in retrospect, I wasn’t productive in much else. While I may have been experiencing great highs, I certainly wasn’t integrating much.
“Yes, well… I may smoke a bit in the morning, take a hit or two…” But I knew it was a tough one to argue.
“Well, to be honest, it’s tough to hang out with you because there’s always this veil – this sort of space between you and I. In fact, it’s between you and the world. Really, it seems sort of selfish. You end up forcing everyone to get through this veil and you’re in there but it takes some work to find you. You’re not straight forward with life. You’ve got this veil to hide behind.”
Well, she said that in so many words.
“So, really, I like you a lot but I can’t really deal with the constant stoniness. So it’s either me or the pot. If you want to be with me, you’ve got to give that up.”
So I chose her. I’d like to imagine it was an easy choice but truthfully I don’t remember. I’m generally aware enough, even in the most egocentric times, at weighing choices like that – door number one is a path you know, a habit, a pattern. Door number two holds something new, different – an opportunity for growth, maybe new adventures, some light.
I chose door number two.
The short end of that story is:
Ultimately, it didn’t ‘work out’ between us. But we are where we are when we need to be there. And we came together for the lessons we had to share with each other. Giving up smoking pot broke through all kinds of things – suddenly life was REAL. In fact, it was so very real that I started drinking heavily because all kinds of emotions came up – sadness, depression, loneliness, attachment, wanting, craving, everything! – and they were quite hard to deal with because I’d never actually dealt with anything. I’d lived in my head and my daydreams for so long that screwing my head back onto my body was, in fact, rather disconcerting. I didn’t know how to handle it and I freaked out for a little while. It was sort of a heart wrenching/heart opening time. The drawing above, at the start of this post, was drawn during that time. It is called “The Heart Dance”.
For people who say there is no addiction in marijuana and no withdrawals… Sure maybe for the recreational smoker, this is absolutely true. But, as with object of addiction – whether it be alcohol, drugs, television or hamburgers – if a person finds that it helps to squelch the real emotions that they don’t want to deal with and it works, and it makes them feel good, they’ll keep going back for more. That’s addiction. Take the object of attachment away and everything it was being used to block rears it’s head. That’s when it turns out there are a lot of demons down there. Granted, marijuana likely helped me in many ways – it was a tool that I had at my disposal; a teacher in plant form. But, as with any teacher, as with the parable of using the boat to cross the river: once you’ve made it across the river, it’s best to abandon the boat. For all I know, I’d been lingering on that shoreline for far too long, hanging out with my boat.
So for a little while, all I seemed to be able to do was calm the demons while I learned how to deal with myself, knowing I’d get back to the darkness. So I worked with the tools I had, picking up new tools along the way. I worked on finding a center (and dealing with the urges and cravings that sought to pull me away from that) and figured, however consciously, that I’d get to the darkness. All good things in their own time!
Ultimately, when I got back to painting – by that time it was in Costa Rica – my work was so much more present. I was more efficient and my lines and approach crisper than it’d ever been. To top it all off, I was having these experiences that actually felt like they could be integrated into my being and I began to understand what “Being on the Path” really meant. I’d never realized what I was missing. I’d thought, for a long time had convinced myself, that I ought to be high in order to paint. I’m sure I’m not the first artist to fall prey to this belief. Now I found a deep reservoir of creativity, an endless and boundless spirit, and I found I had the skills to illuminate it. As I passed through these things, so did the emotions rise and fall, rise and fall.
Through that process, as demons have come and gone and challenges have been met, I’ve discovered more than I’ve ever dreamt. I’ve pushed myself and allowed myself to be pushed in ways I’d not imagined possible. And I’ve found something inside, something nameless, shapeless, wordless, some truth, that allows me to participate in this world, through my work and my interactions with others, in a way that is truly enlightening.
This friend helped lay some groundwork for all that came after. She is someone who helped me to step onto my path and be who I am – and admit to myself who I am – without just living a daydream of what I might be. So I say happy birthday to you, my friend. And thank you. May you live long. And prosper.
This one is dedicated to you.
May all beings experience bliss.
Being Who We Are
I had a conversation with a friend today about separating business from, well, business. She was working on redesigning her design portfolio (as a designer, for websites or otherwise, one is often considering and reconsidering the design of one’s own website). Be that as it may, her website was in need of a facelift and she was doing a fine job at it. She sent me a link to her new design site however and it was vastly different than her art site (she’s a painter as well). It didn’t add up for me and I mentioned that I liked the art site much more – it had such a nicer feel to it. And the design site, well, felt like it was a different person all together. Really, it felt forced.
She said she was felt that maybe the art site was too “psychedelic” for her general design clientele.
But that’s why people go to you, I said, because you’re an artist with a good eye. As long as your site has a clean, well-organized presentation, who cares what your life is like? I mean you’re an artist! A person may be looking for a graphic designer or a website designer and come upon your site and realize that your art is great and want a piece of that on their project. Not your art maybe, but your touch, your vision.
Well, I said that in so many words, anyhow.
The point is though: there is a voice in our heads that holds us back from fully stepping into who we ARE, from allowing us to OWN it. Instead, it compartmentalizes identities and then hides those identities from each other, lest they be like Voltron and unite to be this all powerful being. There is the business face. Maybe there’s the artist face. The mother face. The father face. The buddy-at-the-bar face. It’s tough, it seems, to just embrace all of these different aspects as one whole person and go out into the world like that. This is who I AM.
When I was 21 or so, I’d painted The Three Jewels and it was hanging in a cafe. I thought to myself: Oh, God, now everyone is going to know everything about me. After all, onto that canvas, I’d poured out all my insides in so much fractalized layered madness and exuberance. It was, admittedly, a pretty psychedelic painting. I figured that now everyone was going to know that I’d taken some psychedelics at some point in my life. Including my parents. Including the government. Including, well, everyone. Whoever “everyone” is.
Well, it turn out that my parents were content to turn a blind eye and, when it finally came up at some point or another, I didn’t care so much what they thought. As for the government, well, they could give a shit. As for everyone else: well, the people who think that’s a bad thing aren’t going to get it anyhow and both the people who think it’s a good thing and the people who don’t care – it’s obvious from the get go.
So life went on. I learned to own that piece of me. In doing so, I was able to hold my head a bit higher, walk a bit taller, straighter and not be afraid of standing out when I might stand out.
Later, I started to work with clients. I had clients. This was a new thing at one time. For the self-taught, self-educated computer geek it was pretty novel.
Anyhow, as time went by and I started to work on lots of different projects – websites, flyers, logos, commissioned art – I realized that I should show this stuff somewhere as a portfolio. So I created a website for it, separate from TenThousandVisions.com, my painting website. It was a nice website but nowhere near as nice as my personal site. I realized that I felt fractured like that. There was this one person over here who was busy being a “graphic designer” and this other person over there being a “painter”. And yet, both had a similar task before them: presenting information in an aesthetically pleasing and intuitive manner. Ultimately, the “resumé” of my paintings was, I felt, stronger than anything else I might show. The other stuff is there because I can. The paintings are there because I want to. In my humble opinion, hiring a graphic designer who has an endless creative urge to just create is going to bode better for your project than hiring someone who just creates because they get paid to do so. My two cents, anyhow.
I did realize however that sending my site to someone I’ve never met might throw them off. They might be like – whoa, look at this guys art… and then they might make a judgement. And decide they weren’t interested in hiring me.
And I realized that the person who makes that judgement isn’t someone I’m likely to want to work with. The person who says: this is cool, I want a touch of that on my project – that’s the person I want to work with. We already get each other from the beginning.
Mind you, I have all sorts of clients. Some are very professional to the point of being pretty straight. Others are, well, puppeteers or channelers or what have you. All of them end up feeling the same way: one person who is being who they are in life who is working with another person who is being who they are in life.
So it’s a leap of faith: stepping into who you are because it suits you best. And yet, it’s a leap that you know – if you don’t take it you might as well step aside. I don’t want to present a “business face” only to make a buck. I might as well put on a button up shirt and go sit in a cubicle somewhere if that’s the case. At that point, I’d just be fooling myself.
Listen, it’s best for everyone if you just step into that person who you want to be, who you are and own it. I mean really 100% fully and completely OWN it.
The Small Figures in My Work
Using my smallest brush I painted a small figure standing atop a flame, holding onto some sort of physical structure like an axis with 45 degree angles. The figure is checking out the view from up there, so to speak. It’s a pretty far out view but not a very big canvas. The very tiny person up there – really just a silhouette with perfect little curves – was painted with my tiniest brush: a #0 Kolinsky long handled brush, a lovely brush, really. I’m afraid I’ve almost worn it out.
As I placed the faintest of dashes to suggest a left hand, I thought about my habit of painting very tiny people into my paintings. I always paint them not in relation necessarily to the canvas itself but, instead, in relation to the smallest brush I have and in relation to the largest thing going on in the peice. I want them to be small. The painting, no matter the size, usually has similar sized small figures. They are always making the canvas seem huge because our eyes pick out the shape of the figure in it and relate then to that shape. It is sort of in the same way the we anthropomorphize all kinds of objects, placing emotions, etc, upon them. We see the shape of a person and we relate to that shape and then relate to the rest of the image in terms of that figure. With the paintings that have these tiny painted figures I want to create the greatest sense of space with them: a sense of grandeur and depth maybe; a sense of approaching the infinite and, really, being very small in that view.
The first painting I think I ever did like that is perhaps the oldest of all the paintings that I have a record of. The painting, titled Surrender, has a small figure atop a mountain, realizing he is a speck in comparison to the divine. There are all sorts of paintings that followed and not all of them have a main character, so to speak, but those that do often have a very small main character. Maybe it is me, experiencing a freckle on the little pinky toe of the divine. Compared to that pinky toe I am a speck but, in my enlarged versions anyhow, I am at least a quarter inch tall, an estimable height, perhaps, but, comparatively, a mere trifle in comparison to the forty eight inch tall painting.
I like it like that though. I wouldn’t paint the figure any bigger for two reasons. One is that I’d have to paint details on to the figure – a pair of pants maybe, some shoes. If I were to do that then Mind would have all the more reason to either relate or not relate to the figure. “O,” one’s mind might say, “I wouldn’t wear a red shirt, that is certainly not me.” or “My hair is long and that figure’s hair is short” or something like that. These statements are, generally, a little more subconscious than that but the point is – by choosing how we can’t relate to something, we give ourselves an exit from the experience. By making the figure tiny and with few, if any, distinguishable characteristics – their gender even – the character is all the more universal.
The second reason for the tiny figure is that a bigger figure would, I believe, have more dominance in the composition than the experience of whatever is going on. I’m not so interested in painting the expressions of the figure, gestures, etc, unless that is what the painting is about. The expressions and emotions of the figure are, likely, already captured (or attempted to be anyways) by the subject of the painting. That is what the piece is about, not the reaction of the figure. The reason the figure is in there is to give the main subject of the painting a bit of relativity.
Essentially, I want YOU to experience whatever the figure might be experiencing. Whether it is in the outstretched arms wide open big sky feeling of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants or the sense of casting off the weight of the world in Flowers for Atlas. The subtle gestures and forms of the figure in relation to the grander piece suggest an emotional, psychological or spiritual state of the figure and, thus, pass this on to the viewer.
We walk around all the times with our heads so big and full of ideas, however grand or however trivial, in a world that is, generally, built in direct proportion to our bodies and our senses of self. When we pull ourselves out of that world and experience something like a mountain ledge in the Tetons with some kind of epic view and a tower of a mountain behind us, or thunderheads and a sunset across the Great Plains or stand upon the rim of the Grand Canyon, we realize, we get a sense, of our true proportions – a speck – a mere punctuation mark in the grand book of the universe! I would say that I paint these small figures to remind myself of this as much as share the feeling or sense with others. We’ve all been there, at some point or another, and we get so wrapped up in “our worlds” that it’s good to be reminded of it sometimes.
Breathing Space
What is this painting about? What are any of these paintings about? These most recent ones I mean. This recent spate of canvases I’ve spread myself out upon.
It started with a small diamond shaped painting that grew out of a sketchbook image of a desert landscape populated with freely associative meanderings. That, in turn, spread to another small canvas – 4 x 6? something like that. That one was simply dashes upon dashes in consecutive rows creating a gradient background from deep purple to yellow gold to white. It has developed into something rather delicately precious- dark, bright, sharp – a bit like an insanely concentrated version of The Dorky Painting.
And then – a canvas of a large woman on a divan painted in oils during a figure drawing class – or was it the oil painting class? I don’t remember now – but the canvas had been tucked into the closet, a memory best forgotten and I gessoed over it turning it a bright purple square that quickly turned into even more free associative exploration. No plan. Loose intentions. Within the pattern of dots, and the loose meanderings of the brush, a figure with wings appeared, leaning forward, with wings outstretched as if on the downstroke. This is a figure that has been with me since I first learned the capital-D Dance. It is a figure who has had various iterations and can be seen in other paintings – the first of the Praises series for example – and in various positions but it is all the same dancer. The painting, tho, as it progresses, goes further than that, touching on elements of other pieces – the delicate spirals of Limits, the moonlit cloudscape at the top of I Am All of Those Lifetimes. The archways of Passage to the Infinite. Maybe it’s a quick mental retrospective, a checklist of visual linguistics and mental cues. The painting is called “Breathing Space” and, in the end, intends to pour out the delicately crowded busy-ness of my mental space – the jittery hand, the unpacked boxes -all out onto a little canvas in a semi-orderly fashion so that the next piece can have a little more spaciousness and be a little more direct. Violet clearly stated that, as a painting, the composition is busy, cluttered, a bit unfocused. But I’m not always trying to create “paintings”. Sometimes, one has to just leave room for exploration sans intention or pre-conceived notion. Sometimes, I just need to go with it and whatever comes out, comes out.
From “Breathing Space” I moved on to another canvas that also already had some lines painted onto it. I gessoed over the lines which – a light turquoise/sienna mixture that sketched out reminiscences of a trip through Utah – echoes of landscape. In the end, it’s purpose was merely to give me something, anything to paint but there was too much of a plan and not enough exploration. I painted over it and began anew, this time I followed a loose sketch from my sketchbook although it was still from the same trip through Utah. This sketch was drawn one morning while my espresso brewed on the Coleman stove after I’d gone for a morning hike through the red sandstone arches and slickrock that all sparkles in the morning sun. Upon returning I’d opened to a new page and jotted down a few “notes”.
As always, the painting is not an exact replica of the drawing and it, as usual, expands upon the quick sketches the way a musician might elaborate on a chord or a riff of a song. The sketch captures the intention, the feeling but the painting approaches the vision more clearly. That vision is a clear and exuberant light. It is a sky and and earth and unfolding landscape. It is wings that fly and faces that gaze onwards, upwards, from within. It is intimations of summer storms and understandings of the building blocks. It is I. You. It is giving something away. It is approaching an opening and getting ready to fly. And something beyond that.
Above my desk, on a little shelf coming out from the wall, I have four photographs . One, behind glass, sitting on a very tiny easel, was taken in 1978 and is of me at two years old. The photo is slightly yellowed, a tad out of focus. In it, I’m a chubby little boy in diapers sitting on a swing. I have an eye-squinting smile on my face; laughter, it knew me as a child and knows me now. There is another picture, cut from a larger photo, and taped to the shelf, and it is of my grandparents on my mother’s side. They are in Morocco on a vacation, well retired. The picture was taken sometime in the late 80′s. My grandfather is laughing in the picture and wearing one of the shirts I always remember him wearing. My grandmother is happy, smiling, in the sun. Another picture is of my dad and I, celebrating our birthday together. His birthday is the day before my own, on August 25th. In the picture it is maybe 1993 or ’94 and I am in high school, sporting a goatee and wearing a white t-shirt I silk-screened myself of a figure, looking much like me, about to step, or maybe fall, off a ledge. No one considered that suicidal. Personally, I thought the figure in the image might one day learn to fly. The next picture, this one in glass like my baby picture, is of Violet and I on the day of our wedding just last summer, 2008, fourteen years later, thirty years since the time of the baby picture. We are dancing, she and I, and I am holding her from behind. She has a wide smile on her face and I am also smiling but my eyes are semi-closed, enjoying the moment and our movement together. We are wearing the clothes we made for our wedding but the silky white sleeveless shirt I’m wearing is much like my many other sleeveless white tees – much like the picture of my grandfather – a shirt I may be remembered for.
All together, these pictures span 30 years. Why these and none others? Of all the moments of my life – I’ve kept but a handful of actual photographs and only these four here become the photos I look upon when I lift my head to think about or consider a snippet of web code, a business proposition, a creative decision, what the next move in this chess game of life might entail.
We only have so much time to gather about ourselves the most important tools, the most integral pieces of our development and those tools show up in our lives for only so long before they vanish, if left unused. When I look at these photos, I see a series of markers. Who I was when I came into this world- that happy chubby little baby and where I came from- my grandparents (my mom’s parents) and my father. Those lead into the family I have now – my wife and I living within our creation.
So when I look at this chain of creative choices on the canvases I’ve begun to work on since, finally, settling in: why I chose this sketch and not one from some other page- the one just before it is as worthy of a canvas as this one, is it not? In fact, there are many such drawings. Why this chain of imagery, this visual narrative, and not another? In these canvas I see a progression, and, like the photographs, an s yet unfinished narrative. It may not be as linear, or as easy to verbalize as the photos but it is what has happened, and what is happening.
Back to Painting
Getting back to painting after a long summer into autumn of movement – travel and events and hiking and playing and moving and everything! Everything! And lots of it. Now all those impressions – of wide open endless blue skies and crystalline peaks and red rock canyons and canyonlands and a recent trip to the Sonoma coastline for a wedding of lovingly soft magnitude with crashing waves and tall trees and moving trucks and boxes and going through it all and plants and succulents and flowers and trees and now, living in Costa Mesa, having moved from San Diego. Now, so Violet can go to grad school at UCIrvine and I have a new studio with a new view and the new home has gone from empty echoing space to unpacked and unboxed arrangements to finer tuning of decorativeness, like putting those sweet little peaks and touches on a painting to make it glow – make it live and be alive. A painting: in one morning without a plan I started it – dots and slight brush strokes on an uneven canvas surface with an undercoating of light purple covering a painting created during a class taken in Santa Monica about four years ago. The canvas has been moving with me too long now and would never be shown. There is a two move limit to all supplies: either they are used, declared finished, or passed onwards – the canvas was never declared “complete” nor was it ever to be displayed so it was gessoed over with a light purple/gesso mixture, the purple being the second (after the neon green) tub of paint I grabbed out of the wicker IKEA drawer. The large woman lying nude on the divan whose eyes were dark half moons and whose folds were laid bare and fleshy has been replaced with sparkling stars, planes, glazes and wings… it is the beginning of a larger focus. It is impressions of a summer. It is me, growing. I fly. I move onwards. Bright colors, Blue skies. Wings and cliffs. And endlessness. Into the broader strokes, the precise focus. The point.
The Beautiful Juxtapositioning
A number of excursions recently to downtown LA – a place of a thousand flavors- it’s dirt and it’s grime, it’s old art deco buildings and the motifs that sometimes get lost amongst the construction, the plywood, playbills and graffiti. Here, in this foyer, a ceiling of mosque-like moulding leading to pricey lofts extolling the virtues of the thriving Downtown LA art scene. There a bit of an art deco sidewalk, half of it left, beneath a layer of old bubblegum, ten billion foot prints and car soot still shines tiles of red and gold and white and blue, partitioned off by golden brass fronting against a store selling stereos, karaoke machines, congos and trumpets. The neon signs and blitz and bling reflect on the 20′s style lines underfoot. Around the corner you see a curving arch overhead, twisting and twining with intricate grandeur, welcoming you into the marketplace of a dozen shops selling nintendo knock offs, hair extensions and piñatas. Delicate corners and cornices drop down to boarded up windows, the smell of urine and mexican grocers, sewing machine repairs, and parking garages, art galleries, sushi restaurants and a 50′s style diner replete with jukebox and checkerboard tiling. This is the old town of Downtown LA – the part that came before the sleek glass and steel and polished granite high rises exuding modernity and shunning this dirtied rough and tumble corner that moves into the fabric and fashion districts, lying in the shadow of the business centers. The corner where, with a bit of dusting off, one might find architectural treasures, if only one knows how to look.
Juxtapose all of that with the rocky coastlines of Sonoma and it’s an intense contrast. There – there is no ‘modern’ vs ‘rough and tumble’ – no new cliffs that transition to mexican grocers and burrito shops and the odd stylie sushi bar. There – the cliffs are the cliffs. There is no difference from the top to the bottom other than the smoothness of the lines – how much one section has been smacked and sculpted by the crashing waves more than another. The waves come churning in – wham! bam! ka-boom! Into little inlets that drop down between the rocks and then up! – up along the sides of great jutting corners – no angels or gargoyles upon those corners, no sculpted fleur-de-lis. Just raw rock, at times sharp and craggy, at other times stippled – pock marked like sand after a hard rain and then dried to a hardened shell. Along these lines, echoing the rhythms of sea, wind, and storms, we might cast anthorpomorphized suggestions of a face or the reminiscences of a body, a hand, a heavenly choir. All of it left to the imagination of one or another and the ground left to the cast offs of the ocean- kelp and other types of seaweed, smoothed by the sea driftwood, the elbow of a lobster, red and dry in the sun, or the body of a crab, brittle and speckled in delicate patterns, waiting to be divided up and cast back to the sea.
Later we walk amongst tall tall redwoods – 1200, 1400 years old – walking inside them where we were silent and still. Their stillness is comforting. It is like an ancient blanket knit by thge most compassionate and caring of elders that doesn’t stifle but instead incites within us a sense of ease, a sense of peace and envelops us in a holding that doesn’t constrict, a grandeur that doesn’t yell from the rooftops but instead whispers in rounds and creates one long bass note bottom vibration that is supportive, nurturing, warm. It is a subtle mystical experience.
I take those experiences with me onwards into this life that I lead. The Downtown LA cityscapes with their business suits and dirty streets, the homeless and the hipsters – the cornices and pillars – the cliffs and crashing waves – the salt air and deep fogs – into the sunny San Francisco skies, hills and valleys, gold rush era granite mason buildings with their own sense of urgency that has been tempered with the passing of time into the friendly neighborhood cafe (one of which, the Blue Bottle Cafe, where I was led that last time I was there, had the best cappuccino I’ve ever had.) – and on and on and on into the redwoods and their solid spirits and delicate undergrowth of sorrel and sword ferns to the cab driver who is new at all this to a morning talk, in the fog of the Pacific, with the white bearded old man, herding his sheep, sharpening his knife, talking to me about the doves that live in his barn and how lovely it is to take the squab (a young yet-to-fly dove) add a nice dry rub, stuff an onion up inside and bake it at maybe 350 or 400 degrees. And now I know… And all of the experiences, and how they are perceived, support a movement – onwards, upwards, inwards – through life.
Canyons and Edges
But what of our fearless adventurers? Adventure: One man’s adventure is another man’s walk in the park. Wherever we find our edge – therein lies the adventure.
I found Violet’s hiking edge while we were making our way back to the trailhead in Bryce Canyon. We’d decided to hike the Fairyland Trail – an appropriately named trail that leads in and out of the “hoodoos” as they are called that make up Bryce Canyon, Utah – tall sandy spires, sometimes many stories high, looking like a series of towers in some child’s drip sand castle. The spires glow with an orange/sienna sand stone, streaked now and again with white or subtler colorings of green or purple or red from mineral deposits. Dappling them here and there are twisted gnarled trunks of juniper, bristle cone pine and, deeper into the base of the canyon, Douglas firs, thick-trunked and towering over the little washes and scampering chipmunks.
We arrived the evening before when we set up camp, and showered at the main visitor area/store/etc. We were rather beat from three full days in Arches and Canyonlands – lots of hiking, play, sun, and late night star gazing. Plus I always tend to wake with the sun so I’ll usually go out for an hour or two hike in the early morning by myself. The angle of the sun and hue it casts upon the world at the hour – a sort of golden fuscia – is too precious to miss. I treasure those early morning hikes through the awakening world – usually undertaken after my morning espresso by the Coleman stove and then transcribed through notes and sketches in my always attendant sketchbook (The by-now-default Strathmore 5.5″ x 8.5″ recycled paper sketchbook).
The morning we drove to Bryce, Violet had been up late the night before, tracking Jupiter through her telescope. I, the early riser, beat from a long day, a tasty and satisfying dinner plus wine, and the warming orange glow of the campfire, had retired to the tent before her. I was up early too, enjoying the still crisp desert air. After we had breakfast and fnished packing up, we drove through the emptiness that seems to be most of Utah, segmented every now and again by ‘reefs’ – staggered and steep rifts in the earth looking as if the ground had been wrenched in two then shoved back together recklessly by some careless deity, leaving jagged cliffs rising out of the generally rolling landscape.
Traveling to Bryce on a Sunday left us with little in the way of replenished veggies and other rations – supermarkets all seem to be closed in Utah on Sundays.
“Mormons,” we muttered.
After setting up camp, showers, etc, we checked out the canyon. Yep, it was a big canyon. We went for a drive. We saw some antelope. They were shy, kept to themselves, did not respond to our entreaties. We made our way back to camp, went to bed early.
In the morning I chilled for a while, drawing and enjoying the crisp morning forest air and tall trees that surrounded us, a somewhat different environment than the Moab desert we’d left the day before.
When Violet awoke I made pancakes with apples and bananas and topped with syrup and strawberries a- good hiking breakfast. Then we packed up for a good hike. It was going to be 8 miles, not bad. I like a good long hike. The hike itself – somewhat uneventful. Bryce is certainly beautiful and I think if I’d not just spent the past few days enraptured by the iridescent quality of the sandstone and colors of Arches, then I would have found the soft glow of Bryce more inspiring. As it was, it was interesting, but not oh-my-frickin-god-this-place-is-amazing. Ah well. The landscape was gorgeous none-the-less and, the next morning when I trekked out early for the sunrise, the morning glow over the spires and hoodoos was quite a remarkable scene.
Well – it turned into a hot day, with occasional clouds coming passing overhead, a lot of hiking up, a lot of hiking down. Somewhere around mile six Violet said to me: “This is no fun.”
Admittedly, she is shorter than myself, with a shorter stride. I would think that maybe my 8 miles of walking is equivalent to her 5. The passage from Chogyam Trungpa’s “Training the Mind” on Exertion occurred to me. Here was the part where the fun was gone – the joy gone. Pain creeped up the leg, the feet were tired, the knees worked, the old track injury begging for respite. Yet, the car was not in the sight, the end not quite near, and so one had to push on. Where to find the joy? Where to find the energy of exertion?
We all have our edges. I might like to push myself with a good long hike and even when my own feet are tired, I rarely complain, but a few days before I’d had the most difficult time sitting drawing a landscape.
Some time back, my friend Robin and I were hiking to a waterfall in the mountains northeast of Ojai. The path edged over some very loose gravel and the edge of the trail dropped off rather sharply. She found herself without the ability to put one foot in front of the other. Joy: gone. Yet, she spends much of her life working with others doing spiritual counseling walking them through difficult mental traverses, and doing the same for herself. Yet, here, a physical manifestation of that experience and she was without a next move – without the will to put one foot in front of the other. The
It’s interesting how we all find our edges and when we push ourselves a bit further – we sometimes find an opening, a new view, a new vista. One way or another we come to know ourselves, the world, Life, just a little bit better, even if there are no words for that experience and that new found knowledge.
Granted, by the end of our journey, Violet found herself hurting a bit and a tad exhausted, but whatever doesn’t kill us just makes us stronger, yes? And she didn’t kill me for taking her on a long hike, so that must’ve made me a bit stronger as well!
The next day we left for the Grand Canyon and, after a circuitous trip to a grocery store, we set up camp at a reserved camping spot on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, looking out onto a softly fluttering grove of aspen, fortunately missing any of the heavy rain that that clouds seemed impregnated with. We cooked burgers of free-range buffalo over our fire, had a drink, went to bed.
And yes, the Grand Canyon is actually quite big. But more on that later.
Arches and Canyonlands and Exertion
“What are you thinking about at this moment right now?” I asked as we sat on the cool stone in the shadow of the massive red rock stone arch spanning out over our heads. This arch was a giant circle hewn from the stone by decades of wind and rain. The blue sky beyond it spread out rather infinitely with just a few little cumulus cloud puffs floating through it casting delicate shadows over the red rock towers and cliffs in front of us. We’d hiked up from a grassy valley to the stone towers and the aptly named ‘Marching Men’ rock formations and then onwards, trudging through beach like sand, passing wind blown sand dunes, delicate curves etched in their crests, and winding twisted junipers, aged and grey.
“War.” replied Violet. “Endless war. The concept of ‘inheriting war’ is so… strange… and sad. That a kid feels he has to go off to war to be a man and have stories to tell about the war because he heard stories from his father…” She trailed off.
“It’s been going on long before this – the Iraq and Afghan and Gulf and Vietnam and Korean wars… and all the little wars in between.” I replied. “Go way back – to the Crusades and such – and you have knights always going off to war and you are either going to be a knight, a farmer or a craftsman. Most people wanted to be knights – to have stories to tell of battle, to have scars… It hasn’t changed much.”
We sat in silence. I thought about a painting I’d painted five or six years before called “Breathing with It” about breathing with the tension, the inner wars and fires and waves that crash upon our mental shores. They all pass. A lot of people could use to learn to breath with the myriad phenomena that come up in their minds.
A stark black raven circled over head and called to another perched on a tall rock tower. The sun slowly circled to the west, We left our perch and climbed higher up on the rounded mounds of red sand stone, shimmering in the sun, the white sandstone glittering and the expanse of Arches National Park spreading out – interconneting cliffs, valleys, red rocks and segment of fingers of rock pointing straight up into the air.
We drove down an eight mile dirt road out to this red rock garden across a wide open grassy plain. We’d left the crowded expanse of the park behind us for this silhouette of fingers rising out of the horizon. Earlier we’d hiked through another massive arch peppered with sweaty tourists, out of breath from the quarter mile hike to the upper lip of the bottom of the arch. We had a plan to go sit on the opposite side of the curving rock wall that connected between the double arch and our choice of sitting spit. The climb down from the lip that most tourists stop at, peer over and gasp at was steep but not unpassable. With our sketchpads and camel packs, we scaled the wall, walked along the lower edge of the towering red rock walls and made our way to the opposite side where we climbed up and sat in the crook of a gorgeous arch that looked some some kind of hugely exaggerated Gaudi arch from Park Guell. It’s column – at least eight feet thick, maybe 24′ circumference – came down and twisted in giant stone chunks to the hot sloping rocks below. We sat there, in the bottom of it’s curving window, in the shade, drawing, laughing, talking and expanding.
I made a trip back along the hot expanse between the two arches and climbed up the other side where I entered back into tourist land. Tourist land in Arches Nat’l Park, Moab, Utah:
- Mom, Dad, 8 kids
- Two older women from the south. Why yup, that’s a big stone arch there.
- Healthy Dad, Healthy Mom, two healthy kids. Maybe from california or Washington.
- Kids who don’t want to be there, parents who are hot
- Younger guy off for a hike alone.
- Lines of RVs, all vying for a parking spot
I went to our vehicle and drank some ice cold strawberry lemonade (Santa Cruz Organics…. mmmm….), read a passage out of “Training the Mind” by Chogyam Trungpa about the value of effort to overcome laziness and that even with discipline, one still needs to exert a certain amount of effort to put your foot forward, one after the other on the path. Overcoming laziness is the act of engaging our practice and focusing the mind to hold it steady and not veer off course with all the different trains of thought that come up. I though back to the landscape sketch I’d been doing and just how hard that is for me sometimes – to stay focused on drawing the landscape without following my lines into imagination. Just another part of the practice.
A bit more to drink, a bit of reflection and I got some other things needed for a picnic lunch: manchego cheese, herbed salami, an apple, flatbread crackers, cherry tomatoes, a cucumber, a knife and a cutting board, and some Green and Black’s Hazelnut Currant Dark Chocolate and then I made my way back to Violet and our sitting spot. As I passed through the flocks of tourists, I worked hard at not judging what I seemed to immediately perceive as laziness. The overweight seated guy drinking his can of Coke, the parents who keep irresponsibly cranking out the kids, one after the other… all of them on their path, wherever they need to be in that moment. Learning to breathe with it.
I made my way to the first double arch and then, after a climb down, over, across and up (at which point, not paying as close attention as I should be, letting my mind wander a moment, I slipped and took a chunk out of my elbow) Violet and I ate.
We spent some more time drawing and this time I let my hand flow with inspirations from the patterns of the landscape: the streaked rocks, multi-colored by the minerals that have dripped down over them in various patterns and colors of burnt reds, siennas and oranges, yellow ochres, subtle metallic blues and occasional greens, in various sizes and proportions, nooks, crannies and the like and little swallows darting in and out of their homes made in the cliff walls. Their lines of flight made delicate cuts and curves through the air, juxtaposed against the massive tonnage of the rocks that surrounded us, as they darted playfully in and out of the arch we sat in.
Eventually it was time to change our spot and that’s when we opted for the less traveled dirt road across the valley to the distant rock outcroppings, much larger in person than from a distance. Just the day before we’d had an adventure off on some random roads when we’d gone to the Canyolands National Park.
The drive from Arches to Canyonlands was about forty five minutes and that day we went to the Island in the Sky area, the northern half of the park. A mile walk along the canyon rim, further than most visitors traverse, granted us an immaculate view of the layers upon layers of canyon walls, towering rocks and narrow passages that led down down deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper, to the canyon floor and the river far below.
From where we sat, there was no sound – literally: silence. Not a breeze, a bug or an airplane. Just this vastness spreading out before us and the warming silence we breathed in from where we sat under a rock, slanted and providing shade from the hot sun.
We walked back towards our vehicle and then started to make our way along the roads to other view points. Storm clouds were approaching and we stopped at an overlook, hiked out on some smooth boulders and watched the massive rain clouds sweep up through the canyons. Streaks of lightening cracked the sky and we could see the canyon floors getting soaked. The storm passed by us, leaving us dry but windblown. The intensity of the weather – the distant rain, the clouds, the lightening – coupled with the magnificence and colors of the canyon was exhilarating and we left when the sprinkles got a bit more intense and the wind was too strong.
A few more overlook stop and we spotted a dirt road off to our left into a wide open meadow. Why not? We’ve been driving a Toyota Sequoia, a big powerful SUV loaded with all of our stuff – from camping supplies, luggage, to our Bonnaroo art/vending stuff – so we had no concerns about the road. We sped down the orange/red dirt road, listening to some kind Brazilian samba music, across the open meadow, hoping to end up at the bottom of some canyon. The sun came out and the greens popped against the reddish stone backdrops.
Eventually the road twisted, turned, and popped us out at the top of a canyon that was painted with the most intense of colors – a bright turquoise green, deep lines of black, red and purples… the bottom, where a stream trickled, was the same bright turquoise green. We threw a stone in and counted how long til it landed and counted 150 feet to the first ledge before the bottom. We chilled there for a bit – dazzled by the colors of the canyons, made brighter even and more intense by the recent rain storm that had just passed through. As we drove out, we were sent off by a magic sunset over the bright green meadows, wet and sparkling in the sun, and the red rock canyons and spires that spread out to our right.
There is something magical about exploration and finding some unexpected treasure – inspiring beauty, a teaching, love, openness – at the end of that journey.
The next day, when we left the bluffs we’d driven out to in Arches our trail of dust along the dirt road shone gold in in the evening light and the rounded rocky bluffs we left stood tall, silent, and dark, as silent sentinels in the setting sun.
Later, after dinner, the star circled overhead and the fire case and orange glow over us and the rocks surrounding our campsite.
Now we’ve left the tall red sandy spires of Bryce Canyon – looking like drip sand castles on the beach – and are on our way to the Grand Canyon, somewhere I’ve never been and while these kind of places become icons in our minds, sometimes mocked, sometimes poked at, usually known at least in name by all, to stand in their presence, to soak in their memories and color palates, to be inspired by their beauty and grandeur, is as unique an experience as any.
Kentucky Rivers and the Mid-West
Driving through the mid west there isn’t much to look at. curving sloping fields segmented by barbed wire fences and oaks give way to neighborhoods, shops warehouses and billboards advertising Nostalgia-ville with it’s 50′s and 60′s icons – Elvis, I love lucy, Betty Boop and Scooby Doo – a time they hope to remember as simpler and more innocent. It’s never simpler and innocent. Only different. There were wars and torture and drugs and sex and crime and corporations bent on poisoning the populace in exchange for a hard-earned dollar from father knows best. After Nostalgia-ville, Winery billboards pop up, maybe every tenth billboard, advertising wines – non-organic and not too special. Then we end up back with green wooded areas and cornfields. Endless cornfields. Soon, in the distance, we’ll be in Kansas with it’s own endless horizon of green. For now, wherever we are – Illinois? Indiana? – has become nothing but woods surrounding us.
"The Move Over Law" – a rule we don’t have out in California but I can see the use for. However, I didn’t know about it until a police officer kindly chose to inform us of it on our way from Nashville, TN to Bonnaroo. I’d made it a long ways at that point – all the way from San Diego – without any hassles. Safe driving, usually over the speed limit (except in Arizona where the red light camera are waiting at, seemingly, every curve to pop you and send a ticket your way). In Little Rock, AR I picked up Violet perfectly on time, right as she landed at the airport. She’d had final exams to finish, was without much sleep and I drove us to Nashville where we found a hotel. The next day, after going grocery shopping at the Whole Foods and breakfast at the Waffle House (not an ideal choice) we were on our way to Bonnaroo, early Wednesday afternoon, perfectly according to plan.
I started noticing unmarked SUVs sitting every mile or so as we got closer to Manchester and we knew they were keeping an eye on all traffic. One pulled out as I passed him and I could feel him waiting for me to do something, anything. With out packed vehicle and California plates, we were a prime target. So we pass a pulled over police car searching someone and the lights go on. WTF? I say. I’d had the cruise control set to the speed limit so I wasn’t even a mile over.
The cop sidles up to the passenger door, tells us about the move over law and asks for some papers… So next thing I’m in back talking to the cop about how we don’t have that in CA and he’s asking about our business here – vending, art, etc – and what that’s all about.
No drugs? Guns? You’re not on probation?
No sir. (Of course not)
And if I brought the dogs around they wouldn’t get anything?
No sir. (yeesh!)
Well, see we don’t mind if people smoke for personal use but we are looking for quantity – weight. People coming out as "vendors" and then selling drugs.
I don’t even smoke pot (which is true!)
Can you open the back of your vehicle?
So i pop open the back and he can see that it is packed full tight. Who the hell would want to search that? I happen to have some small prints accessible and show him. I’m sure his mind goes to some interesting places but we check out so he sends us off with a warming ticket. Cool. Nice. Very little hassle.
So that was a new law and we were sure to tell some of our friends who were on their way. And now, with this long drive homewards, we see the "move-over" sign often when entering a new state and we’re sure to get over.
When we left Bonnaroo there were no SUVs looking for anyone (tho we did see a few people getting heavily patted down) and we collapsed at a Comfort Inn just north of Nashville. The next morning (because bedtime was 6pm or something) we went downtown to get some work done. Downtown Nashville isn’t, in my humble opinion, much to speak about. It was also mad packed with the Country Music Awards which we didn’t [plan to stick around for. Good stuff for those who like it. Anyways, we both had some things to finish – me entering data and emails from Bonnaroo and Violet still had a lingering paper to finish. We sat at a Panera Cafe, had some lunch (salad) some green tea and worked.
Outside the sunny day quickly turned dark. We heard talk of tornado warnings. The dark sky turned a deep charcoal grey and rain came down in sheets. We decided that leaving soon wasn’t an option and waited it out. Waited a little longer and the whole thing passed by – no tornado in downtown Nashville that day but it was quite a storm. We got back on the road as soon as possible, heading north east to Campbellsville, KY, a little town in the middle of not a whole lot and home of Violet’s Dad and (somewhat) younger brother.
We spent the next few days canoeing, kayaking and watching movies. The first night we went out for some decent Mexican food and then spent the night (and the next few) at a (very) nearby motel. "Lucky Vista" motel. The vista however was warehouses that cut the view between the hills and the observer and the subtitle sign to the main sign said "American Owned" " Country Charm". As if being American Owned makes a difference. I don’t care much one way or another who owns a place – if the person is compassionate, kind, caring, generous and patient (and at least semi-intelligent), then they get my business. The Comfort Inn we’d just stayed at was run by a couple who was of Middle Eastern descent. The woman told us she was from Riverside, CA and had lived in Nashville for 6 years and her daughter loved it. They were as American as anyone else I’ve met. Just because homeboy has a southern drawl, a pick up truck, and a shock of blond hair that doesn’t make him any more or less American than so many others.
And I could never judge someone on their race – whether running a hotel or not. Like I said, their compassion outweighs their skin color by infinite amounts considering that skin color amounts to zero in my book and compassion and wisdom are just about everything. Las night we spent the night at a Best Western. It was the last choice since everywhere else was full. We’d ended up in southern Illinois looking for a place to spend the night. Everywhere we went – right off the highway anyhow – was full. Turns out there was a giant amusement park right there. Holiday World. For people who it doesn’t take much to entertain. Anyhow, we get there at like 12:30am and finally get a room (last one and this is the third hotel tried) and we get to our room (pretty comfy) and the neighboring room to our right is a family that is arguing itself to hell. CRAZY! So a phone call to the front desk and it doesn’t end. That’s what you get amping kids up on caffeine and sugar water – i mean – soda. It’s nuts but we wear earplugs. We wake to the same thing. NUTS! So As I’m checking out I’m sort of filing a complaint with the front desk. It’s two older ladies and they say they’ll need to talk to the manager.
The point of this story is that his skin is just as dark as the extremely nice couple who ran the Comfort Inn but he is telling me "What can you do?". But we all know that if it were a bunch of partying kids, they would have been booted. But an arguing family? They should be booted too. Society shouldn’t be so accepting of such crude behavior. After some discussing and seeing that we won’t leave him alone, he tells the computer-inept front desk woman to give us a 10% discount. The point of this story is that, had he some compassion, he would have acted differently. Compassion is as non-skin color specific as being American or Indian or French.
That sense of compassion extends to Jarrod, Violet’s brother, recusing the dragon fly that had found itself drowning in the wide flowing river as we canoed downstream it. It’s wings fluttering, slowly drowning. We were in a canoe and a fair bit less maneuverable – at least for ourselves who aren’t super adept at watercraft. Jarrod, in his Kayak, paddled over and rescued the guy from the water. It was about 6 inches long and a beautiful yellow and black. Dragonflies had been landing on us and around us all day – buzzing through the air and tracing arcs and curves along the snaking Green River.
The river was pretty high for the time of the year but rain had been coming down off an on for days and now it’d cleared and the bright sunny day, big lazy clouds drifting overhead, and the multi-colored temperate rainforest of the Kentucky woodlands on either side of us. Occasionally we’d pass farmland or cows grazing or pass under some old rickety bridge but for the most part it was just us, gently avoiding the trees hanging over the water or the logs sticking up from below, startling great blue herons who would come swooping out of the trees and soar further upstream and hawks who would pass overhead. Dozens of little birds of various shades of brown and black, variously striped and the occasional cardinal would dart out over the churning water.
We came upon a thirty foot waterfall stretching along about twenty feet – in alternating sections of water, moss, and dangling vines dotted with pink and white flowers. We passed it by, a memory of the river. There wasn’t really stopping and once you’d passed it, on the river, there was no going back. The river flowed at a fair clip and it took a bit of effort to travel upstream.
Eventually, sun-kissed and satisfied, we reached our stopping point, where we’d left one car to shuttle us back to the beginning. The big oaks and sycamore dappled in sunlight – golden green and glowing – fluttered in the evening breeze and we drove back to the beginning, passing rolling Kentucky farmland, little houses and weathered red barns.
Mount San Jacinto
I left Violet at the lodge where her other philsophy friends from UCSD and UCI were having a sort of informal conference and drove up the road a piece to the Fuller Ridge Trail – drove up a twisting dirt road and parked at a gate. I started hiking… p and up. Into the still silence of nature abounding where there is no stillness but no incogruous sound, nthing is out of place. Bird song, bird anser. A woodpecker in the distance and another bird that zooms past me at breakneck speed. I sat for a while. Feeling my heart beating. My breath breathing. My joints and fingers and feet.
I hiked further and higher… into groves of towering Douglas Firs with long striations of bark in several dozen shades of brown and red and tan. I stood up close to it, my face inches from the bark and breathed in the musky woody scent, mingled with the cold mountain air. I felt it’s tall peace and, as I stood there, felt myself – the roots and branches and leaves and fruits of my being stretching to the sun and the center of the earth. Maybe I looked like the "tree-hugger" type but that issuch a misunderstood idea. A "tree-hugger" gets hugged back as well – bt beyond that I felt like i was meditating there with this tree that was more than several hundred years old. It’s bark attested to fires and storms that it has weathered – knobs and gnarls of knotted wood giving away where a brach was blown free in the wintertime and charred edges and the cetner charring – a tunnel within the tree that has been charred and blackened. I felt it and tasted it an thanked it. And moved on. I stuck my hand in the snow and stopped now and again to let my footsteps catch up with myself. And in that moment – the moment of being caught up – i found a center – and ever evolving moving changing and constant center.
I kept going. I was getting a bt light-headed- hungry maybe, low blood sugar, tired, maybe it was the altitutde but I hadn’t see my "spot" yet. I always find a "spot", a place to stop and brath and feel everything a place that is high up and I can feel all of the elements at once. I’d stopped at a few rock outcroppings and a few tall trees but they hadn’t been :"it" but then as I rounded a corner I saw an angled granite face lit by the sun and looking out on who knew what. I understood that to be y stopping point. There is never a destination – the journey and discoveries along way are all the purpose – but sometimes we find a spot – a place where we find ourselves a little more, a little deeper.
I climbed up atop that collection of giant boulders and had the valley and mountains spread out before me, dropping off steeply, surrounded by Douglas firs and other pines and brush, the clouds rolling away over head, a cold wind sweeping up from below and a warm sun that would peek out every now and again. All of life circling grandly and lovingly – look at us! feel us! feel yourself – my breath, my body, my spirit, my mind, my soul, my everything – all of this one vision, one illusion, one thought, one breath. I sighed a long long sigh, allowing for the fact that I would soon find myself back in my studio, back before my desk r my canvas. But I take a piece of back with me and I leave a piece of myself here.
After a while, I knew it was time to turn back. The wind and cold were beginning to bite and their bites were no longer playful. My light headedness had returned and it was still a five mile hike back. So I turned and ran, hopped, walked, hiked and occasionally cut between the switchbacks and took a tumbling gait down the arid sandy soil of sand and pine needles and dried oak leaves. I breahted, smiled, sighed and returrned to the car. Listening to Sun Electric’s 30.7.94 album I drove to a little general store, picked up a Cabernet and drove back in the setting sun, as it cast it’s glow over the pine, turning them a golden green, to the lodge where dinner would soon be served.
