The smell of saltwater, fish & seaweed & decomposition, the crisp ocean breeze is stronger here. Climbed on two borrowed wheels today after endless hours of slumber in that dark cave of a bedroom. Keep my feet moving in circles, feel the burn in my thighs as they reignite and remember this motion that I've all but laid to rest for the coldest stretch of months, since I returned back to the north. Lungs full and aching with the effort, pulling wide open the space around my heart, empty space creating a vacuum to move more blood, life's energy manifest, through conduits of capillaries to feed my hands and feet, my muscles and my brain all the oxygen I can extract from this seabreeze.

I came out here to clear my head, let the wind push through me, release the iron grip around my heart that closes me up from fear of connecting, turns me inward, backward to a childhood steeped in lessons of the mizerly hoarding of affections, of seeing stress answered with controlling behavior and emotional indifference. I hate that this lives in me still, feels like an unwelcome growth, like my living tissue mutated into a form foreign to my spirit by the forces of the culture I am surrounded by. I am committed to the process of continuing to see this sickness for what it is so I may heal and return to residing fully in this body, in all of it's imperfect, deep feeling joy & exhilaration, pain & stiffness, passion & fear inherent in the experience of flesh and bone. I am body and breath, I am not a concept.

In those moments when I feel the beast that has made a resting place inside my guts, but is not me, raise its ugly head to spit words through my mouth, to recoil my limbs from entanglement with my lover, to lock tight the entryways to my heart, I must acknowledge these demons. They must have helped me survive something or I wouldn't have ever permitted them residence. But I am working now to create new patterns and systems, founded in the old ways, the circle, the spiral, in birth & death, in living in relation to all beings, that will return me to my body and the body of community, inextricably entwined in the web. So how can I breathe through these moments? Give a nod to the beast and bid him farewell.

Perhaps it's time to work with image, not just words, to make a picture of what this occupation looks like. So I might cut out this occupation to give way to what I grow toward, like bird wings lean into the wind, like all green-bloods move toward light.

Emerging from Hibernation

Synthesis. Of the element of air, thought, intellect. This is a time of putting together many threads. I have been on the receptive tip for some time now, taking in information from a multiplicity of sources. This is part of the ebb and flow over time in the cycles of things, honoring where I am. There are manyfold steps all keeping to the path, many perspectives. Like moving around the labyrinth, the medicine wheel, to return in overlapping layers, every time deeper and closer to center, to truth of living in right relationship.

I return to the base of my creative intention, check myself on my concern for "being seen" for the sake of fulfilling an ego-driven quest, reflect upon this in the many communities I've tread through for years. Spending time outside the U.S. reveals to me some of the assumptions I've taken for granted. That there is somehow inherent self-indulgence in the work of being an artist/activist/magic-maker. This feels now like a vain American take on things.

For some time, I've been exploring the reality of my expression serving as a channel for energies, truths, needs greater than purely my own. How can I listen ever more deeply, with humility, to increasingly wider circles of existence, digest, synthesize and offer this back in a way it can best be received and affect change in relationships? In identification of kinship? If we feel in relationship and kinship to all that is, we cannot conscionably continue to destroy in our daily activities, dealings, in supporting the systems and institutions that are so out of balance and out of control.