Part 1: School’s Out

Flung into the air

suspended above the world

emancipated from the forces of reality for

this


exaggerated

moment

I see the land below me, firm and eternal, the buzzy habit of humanity, and gravity bides her time—

---

I put one foot in front of the other and with each step the whirlwind around me spins faster.

visas                               dates
       bills 
                   newsletters                         needs
    grants                         deadlines
          places            bills                             residencies 
               opportunities                           ideas                          URLs 
ideas 
        vacancies                       bills      
                         needs                           needs          ideas           
                                                                                       opportunities 
dates                ideas
                                      visas          places

whip around me, sting my arms and face, fly in my eyes and force me to blink—

to-do list items rain hard on my head like hail drumming down—

---

IN April, once our works-in-progress are performed and the studio that has been our home, incubator, treasure chest, cauldron for the last two years is emptied, cleaned, and callously rented to some other group, we go north, to the Baltic Sea. We rent a big sunny house, pleasantly spartan, after the Northern European style.

Between meals we meander out of the house in stunned solitary silence, into the woods, up the steep hill, and peer over the cliff to the chill blue sea below. Somewhere nearby, in cetacean terms, a whale suffers, suffocating in under-salinated water, the passionately felt and largely ignorant opinions of a nation playing tug-of-war with his huge young body, back and forth across his remaining days.

One morning a crow, juvenile like the whale, befriends me in the woods. His wings are sleekblack. His fluffy grey pantaloons betray him. We talk, or rather, I talk to him, while he tosses the leaves he stands among like a thief searching a diplomat’s apartments. When I say goodbye and walk up the road, he follows, landing with a definitive fwump beside me. Twice more we talk while he turfs around for bugs, I say goodbye and walk away, and twice more he follows me, soaring, and fwumps beside me again. The third time this happens, he begins to walk along the path with me. I slow my pace to match his. I tell him I’m going to the beach and invite him along. We stand awhile. My friend has made his feelings known; I will not walk away from him again. Eventually, though, the sweet scent of bugs seduces him back to his primary corvine task of eating them, and the ancient ocean lullaby wraps me deeper still in wonder, my anthropic obligation.

---

ALL spring, as the sun creeps higher, as the bushes and bulbs and Bäume of Berlin burst into bloom and bloom and bloom, I watch the elegant magpies build and tend their nest. This sophisticated dome sits perhaps 15 feet from my balcony, its hidden entrance level with my eyes and facing the break in the trees that allows me my private view. For weeks, they are my closest neighbors. Wherever I go in the apartment, I can hear their angry chatter that signifies a crow is near.

I watch helpless one week as the crow gets closer, discovers its own daring, as the desperate parents flap and chatter, going so far as to swoop their graceful wings across their cousin’s unmerciful beak. Again and again I watch the magpies drive the crow off.

One afternoon, I come home and open my balcony doors and instantly know: the magpies are gone for good. How, in just a few hours, could a pile of sticks become so desolate? How could the silence, below the flap and coo of the pigeons, the tweedles of the great tits, the fierce cheeps of the kestrels on the roof, ring so loud and so definitive?

---

IN March and April it is dark outside the studio windows when this group of thoughtful, generous, powerful and playful women come together to dive into mystery. We emerge with a meditation of questions. The sea breathes throughout this piece. Seagull cries pierce murmuring silence. Women wait, and then stop waiting. And at the end of every rehearsal, someone says, “Wow! I love this process! We work together so well. This feels so good. I love what we’re discovering!”

I feel it, too, and the third or fourth time someone says this, I realize, this is what I came to Berlin to find. This magic was the blood that pumped through my life for years, and when it dried up I turned my whole life upside down to find it again—and here it is.

Ink it: I’ve won.

---

Part 2

Lviv.

---

Interlude

My country is a high-wire act.

She dazzles, and every eye is on her.

She dares, and the audience gasps as one.

She sticks the landing, somehow. She defies death and the laws of physics.

Do not wonder about her life on the ground. Do not look behind the big top. Leave before the lights shut off.

Be amazed from below. Crane your neck and gape in wonder.

The rope on which she balances and tumbles, flies from, swings around, lands unsteadily atop again, is as dazzling as she, a twisted cord of golden words, breathtakingly high:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [sic] are created equal, that they are are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The rope is not secure.

The rope is held taut by two brothers at war.

If they make peace, what will become of her?

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Part 3: Rule of Life

IN May and in June I am blessed by the presence of two dear friends; first Emily, then Matt. What a gift it is, to share space and time with creative souls who love me and whom I love. Coffee on the balcony, meanders through cobblestone streets, jokes only native speakers understand. We make up songs and scenarios, jaunt across the city and the continent. What a gift it is, to share life.

And then, finally, sadly, blessedly, the visits, trips, distractions end, and at last, I have time. Finally, I can Buckle Down And Work On My Thesis.

I meet with my God-sent mentor, Peter, and he helps me bring my research questions back into focus.

Hypothesis: to be an artist is to live with a particular orientation towards the world.
Experiment: write an artistic rule of life and live it for six months. See if it makes me a better [more productive] artist.

My Rule of Life consists of three general commitments:

1. Intentional Listening to:
   • myself
   • God/the Universe/Source
     through
     • meditation
     • yoga
     • centering prayer
     • intuitive movement
     • resonant body
     • Alexander technique
     • weekly meetings/practices shared with my beloved and longstanding spirituality small group
       
2. Intentional Engagement with:
   • Nature
     by
     • sitting on my balcony and observing
     • walks in the woods/mountains/on the beach/anywhere nature is
     • growing plants
     • adoring, cooking with, and eating in-season produce
   • the Human World
     by
     • observant walks/bike rides/transit rides
     • reading the news and newsletters
     • reading books and articles
     • listening to podcasts
     • conversation with family, friends, and strangers
     • keeping a commonplace book of quotations and observations
   • Art
     by
     • reading books and poetry
     • listening to music
     • seeing theatre, films, and dance
     • visiting museums
       
3. Intentional Practice, which looks like:
   • Rehearsing with collaborators
   • Writing, alone and with collaborators
   • Making music (I joined a band)
   • Creative movement alone
   • Mark-making
   • Outside-eye-ing/directing

This is not easy. Especially because one collaborator is in Chicago, and another other is in Thailand, and the others are theoretical future collaborators that I know or that I don’t yet.

The time spins drily.

The numbers on the bank statement erode at a terrifying clip.

The blank pages of my days unfold flat and empty. Chicken-scratch and crossings-out. Half a notion languishing here. A stillborn image there.

Time is not enough.

Time and structure are not enough.

Time and structure and the world are not enough, and yearning seems to smother every spark.

For the thousandth time, for the eighty-thousandth time, my lonely heart protests: I am not a solitary artist! I do not even believe in solitary artists. I think they are a lie.

I live for the alchemy of collaboration. When I bring my raw ingredients, and you bring yours, and we expose them to air and time and God and one another and the shimmering dimensions on the other sides of molecules, that is how gold gets made. I do this work to witness miracles!

I began this research to try to find more of myself, my own artistic voice, to follow my own curiosity, to rely less on others, given our individualistic atomized world—and I hate it. My soul shuts down in protest. Maybe there is magic on the other side of that locked door, too. Maybe there is a reason to push through. But I know—I know—that the way to real magic is together. I know that whatever lies on the other side of my resistance, deeper inside of me, it’s nothing, still, to what comes into being between us.

Maybe on the other side I find some peace. Some necessary gift—but still just one ingredient in making gold.

---

THIS summer began with a Paul Simon kick, and sometimes when I’m thinking working stressing wasting fighting fearing watching soaring meeting writing trying striving hating wanting missing weeping laughing running moving stilling stretching lazing longing I think woah, so this is what he means. He means all of it is Graceland.

This whole life is Graceland.
It’s all praise, it’s Graceland.
This world, she is Graceland.
This hot summer is Graceland
this young time is Graceland
these long days they’re Graceland
these purple nights they’re Graceland
these cold beers are Graceland
the beauty amid the corruption it’s Graceland
the tears and the triumphs they’re Graceland
the tangle of thoughts it’s Graceland
this wealth of time it’s Graceland
this playing friend is Graceland
this empty page is Graceland
the sliver and the golf ball they’re Graceland
the saint and the aesthete they’re Graceland
the glutton and the monk are Graceland
the blue skies and dark eyes—Graceland
the name of this whole world is Graceland
the name of this summer is Graceland
the name of the sunshine is Graceland
the name of these waning days is Graceland
the name of these good times past is Graceland
the name of these shaky futures is Graceland
the name of the world coming undone at the seams is Graceland
the name of the class wars is Graceland
the name of the grief is Graceland
the name of the hope despite it all is Graceland
this whole life is grace land.