Still here

With a pencil

I'm still here. It's been a rough rocky recovery from covid but I'm still here. As I mentioned in my last post, as per the doctor, I've been doing the breathing treatments. This week I'm slowly beginning to do better! But I must practice patience and trust time to heal and that's a challenge some days more than others.

My upcoming art exhibit at Burnt Bridge Cellars via the Caplan Art Designs gallery is about mundane magic. My new art is currently getting prepped by the Aurora Gallery for display at the winery. As I mentioned in my last post, the mundane aspects of getting my exhibit ready have been impacted by my having covid and complications from it so I'm relying on the amazing and wonderful gallery and winery people who are helping me to have the show go on despite my covid and its complications.

All of my art events become about more than just me and my work but this year I'm keenly, and so appreciatively, aware of being a team player! And simultaneously, I'm sad to not feel well enough to be physically participating in things. I've such a mixed bag of feelings…

But my exhibit is bigger than the person of me and my feelings - my art is just one aspect of the winery events which include food, live music and wine. (If you're in the Vancouver WA area on opening night June 5th there's more information and dinner reservations are available via the link here.) It also includes social activities planned at the winery throughout the next two months.

My exhibit theme of the mundane seems timely right now. While I've been sick, my exhibit theme feels relevant because breathing treatments, and breathing, feels both pretty mundane and pretty magical. I feel grateful for all of the doctors and scientists who've studied lungs, breathing and covid in an effort to find what helps.

We stand on the shoulders of giants and often we never know their names.

Over the last year I've been making paintings that combine ordinary objects and my whimsical animal characters. The things I've chosen are items, from history, that were milestones in pro-social, pro human flourishing and development. I chose my animal characters based on the symbolism of them.

For example I made a painting titled “Heart 2 Pencil” thinking of how the 18th century invention of the pencil, in the form we know it today, made recording observations, and thus the keeping of written history, possible. The availability of the pencil, over time, made the development of scientific research, education and the arts possible. Having access to things written down enabled people to build on that preserved knowledge. We benefit, today, from all of that cumulative development which came about as a result of the existence of the pencil. So I chose a rabbit character to represent the fertility of ideas and the proliferation of the use of the pencil.

Here's my painting “Heart 2 Pencil” which is 29.5 inches tall, 8 inches wide and
acrylic on flat canvas:

We stand on the shoulders of giants and we read from their notebooks.

As I do my breathing treatments I imagine some long ago doctors and scientists making research notes in a notebook with a pencil. Perhaps later another doctor or scientist read those written notes and wrote new notes which expanded those thoughts further. And so it went...

Here's my exhibit statement

While thinking of human history that has been written down I strongly suspect that the majority of people writing, especially in the early days of the pencil, weren't thinking “I'm writing a historical record”. Probably they were just recording what happened that day, how they felt and what they thought about it. Probably they didn't show their writing to anyone, they just did it. They probably weren't trying to be good ancestors but by thinking as clearly as they could and writing things down they were being good to us.

Which makes me think of human bucket brigades at a wildfire. Every person in line has a bucket which they fill and pass forward. The person filling and passing their bucket won't know it, won't feel it, if their particular bucket full makes a difference or not. But they fill, carry and pass it anyway trusting that communal efforts will put out the fire.

Which brings me to history in general. I see human history as a written record of what happened and how people survived. Native American history, Black history, Asian history, Latino history, Women’s history, LGBTQ history... the electrical current arcing through all that history is WE'RE STILL HERE! To the ‘still here, still persisting’ list (because the funding is too often being cut, the results censored etc…) I also add the general human disciplines: Science, Education and The Arts.

The good people and good things are still here.

The Arts are where we, as regular people, can most easily see, hear, feel, understand, and share the abstract things like time periods of history, ideas like democracy. Our strengths, our struggles, our survivals are almost always documented somehow using words, images and songs.

We're currently fighting a particular version of the Predator/Parasite/Profit-extraction Monsters (Epstein Republican Party, Tech-bro data mining, Christian nationalism white supremacy "policies," Jim Crow 2.0 etc) but other versions of this foe have been fought and pushed back before. See above mentioned history… i.e. Black history, Native American history….

Besides songs, images and writings it's the things, the tools, of real life that make our history tangible. Objects are what end up in our history museums with the human-story details attached. These items are the things of integrity, honesty and good intentions (not the mass plastic crap of corporations) and these physical things directly connect to our human lives and stories. But the humans who originally made or used the objects probably weren't thinking “I'm using something that will matter in the arc-line of history”. Probably they were just getting something done within their personal lives.

That seems the way it goes, we don’t often feel the importance of our actions within the bigger picture of life. Often we just feel tired, frustrated or any of the other ordinary human feelings, as a result of the actions that day, which we may never realize were something extremely important.

The way I see it, as a direct result of the mundanity of it, life is a very long human-stand-on-shoulders-bucket-brigade-line arcing from the past to the future that forms slowly like a land-formation process. Few of us see or feel even a fraction of the whole panoramic arc across the landscape of time.

And yet because that arc-line forms and expands every day humans breathe, write things down and be their honest selves the human-good arc has, and will, endure.

We'll just rarely have the “I did something important” feelings personally. Which is why pro-social participation matters so much. The accumulation of efforts and good intentions by multiple people over time is the arc-line of humanity.

Like my upcoming exhibit; I won't get to personally be hands-on helping set up the art display or attend the opening party or to see people enjoying my art this year or have the “I did something good” feeling of satisfaction that comes from participating in person. And while I can have sad feelings about missing all of that I can also be glad that I've contributed to something much larger than me and to be grateful to all of the people who've helped my exhibit to continue despite covid.

My awareness of the long arc-line helps me cope with my messy feelings of sad I can't be there while also happy it's still happening about my exhibit.

Things I wrote in my sketchbooks this week:

A poem I wrote while this covid crap was really rough. But I wrote a poem. So there’s that.

Another day I thought, and wrote, about what it is that can help us keep our grip on our good-filled buckets in the face of difficulties and the predator bullies trying to isolate us, pretending that their power is omnipotent while telling us that our bucket doesn't matter, while trying pit us against each other...

What worked, however imperfectly, in history to deal with the predator class and support the regular people? As I see it a reliance on our own personal integrity, honesty and good intentions as well as a reliance on other trustworthy people, a reciprocal reliance on integrity, honesty and good intentions. (I.H.G.I.) Working together on the bucket brigades of good human flourishing in the real-world.

The greedy predator parasites, to greater or lesser degrees, may always be with us but every mundane day that we survive and thrive is a good mark, a good bucketfull, a good addition to the arc-line of human flourishing. And having a lesser degree of the greedy predator crap is worth everything, it's worth the effort of writing down, worth keeping and passing on what helped you through today even if it only helped a smidgen.

Every small bucketfull adds up. Every small win counts. Every small mundane thing matters even when, perhaps, especially when, it may feel unimportant. You may be a giant, a good ancestor, even as it feels like just an ordinary life. And that's powerful.

Thank you for being still here with me.¹

1. You're making a difference. You matter to me and to many others …