Oh, the time has come to reflect and share. Last night throngs of people filled the spaces between art spread around the Country Day campus during our final presentation. The Festival. My students’ work adorned circular tables set to highlight the ceramic goblets they made their second week, with embellished plates and cutlery in place. Animal faces and small sculptures surrounded a centerpiece of ocarinas. Nearby, lidded jars sat elegantly in a row. One by one the objects disappeared as children and families left the event. Some young artists gave me a hug as goodbye. Dahlia told me she loved me and would see me next year. I said “that feels far away, so I don’t know if I will be here, but I hope to see you again.”

Frequently I have considered whether I will continue to teach children. This experience was my first time working with ages 7-9, and I had a lot to learn. My expectations were adjusted countless times as I received new information about their capacity, and about my own. I did a lot of extra work making sure that the results were similar to what I had imagined, because their skills were so different from the adults I had been teaching prior. This doesn’t seem to be the way forward. I need to respect my own time and find projects that can be completed by little hands and minds.

A class of young children is a quickly morphing organism. One outburst or refusal ripples through the group. There are countless arguments, displays of assertion, moments of vocal displeasure and frustration. They clamor for attention and do not wait their turn. I introduced community agreements at the start but over and over they were disregarded. It seemed to be my job to remind them repeatedly of what it meant to be in community. And still they banged on the door while waiting for class to start, and my head heated, and my mind turned on them.

There is a difference between thought and action. Inside I am also a child, easily provoked. Thankfully the adult I have become is able to speak firmly, kindly, and directly. I was not perfect and still I impressed myself with an ability to respond rather than react. My meditation practice is showing. I gave them tips for blowing off steam when upset. I listened deeply. I vented later, and rested a lot.

As the weeks progressed I became softer and more appreciative of the space held by the container of the camp. Each day as we gathered in the theater for our Noon Time Program I sat in the dark with hundreds of people to view images, videos, and performances. I loved the circus arts, musical theater, stop-motion animation, puppets, dance, film, costumes… and the list goes on. Most days something made me cry, though I don’t know why certain things hit at certain moments. Maybe it was the way the kids easily and earnestly showed themselves. Maybe it was the intimacy of seeing inside their brains and perspectives. Maybe it was the care with which the staff guided each young artist to find something that made them feel more alive. When I let this in, I too felt more alive.

Throughout the five week program there were opportunities for adults and children to answer the question “Why do you make art”? I did not respond publicly, so will take the time to respond here.

I make art because it keeps my attention; it pulls me in. It is immediate and ever-changing. A single idea leads to a single action which leads to another idea and action. This process connects me to my vision and intuition as the project unfolds. I can keep saying yes, until something feels complete within the scope of a single piece and I can take a pause before the next thing begins.

I make art because it is all entirely connected. Everything I have created so far will inform the very next thing I make. My body remembers. The dance I made last week will live inside of the ceramic bowl I make tomorrow. And now, as a teacher, each decision my students have made inside that studio lives inside me and the work that is yet to come. This porous improvisational practice of creation is a sliver of our entire universe, which I see as fluid and responsive, evolving to meet change as it occurs. As I open to my creativity, I turn towards the shaping of my own evolution.

And I make art because it feels good. It brings me peace and satisfaction. I am in collaboration with a power greater than myself; together we make visible magic. Then when it is shared, others are connected to themselves, their imaginations, and this great source. This is grandiose, and it is true. I take my joy seriously. I hold my pleasure close. I let them direct my steps.

Former catalysts of fear and disgust were more useful when I was locked inside my body, or floating outside it. When I felt revulsion I knew what I was not. Those sensations propelled me away from danger, formed the simplest of identities upon which I could base my actions. But this existence kept me silent and small. Thankfully someone told me I could return to my body, where my first desires, the earliest and most pure, were sitting still within me.

I began writing about work and have now reached a place of prayer. Action and contemplation, yin and yang. As I stretch out into the world, engaging, at the same time my roots must travel deeper. The furrows are moments of silence and the growth is a willing heart. The expansion I felt while at camp this summer was possible because I too am a child, absorbent and mutable, ready to let in the light.

It pours and shakes above. cracks of thunder have replaced the steady alarm of a car close-by. I can hear every individual raindrop. They are the sound of the shed, the steps, the plants, and the cement driveway outside. They are the sound of the shape of the world.

I’m married to my desire. At night I return home to quiet rooms shared with longing, where we curl together beneath heavy blankets. I drink her in, steaming, to keep a fire burning in my belly. Our union keeps me alive, keeps me going, for there is more to come. I can imagine it.

sometimes the dreaming turns sour and one of my voices derides another: “how could we attempt to see ahead? the Divine path is greater than anything our small mind can create. come back to now.”

and a sweet young voice responds, pleading: “if we can see it, we can step that way. we can follow the gut-pull as it leads us. Look at all of our dreams which have come to pass!”

My chorus speaks truth from all sides. i know the present is where I want to live, not in clouds of possibility. The spice of my tea, sweetness of chocolate, the shape of the world.
is not this All?

yet i live in a wooden boat, tipping over the waves, its insides holding me smooth like a womb. i cannot always stand to see the storm. sometimes I retreat into the hull, where it is familiar, where worn carvings i have etched over the years keep me entertained. there the images encircle me: a kiss full of want; a hand on my neck, guiding; water pouring between two bodies; limbs askew in surrender.

would I stay afloat without these companions? were they to disappear one by one all color would drain from the sky above and sink into the sea. The storm would rage on, grey and savage, and all direction would be lost.

I’m breathing steadily. The house hums around me. I’m alive to love, and to love more. Radiant truth pulses when I name this. It is my nature to seek out love, and to hold its imminence dearly. sometimes when I fall too far from presence I call in the loves who are here. It is the middle of Mardi Gras and we are dancing, faces shining, bright bursting bodies in movement to match the horns’ blare. My feet are pounding- faster, faster. My chest breaks open to reveal silken strands of connection lacing through the crowd to each heart I know, and there are many, too many to count.

I could cry. I do, often, completely tenderized by what I have already seen, ready to be astonished again. New shocks of beauty or grief rock my entire being in an instant. When the tears roll into my mask at least no one can see my trembling lips. This is universal and this is private. My secret longings are the same as yours.

When I taste you in my mind, my mouth softens and floods, and I relish the flavor, grateful for my humanity. My anticipation will lead me to infinite delights before we meet, pleasures woven by the depths of my mind, or simple ones right before my eyes. let it be enough, i pray. let me be enough.

This is how it is. I need the reminder. Cause when it comes, when circumstances twist before my eyes into an extraordinary new shape and the ideas I was holding drain between my fingers, then- I shake my head and blink because it feels like dreaming.

I used to be high a lot, which also felt like dreaming. Soft corners and jelly legs. I thought the world was too harsh as-is. The security blanket of a joint every morning kept me warm. I thought when I stopped that the blunt edges would wound me.

And they do, you know. Reality can be so ugly. From one angle everything is an absolute mess.

A vast majority of people are traumatized and addicted to dissociative behaviors because domination culture is excruciating to view head-on. The machine of capitalism grinds around us. The earth trembles and bursts into flame. Honest voices fall on deaf ears. Writing this now, I quiver and heat with rage. It is absolutely horrendous, a nightmare, full of suffering. Humans treat other humans and the earth with cruelty and disregard, as they have forever, as they will forever. And I’m supposed to keep going?

The strength that it takes to continue is of superhuman proportion. When I pull compassion from my core, sending any kind of love and understanding towards the hurt bodies perpetuating evil in this world, I know I am connected to something more powerful than I could ever be. That continues to be astonishing.

This evening after moving from one short-term housing situation to another, I sat outside on the ground to catch up with Toren. He said that he is becoming more flexible, able to better handle disappointment and changes. I said I’m experiencing the same. We both have felt the elation of a successful adaptation- of walking directly towards a goal which disappears into thin air, then looking around to see: what else is here? Improvisational living actually feels pleasurable. My head feels light and my skin tingles. The fire station is out of covid tests, so I get to walk in the nature preserve. I’m stuck in traffic, and I like this song.

Acceptance didn’t just come to me. I prayed for it after a lot of gut-wrenching resistance to reality. Cause that’s the other side of it: when I dig in my heels during a particularly disappointing shift, my body feels awful. Now I know I just gotta cry quick and hard, then move on. Shake like an animal. Keep going.

The world isn’t different from this angle, but I can see more of it, and the colors are bright. Of course, I live in New Orleans, where loud music and sunshine mingle with disrepair and poverty. Here they dance to honor the dead. This ultimate pivot from mourning to embodied joy shows me how flexibility can create lasting culture, can create the space for beauty in impossible conditions.

So I’m gonna keep creating space, both inside myself and in groups, to work with exactly what strange, terrible, glorious information comes my way. I want to be here, to see it, to help shape it, to create my own tune from the heavy dark air of sorrow.

I'm not homeless, because we don't say it like that anymore. I'm not unhoused either. My friend Ona says displaced so that's what I have been using for myself. But am I really displaced if I am paying someone to live inside of an apartment in the city I call home? Experiencing housing insecurity, I could say. Or unable to find permanent residence.

However you wanna say it, it's happening. And what it looks like is moving a lot, and thinking about where I am gonna live, and wondering when I will be able to take my bed out of storage and put it in a room called "mine". Not sure if I will ever be able to think of a rented room as mine again, now that I know it can be taken away from me. Nothing is permanent. I was foolish before to think that anything is forever.

Still, I want to have at least a false feeling of safety and stability for some amount of time. Can't even nail down that length of time cause right now it's just "longer than two months". At the end of October, five weeks felt like an eternity, as I looked down the calendar at the time I would get to stay in this Marigny one bedroom.

I didn't know it would be like this. In early August I felt the pit in my stomach, telling me I would be uncomfortable with putting everything in storage and dealing with it later. That sensation shifted slightly when Ida hit and I had no house to concern myself with. Those couple weeks I thought I was blessed, thanking God for the weird protection of Public Storage around all my belongings. And then I was back in town, dreaming awake down streets lined with felled branches, feeling unmoored. Blue tarps hid the damage underneath.

The post-Ida landscape was hushed and edgy. I had to talk to everyone about how they were doing, comforting myself with information while listening to stories. Everybody had a story. Things are different now, I said in a song.

They're still different in December, no going back now. I upped my anti-depressants after weeks of hopelessness. Thinking back on the past two months it feels like a whole year. I moved 11 times, packing everything back up in the Prius every few days for a month, going from a dogsitting gig to sublet to guest bedroom to Mississippi cabin and back again. I was teaching the whole time, just twice a week, but each time I completed a class I felt like a superhero. Before teaching I was reluctant and not sure that I could find the energy necessary to be the encouraging, present person I wanted to be. And each time I pulled the ability out from somewhere, a hidden pocket, and made it through the three hours.

Everything goes back in the car this weekend. My new place is a 18 day stay. There's a garden. I'm sure I will find something to appreciate, that I will be comfortable, that there will be books to read. Sometimes I judge myself for feeling so low: I'm not on the street, or in a shelter, or in places where I can't sleep well. Ok yes, and I'm a single depressive underemployed recovering alcoholic without a steady place to live. That sentence sends me into a wave of self-pity; I have to balance it out somehow.

So here's the thing: when I have less than before I have to obsessively and consistently find what I love, what keeps me alive. Alive like feeling Good. And yesterday that was sitting in the sun for an hour and a half, reading a book by the river. I have a whole list of things I like to do and cycle through them every day, especially the days when I want to get back in bed as soon as I get out. Midday naps are common, and all guilt over them is gone.

I'm a child inside of this body now more than ever. What do you need, lil Rey?

The path from surviving to thriving is wobbly- all I know is it’s lined with phrases I say to myself constantly throughout the day: You are safe, you are well, you are loved. I’m not duping myself: those are true. And I know the next right thing, which is to make art, and to pray.

Prayer means something to me now. It’s a conversation with the web of connection between everything. Whenever I speak in this way I am placing myself firmly as one of everything, a part of it all, no more, no less. I cannot orchestrate anything outside of my own body, and sometimes not even inside of it. This powerlessness can be a freedom, shifting my mindset from the individualist framework given to me at birth. In surrendering to the collective I am claiming my place among everyone striding towards Liberation, a place where all living beings are also safe, well, and loved.

So I pray, and talk, and read, and pray again. I gotta keep myself right sized and moving forward, energy up, eyes clear, relentlessly growing in humility and honesty. When I’m connected to everything, my nervous system is at ease, so each home I’m in becomes my own, just for the night, and I can sleep peacefully.