Howdy Kumquats— How’s everyone holding up? Hope you’re staying sane out there.
It’s pretty hard to motivate myself to write publicly these days. I haven’t talked about this much, because I value my privacy and get very tired of the muggles in my life judging me as a failure. It really fucks with your head. Pioneer-types have to really protect themselves from haters and naysayers, I have learned the hard way. Which, apparently, the hard way is the only way any of us really learn anything.
Since the closing of the Nest last spring1, I’ve been transient-yet-searching in Northern California, mostly living in my truck while I decided if I was going to stay in Nevada City (where I had been since May 1, 2020) or take a leap to yet another new place out here to start over again. This will be my third re-start in California since leaving NYC in 2017. By myself.
In June, I was invited to and subsequently enchanted by the foresty-coastal towns of Humboldt County. After zig-zagging between here and Nevada City over the summer, I am now here, not there. Centering myself in a tiny little town called Blue Lake, near a once-respected physical theater school called Dell’Arte, that I always admired. Like many mid-career artists, the school was also destabilized by this ridiculous culture war we’ve been subjected to.
It’s been a bumpy road for all of us. I feel like I’ve been to hell and back several times just this summer, let alone these past few years.
Now, I am struggling with what to do with projects like this blog. Projects that were started in different places, at different times, with different pressures urging me to share my vision and knowledge. Do I keep going? Do I still enjoy it?
Sometimes I feel like I already said what I needed to. Other times, I remember that I committed to sharing my process (aka my life journey) as an artist with other creatives and artists. And that sharing all this with you gives me the chance to process it in real time.
I try to give what I want to see in the world and the gritty behind-the-scenes reality of my favorite artists is often more interesting to me than their polished products. What it takes to get to the polished product is often a harrowing journey. That’s the kind of stuff that inspires me, so I try to give that to you.
However.
I feel a huge disconnect to a vast majority of people these days, because of my beliefs, so I hold my tongue and choose silence. Since moving down off the mountains, I’m trying to coax myself out of hermit mode, but the pull towards isolating myself is strong. It doesn’t feel great, but I’m tired of the disagreements and drama.
It’s like I’ve wilded myself out of existence in the over culture and I’m not sorry about it, but it’s lonely. I can simply no longer live in a mundane muggle world. I literally can’t be seen fully there, I can’t be myself and therefore I just can’t exist there anymore at all. I feel invisible because I’m horribly inconvenient to others playing along.
Why is that? Well…it’s a lot of reasons.
Here’s a short list of things about me that challenge convention, poke on taboos and make conformists recoil in terror:
I am an artist who chose to follow Joseph Campbell’s advice that I first heard in 1992 to “follow my bliss” and have not given up despite challenges such as— aging, lack of resources, disapproval of loved ones, lack of success, failure to produce results for all of my effort. Surely at 48 with a bottomed out bank account, I should have had the “sense” to give up already.
I choose integrity over short cuts to success. I have chosen the road less traveled, which means I am not going to sell out. This means not going after corporate jobs for money, not chasing fame / followers, not shilling products that aren’t my own on social media, not doing anything that makes me feel icky.
I keep my sexuality on the surface, even after menopause, even as my body changes in midlife. I am a sexual creature (3 Scorpio placements in your natal chart will tend to do that to a person!) and my version of restoring the Divine Feminine to the world means that sex is a natural, healthy, fun part of it. There is no shame in it, only joy.
Like being unapologetically sexual, I am unapologetically spiritual. I happen to like my contradictions, thank you very much. Yes, I do think shaking my tits on stage can save the world. Yes, I do believe that I am a unique expression of Source that has a responsibility to be fully me in the world. Similar to being wired for sexuality, Scorpios are wired for uncovering the taboo and exploring hidden mysteries of how life works. I call this being a spiritual seeker and it consumes the other half of my time that isn’t spent on art.
I speak my mind. When things smell like bullshit, I’m not one to ignore the smell. You’ve all heard my stories about resisting the wokesters in the underground cabaret scene in NYC in 2017. I thought it was bullshit then and I said something about it, which resulted in the loss of my reputation, career and entire creative community. I do not regret it. I sleep peacefully at night knowing that I tried really hard to correct a wrong and that I honored my intuition and integrity, no matter the social price. I did not betray my own inner knowing, I took action on it.
I don’t do what I’m told to do unless I believe in it. This includes vaccinations, voting, etc. I’m not one to just “go along” with things I don’t believe in just to keep the peace. That peace is short lived. Real artists are REBELS. Rebellion is baked into the job description because in order to be an artist, you have to be an outsider. You have to get to a vantage point that allows you to see the culture with some distance so that you can use creativity (which is a direct link to Source) to help humanity course correct. Aspiring artists that do not have the moral back bone for what this requires, often stay at the level of CRAFT. That is different than ART. Art is an alchemical process that transforms the artist and audience. Art includes craft, but craft does not necessarily include art.
I retain my weird and wild nature. I resist domestication at all costs. My entire being is wired for freedom. It’s intoxicating to feel free and safe to express who you are. I used to embody this by dancing naked on stage. Now I also do this by actually going to the edges of nature, being naked in it, being spontaneous and following my nose on adventures.
I will always have one foot, one eye and one ear in the underground. Again, Scorpio nature— they live low to the ground and aren’t afraid to turn over rocks to see what’s lurking underneath. I believe culture is the soil our consciousness grows in. If I want culture that feels true to the human spirit, creativity has to be planted and nurtured in soil and conditions that are not artificially enhancing growth, making weak roots, bio-engineered, toxic, or unnatural in any way. All these long years since I left NY, I have been searching for a place to start an organic subculture again. I have been appalled by how many artists have sold out and lost the plot. In my way, I have been trying to protect the culture by refusing to accept anything less than the real thing.
What I find in the underground is often an entirely different reality that the one the over culture is trying to push on us. Which activates the rebellion in me. I resist conformity at all costs. It’s boring, destructive to our true nature and it will put you in a very shallow grave. When I feel pressured to conform or to fit into a box, I know that it is a prison. I run the opposite way. This is an extinct that has served me well.
My health is my wealth. Not money. And I can’t use money to buy it. Yoga, Ayurveda, nutritional / alternative medicine of all kinds have shown me over and over and over and over and over again that if I change my patterns, abstain to reset, support my body with good food and herbs, rest and basically just get the hell out of the way— my body is a living MIRACLE that can heal itself. We do not EVER get locked into permanent fixed states, everything about us is fluid, flexible and changeable, as long as we let our minds believe that. Most illness and injury is related to emotional imbalances and energetic resistances, often the result of past conditioning, deep childhood pain or adult trauma. I do not let corporations squirt toxins into this living miracle of my body because I don’t trust corporations. Nothing I have learned about health has ever come from what we have been told by the over culture. I had to go digging around in the underground to find different approaches and I have been richly rewarded every time— deepening my understanding of / connection to my own body, learning about the healing properties of foods / herbs and restoring my spiritual link to the Earth, nature, Spirit and every living thing.
I choose cyclical time over linear time.
I endeavor to create systems of mutual flourishing that include art, economics and nature working in harmony.
I’m not afraid to be wrong. I 1000% want to be wrong about my belief that the globalists have infiltrated everything and are trying to kill and/or enslave us in every tier of society. I’d love to be wrong about that.
I believe in past lives, reincarnation and other worlds / dimensions. Yet another reason why woke shit is small minded nonsense to me— because in my cosmology, we all CHOSE to be here, with our set of challenges and gifts and that those are the raw materials we are meant to alchemize for our spiritual growth. By this logic, even people of color or diability CHOSE that path and they have their work cut out for them for sure, but so does every one else. No one is more a victim than anyone else, EXCEPT OF THEMSELVES. We do this to ourselves.
It diminishes the sovereignty of others when we feel sorry for them. Shame, blame, pity, guilt— these are base, over culture feelings that block your connection to magic, Source and yourself. Everyone is a powerful being, here for a purpose. We can have compassion and feel for the suffering of others, but pity is pointless.
We have free will and can abstain and not participate in whatever we don’t like.
Love is the gas in the engine of the entire planet / universe. So, get to it.
Love is a verb, first and foremost. Love is unconditional, not controlling. Love is free, no charge! Love is not always reciprocated and that’s ok. Love is not codependent, clingy, grasping, desperate or scarce. There’s a limitless supply, you will not use up all the love inside yourself. Love is the only truly renewable resource.
Joy, play and delight are the ways out of any mess. No one wants to believe the reasons that I’m so serious about play. People act like I’m immature, delusional, refusing to grow up, etc. But if all of my spiritual study and actual life experience didn’t tell me that playful curiosity is our most natural state, then I wouldn’t be standing here looking like an idiot to most people. Yet, once again, I say— suck it, haters! I have got my FUN flag staked firmly in the ground. Play puts our nervous system in a relaxed, receptive vibration that allows Source to work through us.
The only thing I chase is a sense of freedom. I don’t chase money, people, opportunities, none of it. I only compete with myself too. I only care about my own progress and evolution, how it compares to others is not my concern. I am inspired by the paths of others and they teach me a lot, but I know my journey is my own and I want it to be a memorable one.
I follow my dreams and live from my heart like my life depends on it, because it does.
Geez…I didn’t know I had all that inside of me today. It sort of looks like an Artist Manifesto of some kind. I guess it is.
I was feeling pretty frustrated when I sat down to write because I don’t know how much longer I can go on saying the same things without feeling they are making a difference.
And words are like my third language— I’m much more of a physical and visual person. What it took for me to articulate my lunar experience with words and bring them out into the world was a huge effort, spanning many years.
I like words, but mostly I want to use them to create more people who share these beliefs and help me expand more. I want more people embodying this stuff in my world. It feels pointless sometimes, like all this effort falls on mostly deaf ears and dumb eyes.
I know that’s not all of you, but you know what I mean.
We are co-creating this Earth experience and the only way to change it is to find your power and follow your joy.
My advice about the war in the Middle East? Abstain from the news and follow your joy.
My advice about covid? Get on a joyful path of discovery about your own health.
My advice about the abysmal economy? Reprogram your definition of wealth to be centered around your joy.
We shift the material world by cultivating peace in our hearts and minds, this is energetic work— not external. We radiate that peace out like radio waves and it changes others around us on every level. It’s a very small tipping point before it becomes quantum.
You want to save the world?
Dare to do what you love because you love it.
Dare to share that joy with others without shame.
Dare to be your own weird assemblage of contradictions that make you you.
Resist conformity.
Yes, your integrity will be tested.
Yes, sometimes it fucking sucks to heal past wounds.
But yes, the rewards are greater than the pain.
Above all, be brave.
Wild Side members, I’ll be back tomorrow with an update on how my eclipse fast went and your tarot reading.
This concludes this transmission.
Over and out.
After a harsh winter that we all called SNOWMAGEDDON, we were without power and internet for 3 weeks— my space flooded, I had to cancel 3 events, was unable to pay my rent and was subsequently evicted from the “artist’s Elks lodge” and studio that I spent 3 years building out.