The day the world stopped, it snowed almost three feet. I remember feeling a sort of a panic immediately setting in, like being on a packed plane with a screaming baby next to you and the air conditioning broken. Nowhere to run. A proverbial game of musical chairs, the music stopped and I looked around, embarrassed that I felt shunned, frightened and alone. The extreme reality was that no one was coming and there was nowhere to run to. I wanted to reach out for something or someone, that was impossible to touch. If you went through these beginning days of the pandemic alone, you know all too well what I am talking about. Even if you were in a house full of people I’m sure...
I am in love with things that used to shine. I always have. The first thing you should know about me is that I am the sentimental type. My family used to tell me I was too sensitive. I never knew how to answer that, but now I would tell them "thank God, that's how I became an artist!". As a child I remember being mesmerized by so many things. And the paradoxes: so foreign and yet so familiar...and that is how it begins, the longing to understand. I recorded in my mind, storing it up for later, but I didn't know that yet. To be honest, that's all an artist does to be true to the craft...pay attention, collect...
It was Labor Day weekend and once again I was doing a show in the park. To say I was feeling a little melancholy was an understatement. Like most artists, I had spent weeks making, then setting up in the rain on Friday night, only to see a very slow sales day, every one having fun but me it seemed. Ah the life of a "carnie" I thought, maybe I should switch careers, to what I thought? Move to Mexico, live out my days on the beach perhaps... Just then a young man broke my faraway gaze. He was standing in front of my wall of belt buckles, each one displayed in their own little shrine on the wall. What...
Years ago, I was on a small plane with my two young children taking off from Seattle. Sitting on the tarmac, I looked up at the ominous black sky in the middle of the day that we were about to head straight into. I wanted to run down the little aisle in my flip flops and out the door right then! But. We stayed. Once airborne, you could have heard a pin drop as the plane bounced, dropped and shook us worse than the Cyclone ride at the Jersey shore. It was all so humbling, a feeling so small and I began to go into sheer panic. I bet you've had a flight like that yourself. As the plane jerked up, down, side to...
Greetings My Sweetbird Soul Family, In this ‘new normal’, it’s hard to know who to believe, where to turn to and what we need to do sometimes at any given moment. It really has been a ‘wait and see’ for all of us. For the world. I call this the dark night of the soul. Not because it’s awful, but because there is no going back to the familiar and we have yet to see the future. I feel like we have one feet in each side of the past and future. Can you surrender to the outcome that you don’t see coming? This time can be looked at as a collective chaos, or it can be seen as an opportunity. An opportunity...
