dani made this

[danimadethis]

Chatter

There’s non-stop chatter in the realms where I engage my attention.  They are all offering variations on the same theme:  The Scam is Structural.  Capitalism is Evil, My body, My Choice, Climate Change is Real, We’re All Gonna Die…. you get the idea.

It’s noisy.  In my opinion, it’s also all correct. But addressing all that change while simultaneously existing in this reality, right now, is crazy-making.  Pushing back against those forces that aim to gaslight me and tell me that everything around me makes sense except for my own quiet voice is nothing short of exhausting.  I’m trying to get back to a state of flow in my work because it’s the only way the noise gets muted, the only place I find relief.  

I’m worried about what my work looks like to the world, and most importantly, to my people.  I wake up every day with this cycle planned in my head — arise at 5am, meditate, walk for 30 minutes, make a healthy breakfast for myself and the family, get everyone to school, do yoga, sit at my desk, and begin.  Work at writing, work at art, work towards the formation of the book I will author. And then stop again at 3, collect the family, clean the house, cook a meal, drink tea or a cocktail, read or watch a show, go to bed.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  

This sounds like a perfect life to me.  I don’t do it all in a day most days but sometimes I get close, and often the order changes.  I don’t take for granted that my life affords me this privilege.  Because that’s what it is.  I can choose work that exchanges my labor for money, or I can work on the work that makes me whole and that makes me sure that I am here for a reason.  I get to choose and THAT is the greatest of luxuries to me.  I own my time.  I don’t have to sell it to live in this world.  I can go as slow or as fast as I like.  I can choose when to say yes to a project. I can protect my energy and my values.  Now, I do trade nice cars and fancy clothes for this privilege but I do it with pleasure if it means I can meet a friend for coffee on Tuesday or work on a painting for 4 hours without the sacrifice of a good night’s rest.  

I have to push back everyday to achieve these small personal goals.  The Noise wants me to feel diminished for these values.  The Noise tells me I’m not contributing to the world by living this way, that I don’t have sufficient work ethic or ambition.  I worry greatly that this is the perception my own family secretly harbors.  I literally only make things that eventually disintegrate or become shit.  I feed people and I paint and write things.  That’s it.  

But shit and dust nourish the soil that grows our food.  It’s a circle of creation and destruction that keeps us all alive and able to experience whatever we seek on this planet.  When I reframe it this way, it’s easy to see this as absolutely valuable work.  We don’t live in a time where this value gets monetized however, because ya boy Capitalism is a hungry ghost and it can only survive on the vapor of invented currency.  

For those of us who endeavor to live quietly, to spend our time cultivating our gardens and loving our people well, we can’t do that job and also do the thing that Capitalism is asking us to do which is to sell that message and sell it daily if we hope to be compensated for said message.  For that reason, I’m not clear what my path forward is yet in order to get these ideas into the world.  

My conundrum is this:  I want more people to hear what I have to say.  My ego hopes these ideas are useful and that my words could stir those same or new impulses to the surface in someone else.  I’ve been helped and influenced by other people’s ideas.  This is my Pay it Forward.  

But if my work is to write the words and paint the paint, how do I also sell the words and sell the paint and still have the time to live the life that fosters the words in the first place?  I’m asking because I don’t have the answer.  I don’t know how do it all.  I really believe in the saying that you can have it all, just not all at once.   But Capitalism insists otherwise.  You CAN have it all, all at once, you just need to do the work, then rest from the work by promoting and selling the work, then rest from the success of promoting and selling the work by making more work.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  

I know this is the formula that most successful creatives under Capitalism live by.  If my ego truly believes there’s usefulness to anything I have to say, then this is a formula I need to accept and metabolize.  So then why am I so resistant to this formula?  Is it because of all the content that is being over generated by creatives now, so much so that even the good stuff is no longer authentic?  I listen to too many podcasts by too many people that I really respect, and even they don’t sound convinced that this is the way forward.  I don’t see where I have a place in this current system with what I have to say.  I don’t know how to show up for it and not lose myself.  

Maybe this is just the after-shocks of quarantine talking.  Maybe I’m still just processing what the pandemic did to my relationship to effort and output.  

Before we had to go inside, I was on a trajectory with so much momentum.  I was working towards more teaching and cooking opportunities.  It took a lot of time, and enormous energy, for me to step into that fear and welcome strangers into my home so that we could cook together.  Intellectually, I knew the work was important so I pushed that dread to the side to do the work of cultivating community enriching others.  But my deep down truth is that I’m so incredibly sensitive to outside stimulus.  I wasn’t good at protecting myself from the energy vampires that would suck me dry some days.  And I had this little problem of three other folks under my roof.  If I opened my house up to strangers, I wasn’t allowing my family their autonomy either.  So when I got instructed to go home and stay home, I let that house of cards fall.  I let all of it fall away.

Once I got permission to go inside — like go really inside — I discovered that I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment in the way the world wants me to.  I felt more satisfied from the inner world we created during that time at home than I have ever felt in my life, ever.  I felt so creative that I made a series of one hundred paintings.   I spent delightfully mundane hours with my family.  We got good at games and sourdough.  I got to make what I wanted to see exist.  It was the most satisfying and fruitful time of my life (when I wasn’t consumed by the existential dread of it all).  

Now that the world is returning to Capitalist norms, we are all expected to fall in line again.  Get that money, hunny!  Live your best life!  Cash is king!   

I’m just not feeling it, man.  I need to pay my bills like everyone else, but if money is just a construct like every other one we’ve agreed to as a society then what even is bills?  I guess you can call me a futurist this way?  I’m already living in a post-modern reality in my brain but I wake up everyday in a past times hologram.  I took the blue pill and now I can’t unsee what is really happening.  

So.  What are we supposed to do with the world as it is in this moment if we also accept the other ideas that are percolating?  If indeed The Scam is Structural how do we work around it?  I know that if you made it this far you are maybe somewhere inside of yourself asking the same questions and wondering what the hell to do with all of the irreconcilable realities that we are being faced with today.  The checkbook isn’t balancing.  The old ways are still here but are disappearing like Marty McFly if we don’t choose a different future.  

We were asleep before March 2020.  Then we woke up for awhile.  Capitalism is trying to tell us we’ve been awake long enough and that we need to head back to bed.  It wants to lull us back into compliance and submission.  I feel awake still but I can feel the tug of weariness at the corners of my eyes.  I don’t have anything to offer except observation.  I can’t change a system on my own so I lay low for now and tend my garden and do my work.  Maybe the only way forward is to all agree to do the work that we will never get paid for and keep showing up for it until it’s the only work left to do.  

[danimadethis]

09 February 2021

I have been deep diving lately into the world of how people sell things on Instagram.  Why do some things resonate more than others?  What is it to make a thing and then communicate that thing into the world as you experience it?

There are hashtags, there are algorithms, there are influencers and collaborations… and then there are also just people out there doing good work and letting themselves be their own guide.  I really like those people.  I really hope I’m those people.  Because let me tell you, the algorithm doesn’t fit me.

I’ve been wringing my hands looking at the work I have shared and would like to continue to share with you all from the past few years.  It’s all over the place! There’s painted walls, there’s collage, there’s abstract expressionism, there’s color therapy, there’s cookies.  There’s  SO.  MANY.  COOKIES. How will you understand me as a *brand* (eye roll emoji) if I’m showing you paintings one day and soup the next?  How will I communicate myself to you if I just put it all out there?  Will you write me off as a psychopath?  Or better yet! A dilettante who just can’t stay in her lane?  

I’ve gone into the rabbit hole, got claustrophobic, and came back up for air.  Did that a few times in the past few weeks, the past few months, the past few years.  It’s been a wild ride experiencing the collective trauma of a rogue president, a reckoning with the systemic racism that I benefit from and want to dismantle, the absolute absolution of time that came with a global pandemic… shit is WEIRD, y’all.  Ok. So if that’s the case and we’ve experienced the news cycle of a week in a day and a year is decade and a day is a week and I don’t know anymore, what is time anyway, then why on earth should I be concerned about whether you will understand why I am also responding to chaos with what may appear to be more chaos?

Maybe you see me this way.  That’s ok.  Or maybe you feel some kismet with this chaos because you’ve been there too.  

This is what I learned from my Instagram deep dive:  It’s an abyss out there.  Be careful to keep yourself tethered to your own path or you’ll get sucked away, never to return.  Trust me, I’m a gemini.  I’m excellent at untethered.  I am an artist and I need to make things to experience my feelings and process the world around me.  The shake-up of the past few years has amounted to a great outpouring of making.  I’m gettin’ high on my own supply, man!  And I’m coming out on the other side of all this making and looking at a body of work that may not make sense to you, but to me, I get it.  I see every chapter and response clearly.  I see what I needed through each brush stroke and calorie and why I chose each medium at each time.  It’s a visual diary of my journey and the growth that is propelling me into yet another new chapter right now.  

I’m psychically burning it all down to build all back up again.  I’m saying thank you to everything that served me well before 2020 and gratefully releasing it into the Universe.   I’d like to offer these morsels of my past with you as I embark into another chapter of creation.  I’m just gonna keep sharing things as they happen - because Gemini - and some bigger picture ideas will emerge as I continue this engagement with you.  

Meanwhile, I would like to buy a LOT more paint!  This lady needs art supplies! I offer to you these bits and bobs of the past in exchange for some cash to pay myself forward into the new year.  I am preparing a flash sale that I am releasing over three days.  The first day will be all 5x7 pieces on chipboard or collaged mixed media, day two is all 8x10 on paper (also mixed media), and day three is 11x14 on paper.  The work spans the past four years.  I retooled lots of old work into new, more timely compositions.  There are no failed paintings, just failures to keep imagining.  

I feel so much hope and bravery in me as I imagine myself and all of us into a world that looks different than before.  I want it to look different. I will paint it into existence if I have to.

[danimadethis]

27 August 2020

I went to college before the internet was The Internet.  That meant that research had to occur at libraries and by talking to people that you presumed knew more than you.  Before I went to college, I went to a high school that prized its sports and academics program over the arts.  I was an artsy nerd with an aversion to sweat so needless to say I fit in perfectly....not. 

I didn’t have the agency or know-how as a teenage academic with a propensity to paint and doodle on everything she touched to know where to build my knowledge of how to pursue art for a living.  My family was entrepreneurial and doing very creative work on the highest level but their attention during those years was on the important task of keeping us dressed, fed and sheltered.  I struggled to integrate the sense that I was an artist in my heart with the seemingly contrasting expectation that I use my brain for thinking and earning money.... in other words, for loftier pursuits.  And without a role model or art teacher to help guide me, I just didn’t know what was possible.

I applied to college without the guidance of parents or counselor. I applied to exactly one school.  I applied early decision in the hope that if I didn’t get in, I could figure something else out without anyone knowing I applied in the first place.  I never needed a Plan B after all because I got into that school.  I then spent the remaining nine months trying to figure out how to afford to show up. 

I applied early and showed up late... that was the concession my parents made to string together enough financing to let me attend this elite and expensive school.  In the interim I took art classes at my local community college for the very first time.  I still think about those classes more than twenty years later.  I relished the studio time.  I loved every challenging assignment and the sweat-filled presentations (the first time I learned to like some sweat!).  I worked hard and was truly in my element.  I also ignored the inner voice that was whispering that I was exactly where I should be in those classes. So at the end of that semester I traded my beret and flip-flops for a snow cap and boots and buckled down for a few of the most challenging years of my life.  

It’s a wonder how far you can get from your essential nature.  I loved my studies and I loved the newfound independence I felt in a completely strange city so far from home.  And I also cried nearly every day, felt the loneliest I’ve still ever felt, struggled with my physical health, and had a very hard time finding my people.  The city had a hardness to it I had never experienced. I couldn’t read people.  I felt insecure and small.  And the last thing I could do was tell my family... my family who worked so hard and sacrificed so much to make this education possible for me.  

So I put my head down, tried to fit in, and worked very hard in my classes that first year.  I was doing well academically and was getting the hang of things so I decided to take a shot at auditioning for the a seat in the art program.  I’m going to remind you one more time that this was pre-internet.  I was living on a dorm floor with pre-med students (it turns out this is the dice you roll when you start school halfway through the year), and my roommate was in the business program for international studies.  Other than a few girlfriends who were dabbling in feminist and gender studies, I was completely adrift in my interests and no one to talk to for how to make this shift.  I was taking Art History classes at the time and one instructor had actually paired me with a tutor.  My high school had left my grammar skills at an eighth grade level in exchange for all those fancy Advanced Placement classes I apparently qualified for (that’s a rabbit hole that we REALLY need to talk about at another time).  This instructor was cold like the city and I felt she wouldn’t be interested in offering any insight, so I set about to build a portfolio and schedule a meeting with the art school dean on my own.  I look back at 19-year-old Me with so much tenderness and admiration because she was so naive to the world and how things work.  Good for her that she was brave enough to try to change her course and her fate.  

I wish there was a happy ending to this story.  There is one in the existential version.  But in the 1999 version, a wide-eyed college sophomore takes a truly pitiful photo album of drawings and ‘zines to a cynical and cruel dean who doesn’t see past the unformed child that is sitting before her and tells this kid that she is NOT an artist and will never gain entrance to said art program.  

I think I am just understanding as I write this how deep that cut.  I walked out of that building that day believing that she told me a truth about myself.  I coped by pretending it never happened and spent the next two years trying to mold myself into the one form they told me I was allowed to take.  It broke me eventually, though.  I dropped out of school just credits shy of my degree.  

Eventually, years later, my boyfriend (now dear husband) urged me to take out my paints and make something for him.  He didn’t know it but he gave me permission to let myself enjoy making things again.  I’d like to say that I was woke enough by that point to give myself that permission but I’m a late bloomer and that sense of Self came a whole lot later.  

I still struggle to call myself an artist.  But it’s what I am and always have been.  I made children because I’m an artist.  I make food because I’m an artist. I paint things because I’m an artist.  I am an artist because I exist in this world and I create in it.  You are too.  Don’t listen to your inner critic.  You’re an artist too.  I believe in you.

[danimadethis]

10 August 2020

Woof.  Still here.  Kids are going back to “school” tomorrow so we will be resuming some modicum of routine here during the week days.  I’m happy about it.  Or rather, my astrology is happy about it.  Co-Star keeps telling me I need some routine to stay sane!  It’s like I’m cope trippin’ a little bit! 

Speaking of coping, I’m so happy for my friends’ Simone and Rob and their epic new single Cope Trip.  I feel obligated, motivated and inspired to make things in this moment when I see my friends making things.  It’s accountability, yo.  And I AM making things.  I am painting a lot... which is why I am here a little less... and I am getting more grounded into the big project that we are working to begin actualizing before year-end.

I am thinking a lot of thinks about my social responsibilities right now.  I hope you are too.  I mean, bare minimum, y’all GOTS to vote this November, and for all of your future local voting opportunities as well.  I have school-aged kids so I’m thinking a lot about public education and kids with so much less than my own.  I’m thinking about the choices I can make to make that bridge shorter between us.  I am thinking about my language, and how it’s expanding with all of the learning I am doing around racial and environmental justice.  New language, new ways to articulate things that I have felt for so long, are changing me.  I can see it happening.  I am growing more empowered to change the more I understand about my self, my role, and my privilege.  It’s progress.

I’m fighting against the daily, hourly impulse to curl up in a ball and sleep til this is all over.  When I fight that urge, however, I’m accepting into my body that the fight is never over.  The pandemic is only giving us space and time right now to face our problems.  We got so many fish to fry.  We need climate justice.  We need poverty to be obliterated.  We need to stop separating families.  We need prison reform.  We need to burn our current administration to the ground.  

It’s overwhelming, right?  You can only eat an elephant one bite at a time (but don’t really eat an elephant! you know what I mean)... I bring this phrase back to myself when my projects and my responsibilities make me want to jet.  Or just go to sleep. Or eat a gallon of ice cream.  I know there’s always one thing I can do each day that takes a bite out of the elephant.  Right now, just one thing is so much.  If we all commit to one thing once a day that gets the world closer to the one we want to live in, the elephant will just be bones before we know it... and the world will look a whole lot more like the one we all deserve. 

Eat the elephant.

[danimadethis]

30 July 2020

The noble and honorable John Robert Lewis was laid to rest today.  I’m frankly lucky that I decided to turn on the news when I woke up this morning (something I RARELY do) and luckier still that CBS broadcasted his burial service commercial-free for a full two hours.  Three US presidents across both party lines spoke as well multiple leaders in the nonviolent moment that woke us all the fuck up.  

I knew who John Lewis was before this morning.  But now I know so much more about the invisible ways he has been influencing and impacting my life.  I live with so much privilege that I don’t even get to fully metabolize that fact.  

Today was a good day for mainstream media, IMO. They took the highest road possible and interrupted your regular *not regular* sleepwalking life.  They said YO! This matters!  Listen Up! This dude worked for 60+ years tirelessly -- peacefully demonstrating and organizing, changing laws, influencing policy and culture -- to give you the freedom you enjoy in this great country of yours. This great country is so insanely flawed, currently existing in a vacuum of leadership, hurting, and broken... but this man recognized the genius of our republic and the lived with the resolute conviction that ours is a democracy that -- when working as it is made to -- is made BY the people, FOR the people. He shook me out of my slumber today and reminded me of that.  

So many forces are trying to put us to sleep right now.  So much despair.  So much inequity.  For tender-hearted empaths like myself it can seem unbearable most days.  But the fact is, it IS bearable.  And we ARE tough enough to do the work.  WE ARE NOT FREE UNTIL WE ARE ALL FREE.  It’s plain and simple.  However each of us needs to dig deep right now and find the ways we can speak up and out to make change, this is our obligation.  It’s non-negotiable.

Democracy works when we all come to the table and decide we care enough about our fellow neighbors to listen.  We don’t have to agree.  Mostly we won’t.  But the blinding beauty of the opportunity we have here in America is in the fact that we are all so different.  Bumping up against those differences is the whole goddamn point.  We MUST reclaim our right to see and honor those differences.  And raise up all of us while we do it.  

This is an absurd segue but here goes: We love movies in this household.  A lot.  We also argue all the time about finding films that we can all agree to watch together.  So after an inspirational -- rare -- screening that we all loved last week (shout out High Note! So good!) we came up with the idea for the Most Awesome Movie Fest.  Please steal this idea.  

Four Genres, Four Weeks, Four Films per week.  We each pick one film in the genres we picked from a hat and the whole family has to watch all 16 films, no questions asked.  It’s been absolutely remarkable to see A. what we are all coming up with, and B. how quickly everyone stopped complaining about what to watch since we all have to show up for everyone’s choices.  We are practicing a working democracy in such a small but significant way through this exercise.  It’s been a joy to see what my kids want to see, and even more significant to think critically about what I want to share with them, in turn.  We are all kind of rising to our highest selves in this two hour space a few days a week.  You should try it. 

But I digress.  Back to the most important message of the day.  Barack Obama reminded us all today about the power of our vote.  Can y’all just show up?  Let’s vote for the world we want to see in November. We have so much more power than they want us to think we do.  Do it for John.  

[danimadethis]

Mood

[danimadethis]

29 July 2020

This has been a great week for future planning.  That sounds absurd since we still can’t really leave home, but I feel more optimistic than I have in weeks and I’m using that energy to work on a project that we have been speculating and thinking about for the past five years. 

I can’t tell you too much about it because I need to preserve all this clean, clear thinking I gratefully have right now for the project itself.  But I can say that if you have an idea you have had at some point, and it returns to you more than once, stop ignoring it.  You are infinitely creative and you have the ability to do some deep work with your ideas at this time.  Innovations in Quar! Pandemic Blessings!  Let your mind wander, doodle, noodle and problem-solve on the big or small idea you are growing.  We will never have this opportunity again in this lifetime to spend this much energy in this specific way.

I am going to make something big from this experience.  I already get the sense that I will look back at this time as some kind of bizarre miracle.  I’m making a little more art, which is why I’m writing less, but I’m making... and that’s really all I care about at the end of the day.  I enjoy having a place to check in with myself and with you, however, so I will commit to keeping up with this on a regular basis.

In other news:  It’s so hot I’ve forgotten that food is fun and exciting.  Right now it’s just work and if I can put my meal in a glass instead and just forget about, that’s fine by me.  Smoothies are de rigueur for at least a meal a day and the rest... ech, figure it out for yourself.  It’s 116 and I’m OVER IT!  I wonder how we and why we live in the desert right on schedule, this time, this place,  every year.  

Stay cool, friends.  

[danimadethis]

New Plant Paintings from my #indoorlife series.  I’m selling these to raise money for a local urban garden here in Phoenix that is doing great work for our community.  I partnered with a friend who also made some beautiful letterpress postcards that will be included in each sale.  Visit my instagram page @danimadethis for more info.  Together we can do great things. #buyart #buylocal #growyourown #blacklivesmatter 

[danimadethis]

07 July 2020

Do the stages of grief happen and then happen again?  Because I feel like I’m starting the cycle all over again.  It felt like this in March, and then I slowly moved on to Acceptance and was getting used to this new normal and then BAM. The grief rolled back in hard and fast all over again and I’m back at the beginning. 

Numbness and Shock was the dominant theme a few weeks ago but I’ve moved on to the Anger phase again.  I can’t stop thinking about how I was so on top of my shit during my last therapy appointment -- I said all the right words, and was doing all the good work.  I was exercising! Eating right! Meditating!  And as soon as I hung up the phone, I pretty much fell apart.  

I feel like such a phony.  I can’t believe I was that Together Person just weeks ago.  The person I am right now hasn’t gotten cardio in two weeks and has an ice-cream based diet.  Staying present? I don’t even know where I am right now I’m so deep into my head and its nasty games.   I know I need to get my shit together for my kids, but dude, I just really want to lie down.  Like forever. 

It’s something about the toxic cocktail of the spike in Covid cases, the injustice that overwhelms every nook and cranny of our society, the environmental fragility that I am passing on to my kids, and the selfish attitude of so many in the general population that feels insurmountable.  I don’t know why humans believe the earth is theirs to trample, pummel, pillage and destroy.  It’s so very hard to stay on your own path, maintain energy levels high enough to keep doing the good and hard work, and not want to throw in the towel every day around 11am.

I know and like therapy enough that I understand that admitting there is a problem is the first step in working through the problem.  The Problem then is that I would like a lobotomy but there are no elective surgeries available at this time.  So I have to instead live with myself and live with this world, as it is, right now, and find a way to function, and not just function, but thrive.  Because if I am a universe unto myself and believe in the essential nature and power of a creative brain, then I need to shine so that others can shine.  My only contribution at the end of the day is to be my Best Self, whatever that means.

I feel better looking at those words.  I’m pissed as all get out still but I feel a little softer just writing this down.  Maybe today my Best Self is just a long shower and a face mask, and an attempt to read for a little while.  And maybe a green vegetable or two.  After ice cream.  

[danimadethis]

July 1, 2020

Our brother is trying to find a way home while I sit at the kitchen table and think about what could/should/will/won’t happen today.  He did the kind and hard thing and flew straight into the hurricane, coming back here while our state hits a crisis point in the pandemic.  He flew here to drive across the desert with my husband and my son and visit their dad.  It was too risky for his health back in March and April, and probably just as risky now, but that’s where we are at in this journey right?  We are beginning to justify choices, making harder decisions, grappling with risk/reward to remain human and have human experiences. 

I don’t want my kids to go back to school yet.  It doesn’t feel safe enough to me.  One of my kids shares my sentiment.  One of them does not.  I am actively engaged in protest against school prematurely re-opening and yet I am also preparing mentally to actually send one of my kids into the fire.  

I am trying to accept that my desire to keep him physically safe may not keep him mentally safe.  My boy is developmentally at a different stage than my daughter.  To his 13-year-old mind he lost his social life, his varsity sports, his identity literally overnight.  To his credit, he’s coped with the loss remarkably well. But when confronted with the prospect of remaining at home for another three months yesterday, his grief was untenable.  He screamed, he cried, he said terrible things to us.  

He’s a private person so I hadn’t been able to see his wounds until now. It gave me so much empathy for how strong he’s been throughout this time.  I pray that my children are growing because of this experience, building character and sensitivity for the world and for others.  And if I pray those wishes for them, I must all pray that wish for myself.  I need to trust that my 13-year-old might know what he needs the most right now, even more than I do.  I need to accept that he needs to take that risk and return to school and that we need to take that risk with him, for him.

I want our government to make the choice for us.  I can blame it on that this time, but if I’m honest with myself, the world I actually want to live in doesn’t work that way.  We have to make hard choices all the time, and that’s by design.  That’s how we grow.  So I will take a deep breath, sanitize my hands, put on my mask before I help my son put on his, and enter the drop-off line with the rest of the weary and worried parents that are all just trying to fly blind and not crash.  

[danimadethis]

June 30, 2020

I learned that my kids won’t be going back to school in August.  

I ate grilled chicken with onions and peppers on brown rice with cilantro and lime and laughed and cried during a family movie screening of some silly new Will Ferrell joint that did exactly it’s job and kept me numb and dumb for a couple sweet hours.  

I woke up at 6am and wrote a letter to my governor and then I sent the letter to everyone I know, grasping for some thread in the Universe that will echo my prayers back to me.  

I watched a press conference with that governor and he was so uncomfortable, just like me.  He wants to make order in the world again.  He thinks he can get closer to that order if we all stop dancing in nightclubs and tubing the river.  He’s trying to systemize chaos.  He’d have a real shot at it if he took off his tie, threw out the script and actually spoke to the people. The absolute absence of leadership in our state and nation is pouring a river of salt into our collective wounds.    

[danimadethis]

Returning to the Blog

I need a place to put things.  I need a place to unpack all of the shelves that I’ve stuffed full, relieve the congestion, and begin to organize the seemingly unlimited thoughts that have cluttered the space between my ears for so many months now. 

I'm revisiting this once-beloved space to try to organize some of those internal shelves.  I want to document what I’m thinking about here, so I can take some of the weight off those mental file cabinets.

I’ll start with right now: 

The world is on fire, in case you are reading this in the far-distant future or just live on another planet.  We’ve been home since March 13th, 2020, the Friday that would have begun our Spring Break.  It’s June 29, 2020 and we are still here.  We are smack in the middle of a global heath crisis, which has made crystal clear the moral crisis that we also face in this country, the United States of America.  

Those states aren’t so united these days.  They haven’t been for a long time.  Haven’t been ever, let’s be honest.  Many of us thought that we had taken great strides forward in the deep inequity of this country through the election of our great president, Barack Obama. And just as many of us are now fighting to unlearn messaging we have heard since birth in order to re-imagine a world where Black and Brown Lives Matter.  Many of us thought we were on the road to all of that progress.  Many of us finally understand now that until all of us are free, none of us are free. 

The time is always now for activism, but there’s really no time like this one for that activism to take hold.  I spend hours of my day now writing letters to congresspeople, raising money for causes that need support, and continuing my education in the areas I’ve got limited - and limiting - beliefs.  

I believe I can change.  I believe this because I am doing the work of making that change.  I am interested in looking for solutions, not wallowing in the shitty way that it is.  I am determined to use the rare quiet of this moment in history to deepen my work and transform from someone who opted out to someone who opts IN.  

I have a big brain.  It’s had lots of room to fill with tons of ideas and information. I have realized during this period of quarantine that part of my work is to synthesize those ideas and share them.  If you are a person who likes thinking about ideas as related to education, integration, food and the growing of it, environmental activism, art, beauty, space, and anti-racism, I hope this is a place where you feel stimulated to use your own big brain to chew on these ideas and make some more of your own.  

I want to go where the wind takes me. I am interested in a wide swath of intersecting ideas and fields, so this may not seem like the space you thought you signed up for at times.  Or maybe I’ll spur you on to some new never-considered thought in your own head that you can talk about with someone and transform into action.   I hope that my work will inspire you to your own. Because if there’s anything I’ve learned during this time, it’s that the world really needs each and every one of us to wake up, speak up, and bravely face the task of meaningful, deep change.  

I’ll keep showing up here.  Please comment and let me know what you are thinking about during this time and what you want to change in the world.  We are all in this together.  

[danimadethis]

Bread. Broken. #allthatremains #nubs

[danimadethis]

In honor of my awesome mother in law and her granny squad, marching for all of us this morning. #whyimarch #ladypower

[danimadethis]

I've always believed art is the loudest form of protest. I'm a wheat-paster, not a marcher... and this is the way I'll speak out this week. Find USAToday at any of your local grocery stores today...Shepard Fairey did you a solid and bought full color ads on the back of the front section. #spreadlove #celebratediversity #shepardfairey #obey #peacefulprotest #whyimarch

[danimadethis]

Nature is the greatest artist of all #chioggabeets #growyourown

[danimadethis]

First beet + carrot harvest! #growyourown