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Universal Form: Light on the Wall

| cloudcalling

This video was made with 1 (possibly 2) still-frame images of light shining on a wall through a window in the morning. Very, very golden – almost having a substance and shine of its own there on the wall. I hadn’t been thinking about universal form, and hadn’t been noticing – at least for a couple of days – the patterns in things. It’s a particular way of seeing, a studying, a manner of orienting one’s sight and might to deeply look at the way everything lays over everything else to move and form up what we can see, covering what we can’t. – but, still showing the shadows of forces beyond perception. It is a state of consciousness, a mode of participation, engagement – this way of seeing.

A primary driver of my determination to create coherent re-presentations of my work as an artist is the necessity – at this critical point in my personal, professional, and vocational development – to disengage with tasks and activities that undermine, disrupt, corrode, inhibit, exhaust, or otherwise fuck with my capacity to inhabit the world in the state of consciousness and functional cognition that allows for – if not is central to – my art and research, and thus central to my purpose and passion in existing and to my sources of joy and wonder in existing. That, to me, is important.

I hadn’t been thinking about it engaging with patterns much, because I spent quite a bit of time this season in a muddle about work and earning wages and not able to focus on anything at all. It was during this period of time that I began to realize that I may not be able – in the literal sense of ability in cognition, executive function, social and communicative mediation and adaptability, etc. – to do the work I had been doing, which was the only work I thought I might be able to do, as other areas of disability involving extremely variable sensory integration and stress vulnerability challenges stemming from neurodiversity factors has seriously side-lined me in terms of most industries and occupations in the United States. It may be possible, I was realizing during the period of time – roughly – that I made this video, that being an artist and the sort of experimental researcher I am may be the only work I am able to do as I enter this stage of my life.

I walked into the room that I am perpetually moving into and out of and never quite fully live in, and the light on the wall was playing like happenstance magic on the wall, shifting shadows of leaves forming shapes and faces, stories. I photographed it all for 10 minutes and then the sun moved from specific position and the light was no longer reflecting off the slightly glossy leaves of the hedges grown to trees.

I didn’t know what I was going to find or make when I started layering, and was delighted when this moth-like form appeared. �

Proving God w/ Clouds: Reflections in Early August + Cloud Gallery

| cloudcalling

Is this a common thing to be seeing all the time?

Why am I seeing this stuff? Are other people seeing this stuff?

There are little flashes of the maddening urgency of 2010, the first time she took a deep dive into cloud watching and totally lost her mind, became crazy in the context of a unique set of extraordinary pressures and chaos dynamics that she was utterly unprepared to navigate well.

She hadn’t ever really even thought about God that much, though admitted to herself a quiet, stubborn agnosticism, a belief in something that just wouldn’t go away no matter how hard she tried to believe that there was nothing, no matter how hard she tried to be an atheist. She could say – sitting by the heat exhaust smoking cigarettes outside of Kramer Hall, c. 1997, black tapered pants, nerdy white socks, face accented by silver eyeshadow and uncertainty – that she was an atheist, but she’d always believed there was something, at the very least ghosts.

However, in 2010 she was not thinking about God, and had no desire to think about God, except that her life was falling apart and she didn’t know what to do. Her family was impossible to talk with, and her friendships had atrophied in the years of children, work, and a difficult marriage.

As soon as she dropped her son off at skate camp, both of them determinedly cheerful, she collapsed into sobbing. She didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to go anywhere, didn’t want to be anyway. She felt completely disconnected from the life she’d had just 6 months earlier, a life where she was a mother working at a science museum, going through a divorce, but still on top of her game, feeling confident, good about herself and her ability to move forward in her life as a person who had made difficult choices and come out okay.

How had she become this person who could not stop crying, driving around her block in circles, waiting to know what to do. It was almost like she saw herself stopping the car in the bright sun of a regular summer day where people at the church on the corner were serving food from a folding table, white plastic tablecloth blowing thinly like a flag of surrender laid down.

She saw the way that first one, then two, then slowly a small group of people quieted and stared, plates held between hands, watching as she stumbled up the steps, openly crying as the woman preacher intercepted her and led her inside the empty sanctuary, ceiling vaulted and blessedly dark.

The woman laid hands on her as she cried and called down warrior angels. The thought of warrior angels was initially reassuring, but soon became strange and overwhelming – the clouds and the beliefs, the sensations, worlds inside of her being washed away and new worlds blooming, new bizarre worlds where entities such as warrior angels and dark forces were transacting all around and through her.

Keep it simple, Faith.

Don’t go into the bizarre worlds now. The novelty of your delusions is a good story, but it’s not the story you need to focus on right now, and you only have a 1/2 hour to write before you need to start getting ready for the day, because it is your mom’s birthday, and your parent’s anniversary, and your mom is not dead, even though they said she would be. So, hallelujah.

She is a syncrete, an animist, but even in those identifications, she doesn’t follow or study anything too deeply or for too long. She studies the sky, pays attention to what she notices, what she is pulled to learn and to then let go. She does not want to be consumed into anything that may keep her from believing what she believes, which changes as she develops.

Fixed beliefs and externally devised prescriptive practices of spirituality are not for her. They make her feel as though she is worshipping a false idol or something, ignoring the wind and her own ways of connecting to what she experiences as ‘spirit’ or ‘the holy unity of all things held in brief, glorious pausing resonance in the vastly constant tumbling of time and space and place’ or…she doesn’t know…

Writing assignment (for self):

Free-write how you feel when you feel connected to a sense of God or spirit or the earth itself, or to ancestors, or some combination of all of the above.

What do you notice in your body and mind space? What sensations and thoughts do you observe?

What are you grateful for and hopeful for in those moments?

What do you know in the most simple ways of knowing?

Yesterday, she began two small paintings of a cloud picture – one of the many, many cloud pictures that she has taken over the last two months, which has been a major period of cloud observation.

Twelve years ago, she began the process of drawing everyday for a year. She drew and painted a whelk. A shell.

Yesterday, she saw – and thoroughly documented- what looked to be the outline of a whelk that hung in the sky for a solid – she doesn’t know – 10 minutes a half hour. She can look at her pictures and tell how long a structure lasted, or at least how long she documented it before moving on to some other holy wonder that is sprawled out over her neighborhood and that nobody else seems to notice, which – to her – is so fucking weird.

Is it even real?

She has let herself get consumed and misled by questions before.

It is very important to maintain focus and grounding, because – after 12 years – twelve years which have held some seriously alarming mass atrocities and generated disturbing trends in avarice, exploitation, hate, and delusion, and have – alas – foretold of a future, ahem, most grim as far as the health and habitability of the planet we collectively live on, well – she is pretty sure there is something weird going on with the clouds and that it is important that she find someone to talk with – seriously and sensitively and rationally and helpfully – about this.

There is almost a desperation in her and she tells it to quiet down, knowing that she needs to listen, but that to be effective in actually finding the right people to help her make sense of why she sees this and is it real and – if so – is it significant, and – if so – how and why, what does any of it and all of it mean and what should she do?

What should I do? What would you do?

At this point, I have 0 attachments to specific outcomes – though there is a part of me, a part of me that is likely alive in almost every human on the planet that longs for the reality of a glorious greater force to intervene, to help, please help. Lord, please help end this suffering. The people and the animals and the places and the water.

It doesn’t seem crazy to me to think that – in some way – the animals and forests and the ocean itself is crying for help, praying for help.

Fuck my scientific objectivity and all the wishywash mealy-mouth careful step around what I say and how I say it – show them, show the people, let them make of it what they will.

What is an appropriate social media strategy for a project like this, which hardly anyone knows about and that is somewhat loaded in that it deals in themes that people go to war over, deals in themes of God and gods, both of which and all of which I know basically nothing about and am totally okay with that for now, except that I have so many questions that I don’t even begin to know how to answer, and – to be honest – feel like I’m in waaaaay over my head with this project, these questions.

How silly is it to see something not just beautiful but profoundly beautiful – powerfully beautiful – and to see it again and again and again and then – haha – retreat into a study to learn the details of this doctrine or that doctrine, to join some thing and then devote your life to fitting in and being virtuous, respectable, unto the code of that belief system?

Nope. Not for me.

I am open to learning many things, but will devote my entirety to none of them, because ideas can be powerful mediators of experience.

It’s two minutes til I have to get ready for my mom’s birthday. I am going to have a good day.

Getting Amor Fati tattooed on my hands was a fantastic decision, because it is a constant reminder and directive to love and appreciate whatever is happening, to embrace it and keep moving toward a fullness of being, to not be distracted by all the reasons something might be bad or unpleasant, to just love it and learn from it and move on.

I depart from Nietzsche in many ways, at many points, I’m sure, none of which I will elaborate on because I have hardly read anything he has written and don’t necessarily intend to, unless his work and ideas begin to show up in articles and ideas and occasional books that cross my path and strike me as significant or stimulate my curiosity.

One thing I do know is that acceptance and appreciation of whatever is happening is great and all that, but the reality is that I can never ever rest in any kind of peace if I do not do whatever is in my power to do to end avoidable suffering and the exploitation of creation in the world that I live in and that I love deeply.

I will never retreat to the comforts of my own acceptance and appreciation and forget that all over the world mothers are grieving and places are dying and entire worlds are screaming in ways that we can’t even hear.

Proving God w/ Clouds: Inquiry and Reflections 07/24/21

| cloudcalling
  • It is worth noting that this hand – form that is appearing to hold the sky is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I am going to paint this one day.

Today, I felt a shade of doubt.

Then the sky opened up and I was certain that, yes, I probably should continue to think about this, spend time on this.

I don’t think I really have a choice.

This is not the sort of curiosity that one puts on the shelf. “Hmmm, am I witnessing some supranational phenomena that maybe ancient humans saw and felt and understood as God? I dunno. I guess I’m gonna go take a nap.”

I’ve been studying the clouds for 11 years. I lost my mind trying to prove God on the Internet with cloud pictures in 2010, though there was a lot of other stuff going on that year, too. I lost legal custody of my children in part because of my wacky ideas and experiences about clouds and strangers and angels and things like that.

I’m definitely not crazy now. For real. There is something strange with the clouds.

I’m an artist and if I saw clouds painted like some of the clouds I observe, it would be easy to see that they look all wrong – not like clouds at all. They look like pictures and symbols and parts of words.

I reminded myself, again, that I am not trying to prove God with pictures of clouds.

I am observing and documenting cloudforms that I find interestingly reminiscent of various other forms – symbols, animals, trees or atomic mushroom clouds.

This is an observational and contemplative practice. I have to acknowledge, for the sake of noting researcher bias and the potential impact on perception and meaning-making, that when I see some of these things in the sky, it is kind of hard not to believe that the clouds are – at times – manifesting the shapes of the Holy Spirit, or some immanent presence such as that.

I don’t hold to a Christian interpretation, or any specific interpretation at all. I might use the language of Holy Spirit or God, but – really – I should come up with other words, because those words (among many, many other words) mean very different things to people.

Even in the absence of numinous interpretation, it’s the most beautiful and wondrous thing I’ve ever seen. As I write this I notice a rising in my mind, a retort of sorts, reminding me of the miracle of leaves, and of spiderwebs, and of basically everything that has come into life over the past 4.5 billion years. It’s like nothing is more beautiful than anything else, somehow, because it is all connected and even piles of mud and rotting carcasses are a small facet of this infinitely and gloriously expansive entity we are a part of.

I can remember when the world was full of separate things, back when nothing meant much but living because you had to and eventual death – a clean drop of a sharp cliff at the edge of space, the age of the universe or how anything was connected to anything else was impossible to imagine.

There is something in me that is simply stunned by anciently sacred all life is, and concurrent with that stunned feeling is the sensation of wanting to cry, a stifled desire to cry, tho’ I’ve cried quite a bit.

I wept on my porch for the oceans in 2010, felt the floor of the sea (the Gulf of Mexico in particular) violated by drills, the waters that gave life to all becoming toxic, billions helplessly swimming and dying, dying, dying…because of some dumb stuff that humans have decided they like to buy and own and then throw away, some convenience to our modern lifestyles, our ever-so-brief world.

I am angry. Outraged, actually. Outraged like the kid I was when I first began to realize how utterly disgusting it was that sea turtles were dying so people in Omaha can eat seafood, so we could drink our six packs, so we can drive our cars.

I literally makes me feel sick.

I can hear an echo of adult voices in my head. “I know. It’s so sad. What are you going to do about it…?”

“Want to go to the movies?”

🤢🤮


So, I just took about who-knows-how-many-pictures of mind-blowing heart wrenching seriously intense clouds. Stood calmly, watched. Took pictures for about hour, then another hour. The sunset hours.

I can totally understand how I lost my mind over this stuff in 2010.

I don’t lose my mind over anything anymore.

I can stand with one foot in the calm and rational while I pan up to see what appears to be a giant ritual skull mask, or skeletal cat face, and I can drop the camera – just for a moment – and look right at the eye-shapes and feel how small I am and say, out loud: “I see you.”

Nothing that is happening in the sky scares me, save for the belief that in some act of divine desperation, all the ancient forces of the earth and waters and sky that have witnessed and absorbed all life and death for – like I said, 4.5 BILLION years – mustered all their molecules together to shape a warning of what we stand to lose if we humans do not immediately cease and desist with the destruction of sacred creation and the splitting of atoms and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, messing around with DNA like we are some kind of genius God when – obviously – we are total idiots because we have destroyed our habitat in like 300 years and have actually managed to erase other living creatures from existence like they didn’t matter at all.

At this point, we deserve whatever scorching mutated soulless and hungry hell of a future we will get.

Oh, don’t worry, I’m not talking about Hell-Hell. I’m talking about Earth, only we won’t get what we deserve – our children’s children will.

😵‍💫

*Note momentary loss of scientific objectivity. *

NOW WE ARE LEARNING THIS 

| cloudcalling

In whispers it came, hush and slow-spread

shaped as the voiceless sphere 

of a dandelion,

cities lit at night under planes.

It did not come wriggling, slithering, 

or crashing.

It came drifting, hanging like air,

caught in pearls of breath 

sparkling over everything we sigh about, settling.

Replicated in dark creases 

inside our heads and chests, 

the fibers of our hearts,

winter cold.

Silent streets, 

jagged line graphs, rising numbers,

hospitals afloat in the harbors,

bright white bundles, rolls and rolls, 

biohazard, poppy red, 

mouthless grimace, 

no toilet paper. 

“Close down the schools,” the order came.

“Now we are learning this.”

Tears of God and all Gods

fold the mountain, exhale fog,

as ghosts of the girdled  

echo their fallings in the forest, 

being morning breezes. 

No more coffin wood, only bleak sunlight,

no tooth-leaved shade. 

Scurry squirrels,

dig and dig and dig.

“Forget the fallen,” old hunger says. 

“Now we are learning this.”

Redbud procession, same as before, 

only difference in details:

new branches, new blooms.

Creeks surge and wither, slightly

frogs begin chorusing 

their one-season world. 

Up through the parking lots

empty elementary school, 

empty pool    –

uncautious shoots of new green rise

through soil made of dust,

bones, bark, rock worn to sand

under asphalt.

Once a giant, stubborn roots hold tight.

Unnoticed on ridgelines,

small striving trees, 

not yet choked out by blight, 

grow, seeking the light

because – really –

what else is there to do?

“Now we are learning this.”

[Note misspelling of last name]

Now we are learning this. 

Hi, thank you all for creating encouragement to make poetry during National Poetry Month. 
I have attached a poem entitled Now We Are LearningThis as a .docx. Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing the file or if a different format is preferable.  
Have a great afternoon!

Thank you for your poem. I am forwarding to the judges. 
Since I am not a judge, I can say in my humble opinion, 
 this is an amazing poem. Although amazing is an overused phrase; this time it fits.
  I have read it twice. It is gorgeous read aloud.
This made my day. 

Thank you so much for forwarding the poem!
It meant a lot to me to write it. My mom picked up the notice of the contest at the library and gave it to me, so she was on my mind a lot as I wrote. 
Thank you so much for reading and enjoying the poem. That made my day.

I am delighted to report that you are one of the two winners in the adult category  of the Library Poetry Contest.   There was a tie. 
  As you know, I loved your poem! Amazing is a word often overused.  It describes your poem perfectly.
  Because we only had 4 entries at the time where we had to commit to the Zoom Event, we could not do it. 
 I have your prize. I can mail it or we can meet somewhere in Fairview. Please let me know what works.
 Are you published anywhere? I would like to read more of your work.
 Thank you for entering.

Oh, that’s great news! How exciting!
This is the first time I’ve ever won anything for writing. I’m not published anywhere – but, hope to be someday! 
I am working on putting together a little website for my artwork and writing. I’ve spent most of my energies over the past couple decades on family and working in nonprofits. I am in the process of learning how to better follow my passion for doing good in the world through arts. 

I hate to ask, but do you know if the poem will be printed in the Fairview Town Crier? 
I’d love for my mom to see a poem I wrote in print. 
As many of her ‘library friends’ know, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer last year and she knows I have always wanted to be a poet. 
It would make her so happy to see the poem printed! 
I understand if there isn’t space in the layout, but just wanted to ask. 
Thanks so much for liking the poem! 💜

“Oh, My God! It’s God!”

| cloudcalling

When she started to see peculiar-seeming clouds, it was only a matter of days before she began bumbling toward the conclusion of “Oh my God, it’s God!” 

Her thinking about God was a mush-mash of recollected symbols and suggestions gleaned from experiences growing up in the everyday+everywhere Christian culture of south Georgia, the imagery and intonation of miscellaneous church services attended after spending Saturday night with a friend, going to church on Sunday, hot and mostly-boring-but-sometimes-with-singing.

She felt closer to God in sweet the relief of leaving when the services finally ended, stepping out into the heat and sun, the living day.

In the 9th grade, she spent a single semester at boarding school, where a van dropped her off Sunday morning at the Episcopal church in Clayton, Georgia right down the street from where there was a Klan rally one Saturday during the town-outing, which was usually a trip to a shopping center where there was a grocery store, a Papa’s Pizza and an Eckert’s drugstore stocked with Robitussin DM, gum, and cheez puffs.*

She didn’t entirely dislike going alone to the Episcopalian service in the little stone church building, dark and wood-filled, shining with color through the morning-lit windows above where the rhododendron outside had grown up over Jesus’ feet. 

She felt peaceful there. Anonymous and peaceful, sitting alone.

However, she soon discovered that she liked it far more to lay on the nubby utilitarian carpet of her room, eating Kool-Aid and reading the yearbook for the 100th time after pressing her body against the wall under her roommate’s bunk and holding her breath during Sunday morning roomcheck so she didn’t have to go to church at all and there were no sounds except her own sounds and the building’s sounds, heat through vents.

*Circa 1991: Three senior girls walking in streetlight circle by the dorm’s side exit, tearfully protesting Operation Desert Storm and a Klan rally with full white robes walking down Main Street, right past the grocery store where she would buy ramen and microwave popcorn, 12 packs of Fresca.

Stranger Angels: 1 [“Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check.]

| cloudcalling

The old man said hello to me as I started the walk back to my car from the Senior Opportunity Center, where I and a bunch of other people gave food to elders on Wednesday mornings, high-end packaged salads from grocery stores couldn’t afford to shop at, artisan breads packed into black garbage bags, crumb-dusted pastries, and dented cans of soups, expiring cereal.

He fell into step beside me, walking down the hill and talking about traffic on the I-26, and the accident he almost saw on Patton Avenue. “I was just standing there on the sidewalk, watching these two cars, and I was like, ‘This is crazy!”

“It sounds like you were paying attention.”

The man, tall and stooped around the shoulders, still handsome in the set of his cheeks and architecture of nose, the son of slaves and people who lived here long before I did, had the laboratory smell of a few straight days of drinking, the smell of old alcohol poorly metabolized.

He sat down on the small wall outside of the unemployment office and I sat down beside him. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, sister, I was paying attention. I pay attention.”

We sat there in the companionable silence of strangers, feeling the warm sun and paying attention.

He shifted toward me, leaned like he was about to invite me into a secret, and I understood that he would ask me for money, and I was okay with that.

He began his request, and I didn’t need him to go on about what he was looking for, held my hand up for him to stop speaking. There was no need for him to beg, to spin a story, to make an appeal. He did not have to charm me or convince me.

I opened up my bag, “Let me see if I have any paper money.”

I knew that I did. A crumple of two singles, and a secret 10 dollar bill. I pulled out the two dollars and pressed it into his hand.

The man nodded, almost solemn, squeezed my hand. “Thank you, my sister.”

I felt like God was watching us, sitting there on that wall. The woman wearing all black and the old man in the sun.

There was a pause, and I plucked the ten dollar bill out of the small zippered pocket inside of my bag, grasped the man’s hand, transferred the money.

His whooping surprised me, his jumping up and slapping his leg, pulling his hand into a fist that beat against his chest, solidly, once, twice. “My sister! Oh, yes, my sister!”

I stood up, pulling my bag back onto my shoulder.

He grabbed me, pulled me to him, his sweat and alcohol smell around me, his arms strong and knotted like wood across my back. I didn’t feel scared. I have hugged a lot strangers in my life and, besides, I have a social naivete that makes me almost oblivious to the possibility that some stranger will do me harm. The only people who have ever harmed me were people I know. I wasn’t scared of them at first, either.

He kissed my head, up by my hairline, and hugged me like I really was his sister that he hadn’t seen in a long time.

He began to utter the words, quiet, like a prayer, then broke away from me and shouted them, hollering them out to the street like he was calling down gods, exclaiming to the universe. He turned to me, and put his fist on his chest. “My sister…”

He stepped forward to embrace me again. “I love you, I love you…you, you are blessed person.”

He stepped back, took my hands in his, and nodded to me, then turned and started walking back up toward town, still saying those words, louder and then quiet, a chanting rise and fall. I watched him walk, and listened, said the words to myself, trying not to forget them.

He was almost back to where we’d begun walking together when I caught up to him. “Excuse me, sir, those words? What are those words?”

He put his face close to mine and repeated the words, whispering.

I said them back.

He corrected my pronunciation of the last syllable, and said it with me until I said it clearly, with some conviction.

“It means peace, and goodness, salvation.”

Walking back to my car, I said the phrase over and over again. In my car, I wrote down how I thought the sounds might be spelled, but I still don’t know what the words are, or where they came from.

I tried to Google what I thought the words sounded like, spelled out phonetically, with hyphens between the syllables, to remind myself of the intonation, the rhythm of the sounds.


I learned a little about Hebrew suffixes, and checked out an old Busta Rhymes song, Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check.

Visual Thinking and Sense of The Real

| cloudcalling

C. 1990

She waited for her friends to come pick her up. It was raining and they were late. The river was grey and brown, rough-textured with falling water and a steady wind from the east, from the ocean.

Sitting and waiting, nervously considering the possible explanations for her friends’ lateness, she wondered if they had gotten in an accident, and then involuntarily pictured the whole tragic scene – wet metal twisted, a tire still spinning, the underbelly of the vehicle exposed, hiss of rain on a hot engine quickly cooling. Frozen in a stricken sadness, she willed herself not to think about wrecks, and strained to hear the dogs bark, the sound of tires on the wet dirt road. When her friends arrived a few minutes later, she almost couldn’t believe they were okay. There had been no wreck. Nonetheless, the heavy sadness stayed with her, made her quiet and awkward riding in the backseat, still thinking about wrecks and how weird it was that her friends had no idea that she had been almost convinced that they’d been in an accident.

Ideas or imaginings that make her feel something are hard not believe, because they exist in her mind and in her body with the same detail and sensation as things that are real. Her feelings are her nervous system being scared, or excited, happy, calm, etc. The sensations she calls feelings are caused by her nervous system reacting to what she is experiencing.

She is a visual thinker. This means that she imagined the wreck that never happened, she saw the car crash, the slip of tires on pavement, crumpling metal, windshield buckled in like a spider’s web in wind, the sharp impact of a face against a dash board. Sometimes her nervous system doesn’t know that what she imagines isn’t real, and so her heart races, her blood vessels constrict, guts clench, and the chest constricts with a feeling of crying seizing in the throat.

It was of no importance that she’d never been in a car accident, that she had never seen – at least not up close – a bad wreck, had only glimpsed the mangled car bodies on the side of the interstate, in the closed lane.

She had seen plenty of wrecks on television, in movies.

Once, on the bus to the Catholic school, someone swore they saw a foot, a severed foot, laying in the road by a wrecked red car, but she didn’t see it, except in her mind.

For years before she’d ever been to New York, she could picture being in the city so thoroughly that she had to remind herself she’d never been there, pause a moment if anyone asked what cities she’d been to. 

Her head is full of things she’d never experienced seeing – car wrecks, war zones, the devastation of floods, the anger of men in dark rooms, the creeping stalk of late night streets, cities lit at dawn, the tangled of interstates coming alive while people on the other side of the world bake under the midday sun, speaking different languages, living in refugee camps, steam rising from the earth, the stink of the slaughterhouse, quiet halls of rest homes, bombs going off, rivers always flowing, waterfalls plunging into the dark, mountains asleep as the edge of glacier falls heavy into the ocean, unseen and heard by anyone but the bears, blithe seals giving a brief shudder before sliding back into the water.

All of this is happening all at once, a rapid-reel flashing of scenes and thoughts running in the background, a sense of seeing, witnessing.

It’s made up though, her imaginings of these things she has never seen in real life. It’s all based on television and movies and pictures in books, stories she has read. 

She stopped watching television in 2001, in the days immediately following the American event of 09/11/2001. Taking the dog for a walk around the NE Portland neighborhood she lived in, she found herself picturing the President’s face, the buildings falling again and again, the people and the smoke.

She could feel it in her body – terrible, stunned, and close – almost like she was there, like it was real to her beyond the news reports of what was happening several thousand miles away.

PROVING GOD WITH CLOUDS: I Was a Big Loser [Backstory and Context, Spring 2010]

| cloudcalling

My belief that I was noticing and witnessing elemental communications from something like God gave me a far-greater purpose than being the total loser that everyone seemed to think I was – the selfish, ungrateful wife who wanted to get a divorce, the person who was laid-off from work, the one who “wasn’t thinking about the kids” – who was being selfish and immature, crying too much and not trying hard enough to get her ‘act together.’

When I think back objectively, I understand that I really wasn’t that much of a loser, but at that point in my life, I deeply believed that I was, in fact, a huge failure as a human being and this belief was reinforced by criticism and hostility in extended family relationships during the process of a bad divorce.

American history and economies create a toxic and transactional culture full of power and control dynamics and run-through with traumatic experiences in core relationships and maladaptations to not having our basic needs to:

  • be seen in a way that is dignified, worthy, valid
  • to not be harmed, exploited, or abused by the people and institutions we rely on to support our human existence and nurture our individual potentials.

It was almost cliche when my mental health history and brief, relatively minor parenting transgressions – (getting upset and tearful during confusing conversations that turned into arguments in front of the kids, being late to drop them off at school some rare morning or another because one or the other of them was refusing to leave the house and those things can take a minute, spending time on artwork when I was supposed to be helping my daughter learn how to read even though she didn’t want to sit down with me and look at the boring books of phonetics, simple sentences) – were brought into divorce discussions.

I had thought – hoped – that everything could be amicable, copacetic in the process of uncoupling. However, that ended up not being the case.

There began to be discussion of custody lawyers specializing in mood disorders, and one of the other mothers from my son’s class called to let me know that people – other parents from my children’s classes – were being told to keep an eye on me, that I was unstable.

The drawing-everyday-for-a-year blog was getting even further off topic – pictures that twisted and folded onto themselves in semi-disturbing surrealist mash-ups of figures and fish.

These were not the sort of pictures a well-adjusted mother should draw.

She definitely shouldn’t draw a recognizable and unflattering caricature of an extended family member, and if she is foolishly bitter enough to draw such a picture, she probably shouldn’t post it to her weird blog that was not the sort of blog that any normal mom would have, a blog that was – unbeknownst to her – being surveilled by concerned family members and a handful of parents of elementary school age children who had known her since their kids were mutually tiny people playing at parks and preschools, kindergarten.

She could feel that people were thinking things about her, that there had been conversations.

It was literally palpable – the different person I had become to almost everyone, as though the moment I stepped toward the space where the other mothers were talking in a loose, easy circle, a force-field went up, and the awkwardness of this new person I had become slipped over me like a cage as I saw that they did not want to talk with me.

I began to just wave my hand a little as I passed by, to or from taking my children to the door of the building, the door of the classroom. Then, as the school year finally came to a close, I just smiled a half-smile and gave a half-nod, no real eye-contact as I dropped the kids off in the morning.

I began to simply cease to exist as anyone that anyone talked with, and stood alone, waited alone at the end of the day for the bell to ring and the doors to open and my kids to come back to me, to get to come home.