The Way of Art

So there you are, faced with another of the ongoing conundrums that require your attention. Now. You can fret and just pull the first lever of response out of anger, frustration, and impatience, with no care for the outcome, or you can take a breath and consider the options. The problem, unfortunately, does not have one right, correct, or pre-ordained solution. You have to think on your feet and synthesize. Pull together the middle way rather than being gored on the horns of a dilemma. Try to find some joy in the process. Ultimately, it's about doing the best you can with what you have, hoping, but not expecting the best outcome, all while offering the best of you to the situation: patience, care, mindfulness, craft, skill, and love. You pull up the heretofore unknown solution, or action, in other words, out of yourself. You leave yourself on the field. You give birth to something, whether it is a roof on your shed or colors that pop in your painting. You meet the monsters with bravery in the face of newness and joy in act of giving yourself to right now, even if you go down, or up, in flames.

Paying My Dues

Snow flies early in New Mexico at seven thousand feet on the high desert. That is what the dark, brooding skies deliver today. The cold bites through my thin Tucson jacket and the wind has the dried sunflowers dancing a swaying conga line as I make my way along the path to my studio. The studio is a pre-fab building with a wood burning stove. I'll stoke the stove so I can paint without freezing in my quiet little cave. I am not a trained painter. I don't really know what I'm doing or even why I'm doing it. I look at "real" painters like I look at real writers and come face to face with the fact that I will never reach that level of achievement. I failed as a writer, having composed over ten books that were never published. That is nothing, a painter friend told me. "The first five thousand paintings are the worst," she said. Aye. But I made more money selling a painting that took me two hours than I did on a book that took me over four years to write. I guess there is no equation for time spent doing something and the compensation one receives for doing the work. I did not write for the money, nor do I paint for money. I do these things because something inside me wants to get out and to touch some other soul. So I listen to the juniper crackle in the stove, watch the snow fly, count my lucky stars to have a moment to stare at a blank canvas before I struggle with the colors this time instead of words.

Waking

I was living in a politically active housing co-op, working in a whole-wheat, granola-eating, spirulina-swilling grocery co-op, and studying European social history with Marxist professors. It was a heady time in Madison, 1977, and I was asked by some women friends to serve as a security person for the first Take Back the Night march I ever joined. So, I, Todd X, and some other long-haired men sympathetic to the burgeoning feminist movement took our places at the back of the march down State Street. Our job was to keep counter-protesters from breaking up the march. I thought it would be easy. It was not. We security guys listened to the stories of rape and abuse over the loud speakers. It was enraging, and made me feel embarrassed to be a man. But when the march got going, things began to heat up. Beefy frat boys drinking on State Street did not like women gathered to even the scales of sexual power. They stopped on the side-walks and heckled, made masturbatory gestures over giant (imagined) phalli, and engaged marchers in shouting matches. For the first time, I was on the receiving end of the male gaze. One of my fellow security guys got into it with one of the hecklers. I had to break it up and stand between them, arms extended. Another of the security guys threw a brick through the window of an adult (porn) bookstore. Cops came. People ran. It was the beginning of a long wake-up call, still going on. My static, little world where I could just stand on the sidelines and let degrading comments about women slide ended. It was my fight too now. I could smell the bridges behind me burning, could see the friendships that had been based on bashing women explode into flame, and I got the hateful look from men who now saw me as a betrayer. Having the curtains that cover misogyny pulled back and seeing the carnage hidden behind it, there was no going home again.