i am usha

The Dark. A natural and essential part of our existence.  Not evil.  Not inferior.  Deep.  Forceful.

Darkness is intense,  and so widely misunderstood.  Who has not used the word "darkness" to describe something ominous and threatening; when in truth it is simply the unknown.  It takes a brave deconstruction, followed by an honest reconstruction, of language, culture and history to fully understand what darkness truly is.  It takes conquering the fear of the unknown.

One thing I have had to admit to myself, in these times, is my own reluctance to go deep and wide.  To be honest with myself and to keep Looking.  Especially when it is hard to look, when what I see before me is greed and unimaginable cruelty.  The Horror.  Looking at the world with my eyes wide open and my heart wide open feels like a punch in the chest, leaving me breathless.  I begin the year 2017 with the humble realization that I, too, have been hiding from my own intense darkness. 

What I learned as a child:

What one sees in the dark will not be believed.  

Turn on a light and it disappears.  

What I learned as an adult:

Leave the seeds of your own imagination and intuition in the light of the bright sun. 

They will shrivel and die.  

For they need the cool damp soil, the long dark nights and rain.

Finally, I not only understand darkness; I thrive in it. I am learning to see in it.  I need to go into darkness to fully understand myself and the world.  There I have found a deep connection with my ancestors.  My ancestors are my connection with the unwritten past that I carry within, making them the seeds of compassion for myself and all life.  

In the light of day we learn we are all one in the world, and we reach out to the sun.  In the darkness we learn we are all one in the universe, and we germinate.  

Darkness is where seeds germinate.

My journey into this acceptance takes me into the mythology of my patrilineal ancestry and my Sanskrit name, Usha.  Let me be clear - India is more than the land of chai tea and asanas, colorful goddess memes about enlightenment and little brown men in tree poses.   That is the surface of India, the travel brochure ad, the guru's full page ad.  I love my yoga classes and I appreciate the West's need for something to ease the imbalance in its own culture.  I struggle at how often that leads to a narrow vision, the appropriation of only a slice of a monumentally complex culture, existing now in a country devastated and transformed by Neocolonialism.  There are certainly many Westerners who consciously address this problem.  And I respect the complexity of American life, being a part of it while I sometimes bristle at it.  I have driven home frustrated from at least a few yoga classes, when, chatting after class, I have tried to explain my own experience of India.  I lack the words as much as the culture I live in lacks the understanding.  It is an impasse that has led me to create a world of art surrounding this name, Usha, and all it represents.  You cannot embrace the shiny surface of India without swallowing the darkness that is as much hers.  And this goes for all of spirituality, all of nature, all of this existence.

Usha is also a character I have worked on in several stories.  Often intensely personal work,  I seldom felt comfortable having my stories be public.  They are stories that reflect my most personal struggles, my relationship with my Indian father, my outsider status, my stubborn pride over an identity I fail to fully understand.  Usha has been a protagonist in a private monologue.  She journeys into darkness, giving me the courage to reveal these stories and the imagination to create new ones.  In the dimming light of the Empire's Lies I feel the time has come.

 I am one of many.

Sometime in the 70's:  a day in the life of Usha.  

"I am Usha" is not about history and a retelling of ancient myths.  There are piles of books for that.  It is my personal discovery of an unknown lineage through the journey of visionary art making.  It is my own solitary conversation with my ancestors when I wear my Sanskrit name.  It is a change that occurs when you see your present self through the eyes of your cellular memory.   It is more than a name, and more than an exploration of culture; in the end it is a search for meaning in the abyss.  Implicit in the search is the release of old norms of thinking, a rejection of dogma, opinions and assumptions.  What replaces these untruths does not reveal itself immediately and an uncomfortable darkness descends.  Uncomfortable because it is the unknown, the one thing feared so deeply.  But Darkness and Unknowing have become my closest confidants in this language of art I have developed in a lifetime.

"I am Usha" is a journey into the mysterious understanding of the necessities of darkness that ultimately leads to the light of communicating and connecting with the world.  Each of these cannot exist without the other, making me realize "I am Usha" is my way of joining the divided parts of myself as a mirror to the divided world I live in.  It is my hope that this creative vision quest will unite past and present, illustrating the illuminating potential of darkness.  In the end this is all I ask of my art.  

Note: all paintings are my own, painted between 1994-1997.

Night Vision

In the earliest hours of morning our thoughts connect 

 two worlds.  Dreams open doors into a fluid world. In daylight the thick shell of the world hides from 

us from the truth we seek. 

We forget the stars are still there. 

This is my story of remembering.  It is one of many, for when we are not forgetting, we are remembering.  And each story tries to remember, but in the telling it falls short.  So the Storyteller is born again.

In the middle of November I was not sleeping well.  One particularly windy night I lay in bed, staring into the darkness and listening to the forest howl outside my window.  As I drifted between waking and sleeping a vision began to form, one I did not welcome.  I saw a darkness surround all beings, enveloping the earth.  It was thick, a cloud of deep thick charcoal fog.  I entered into it and saw with my heart its fullness.  Suffering.  So much suffering.  It was not just suffering to come, it was suffering that had been and it was suffering that is.  It was all existing in one place and one time.  I saw it with my entire being and I lay in bed weeping.

It was 3 in the morning and I was sobbing, trying not to wake Dale.  I lay there for an hour.  All beings, humans, animals, trees and the earth itself all wept with me.

Untitled Work in Progress

This was a pretty dark place, even for me.

After an hour I knew I had to get out of bed and go into the woods. I woke Dale.  He was concerned when he saw that I was crying. I told him. He said, “Take a flashlight.”

At first I didn’t turn on the flashlight.  I wasn’t in a hurry, so I thought I could just step slowly and carefully, letting my vision adjust to this very dark night.  It was a Wisconsin November.  So there were dry brittle leaves everywhere, and, on a windy night like this, they tend to pile up.  So, my first fright came when I stepped into a pile of leaves that wasn’t there the night before.  My foot lifted the leaves, taken up by the wind, farther than I would have imagined. I was surrounded by the sound of rustling leaves and my pounding heart.  In the blackness I stood frozen, hearing movement all around, and I decided I wasn’t so opposed to the flashlight after all.

The Wind

At that point it occurred to me that I would rather see a creature of the night before stepping into its space, so the light stayed on as I carefully made my way to a special spot in the forest of pines.  It is a place where a large tree has lain fallen for years, so much so that younger trees grow through it.  Animals take shelter in it.  Moss grows on it.  I have always loved this spot.  When I got there it took me awhile to find a comfortable seat.  The woods feel ominous at night. I chose to have my back against a young tree, something to lean on, and it gave me a small sense of protection. 

The wind was still blowing fitfully, shaking the trees and loosening their dead.  Before turing off my flashlight I scanned my perimeter for potential Widow Makers, or in this case Widower Makers.  Then, with a touch of my thumb, total darkness.

House of the Woods

Oh how hard it was to keep that light off.  A breaking branch a few feet from me was enough to make me freeze.  For what seemed like hours, but was more likely 30 minutes, I sat frozen.  My eyes were wide open, but, at first, I saw nothing.  Slowly I began to see.  There seemed to be a substance to the air, as if every single molecule was coming out of hiding.  The air, the trees, the leaves and I were all tiny dots vibrating in and out of my sight.  Looking up I saw a falling star.  In this light the trees are the negative space, and the distant stars are the positive space.  For a moment I was neither light nor dark, I was only perception, as everything around me changed from one to the other.

Molecules

For an hour at least my thoughts bounced back and forth between wonder and terror.  Of course I could calmly remind myself the biggest danger that night was a coyote.  But a noisy rustle in the black space around me made me imagine more.  Believe it or not, this was the first moment I recognized a connection between my choice to sit in the woods and the story of Siddhartha.  As the account of his becoming the Buddha is told, Siddhartha despaired at the suffering in the world.  His search for an answer led him to sit under a Bodhi tree, meditating outdoors for seven days and seven nights.  My 2 hours in the cold on a fallen tree paled in comparison to his 168 hours. I laughed at all the times I sat on a comfortable cushion in my heated home to meditate.  Nature is essential to awakening us to this life, and we humans so often hide from it.  In a terrible separation from the earth I had forgotten the lessons it has to teach me.  In my darkest moment, I remembered, and I stepped outside.  To be inside of our deepest consciousness we have to be outside in the Natural World, not inside of the Manmade World.  To the degree to which we the Modern Humans have violently torn ourselves from our connection to nature, we have suffered.

I swear I remember there being a moment in the story of enlightenment where a giant cat approaches Siddhartha.  So, I thought, maybe I needn’t be quite so fearful.  A lion or tiger would be bad. Back to fear. Forgetting.

Deep Sleeper - Intermediary

Of course the point wasn’t Lions and Tigers and Bears.  We do have occasional bears and wolves and even the rare cougar sighting in this part of the State. I knew there was a reason I was out there in the cold and it wasn’t to try to guess which wild beast would eat me for dinner.  I could fear the wind, the animals, even the possibility of a human in the woods, probably most dangerous of all.  I had to let it all go. The most frightening part of being alone in the darkness in the woods was also the most awakening.  Remembering. 

I began to look each fear squarely in its face and release it.  I soon found myself remembering them all, from paralyzing terrors to the less obvious ones. The ones that linger for days, muted and pale but persistent in their nagging.  People who had frightened me, I saw their fear.  People that had hurt me, I saw their pain.  People I had frightened and people I had hurt, I saw my blindness.  I saw fear and pain passed on from parent to child, from master to slave, from teacher to student.  Acts of violence replacing the wisdom of old with inherited pain and terror.  Victim becomes perpetrator and the lamb becomes the hungry beast at the door. There was no bad, no good, no dark, no light. Only attaching and letting go.  With each passing fear I felt an infinite lightness that cannot be expressed with words, although LOVE is a good one to try.  This was a special kind of night vision.  Seeing through the dark.    

Artic Spirits

It was at this point I realized the woods were becoming more and more visible in the earliest light of the day.  As I had passed through the darkest hour of the morning I had seen through at least some of my blindness.  As the trees became solid, once again I could connect each sound with its source.  I looked up at the sky.  Not a single star in my sight.  I would have to go on memory.  Remembering.  I got up, a little stiff, and walked toward the house.  I would put on some coffee and try to talk about this.  The things the darkness commands us to know. Fears are only passing moments, but we give them strength when we try to suppress them.  In their suppression they are squeezed and wiggled into our souls and the passing darkness takes a solid heavy form.  This heavy load is so light in its release.  Walking back to my warm house I knew I would struggle to find the words to tell this story. And in the telling they would fall short. And the storyteller is born again.  

Manifesto of a Solitary Artist in the Age of Unenlightenment

A Confession, a Conclusion, a Manifesto….

Otherwise titled, Five Years in the Journey of a Artist in the Age of Unenlightenment

Otherwise titled… Onward!

Five years ago I sat a table with a small group of friends and revealed to them my decision to step away from the world.  I don’t think I said “drop out” because I knew I had to remain attached enough to put food on my table and pay the rent.  And I wanted to try, for once, to put 100% of my effort into surviving financially as an artist.  But, I explained, I don’t believe in it anymore… the BIG LIE, that I have to make my money this way (at the time I operated a successful tourist shop in Fish Creek, WI)  and all the little lies that I swallow in order to make that happen.  I moved out of the city and into this little doublewide in the woods and started making my exit…

Within a year my “step away” was a giant leap into the unknown and uncertainty of the path less traveled.  I closed my shop, and I sold or gave away most everything that remained.  I kept what I needed to work from home as a eco-conscious artist, working with repurposed materials and selling in a few local galleries and online.   It was a dramatic change of lifestyle and work and income.   

It didn’t take long before the little savings I had was gone.  The simple choice of whether to drive to town depended as much on gas money as the environmental consequences.  I had cornered myself into a life of quiet solitary work (which I wanted) and financial precariousness (much more than I expected)  and the stress of trying to succeed at something in these circumstances.  

I am not writing this to tell you about reducing trips to the dump and the pump.  There are plenty of resources on the internet if you want to learn about that.  I’m sure there are people doing a better job than I am.  What I want to share is the psychological impact this leap had on me and my life, my relationships and, in the end, my definition of self.  What i didn’t realize, while revealing my decision at that table five years ago, was dropping out of the system would mean emptying my life of the activity and thought that filled every work day.  And it would be scary to be that empty.

We are all born into a culture and we are a part of that culture.  And that culture is a part of us.  As many people already realize, in a racist culture, the members, even when they are abhorrent to the IDEA of racism, still have elements of it in them.  That is true for every distinguishing feature of the culture you exist in.  As we are in the universe and the universe is in us, WE ARE IN THE CULTURE AND THE CULTURE IS IN US.  And this culture we live in, this American Dream, it is a state of heightened consumerism.  Everything we do is somehow measured and compared, every breath, every step is broken apart into quantitative measurements.  We lay prostrate to the system waiting for the final numbers of our worth.   When you’re not productive in the system, you are invisible.  You are certainly not a success.  

That was the hard part… 

We not only consume products of the system, we are the products and the consumers and the means of production.  Even if all you are producing is another version of the lie.  Stepping away means unraveling oneself from these roles, and refusing to lie to yourself.  When you start to really separate yourself from the culture you live in there is a dangerous thing that happens, you lose your sense of self.  This is evident when you are a solitary and, for the most part, unrecognized artist.  Being a solitary and unrecognized artist had always made it possible for me to be true to myself.  I have always been free of the pressures of academia and fashion and trends, whether intellectual or aesthetic. But here I was taking a leap of faith that I could survive financially as an artist and still retain my artistic freedom. I had no idea what a psychologically dangerous pit I was falling into.  

I didn’t expect the loss of my connection to this world I was raised in and lived in to be so difficult.  I thought I had already let it go.  I had rejected Capitalism and Consumer Culture and I had embraced Simple Living.  At first I was elated to be free and told friends how great it felt.  Fairly soon after the initial elation I had a health crisis that was nearly debilitating.  My entire body was covered in a rash, a terribly itchy uncomfortable rash that lasted almost two years.  During this time I buried myself in work and distanced myself from friends.  I established strong boundaries, many of which were healthy and necessary, but for awhile I built a wall around myself.  I spent hours in solitude and lived a quasi hermit’s life and had a love/hate relationship with my own existence.  (I need to add I did this with a caring partner on a similar path)  Without the distractions of the world and work I had once buried myself in, I found new distractions, everything from Netflix series about aliens to the strange new world of social media marketing.   I was painfully aware of the emptiness of these new distractions.  The biggest distraction was still so firmly rooted in me I didn’t see it for another couple of years, the addiction to work, productiveness and the dream of success.  But, despite how hard I worked, I was not all that successful, just scraping by.

I started feeling frustrated and lost.  I felt a range of emotions from hopelessness to jealousy.  As much as my rational brain told me otherwise, my feelings told me I was a victim.  I experienced mild depression and that was new for me, and scary.  I mentally chastised myself for every missed opportunity in life, leading me to a place of emptiness.  I felt like a failure and still, at this point, did not realize the emptiness I felt was just the temporary emptiness that results when you empty your life of the things that no longer fulfill you.  

  

That depression grew into discontent and longing.  I literally drove and walked all over Door County (and the state of Wisconsin) wishing I had a different life.  Every house, farm or commercial building that was for sale could take me on an imaginary journey into some dream existence… sometimes lasting days or weeks.  

Sometimes, while driving around and looking at old farms and shops for sale, I saw myself through the watcher’s gaze and I saw the desperation in this search.  I have no money in the bank.  I knew this search would have to stop.  I could see it for what it was, another attempt to validate myself.  In the sheer transparency of my desperation I finally saw it, what I was beating myself up about, what i was perceiving as failure, what I was desperately trying to fill.  The Void. 

And then came the real grieving.  The tears.  That process that may look like the worst to someone looking in, but is really the best.  The new me that emerged from all this pain of letting go reconnected with my deeper self.  All the parts of me that had never fit into this culture flooded back into my consciousness, orphans from unfinished chapters in the life of a outsider.  I was successfully making it through my difficult journey.  The tears, which now I see to be the true release, freed me from the guilt of perceived failure and the fear of a perceived lack of belonging and the longing for something that I didn’t need.

I had learned what I needed most to learn, that the simple concept of consumption isn’t just about buying and selling; those are simply the forms that dominate our economy. They overshadow the way in which the mentality of consumption destroys our spirit and our humanity.  I think it was a dramatic lesson for me only because as a solitary artist and social outsider my life had been kidnapped by the concept of my art as a product and my purpose as a producer.  In this new cottage industry economy it is easy to fall into that trap.  I confused my artistic journey with the journey of the many “makers” in this new economy, but that is not who I am.   Just as I had to come to terms with the realization that i do not fit into the world of academia, nor into the commercial art world, I am not a “maker” in this new economy, one which pushes artists to be slickly marketed production machines.  (Note there are many people who fulfill the role of "maker' and remain true to their artisan values and I am not referring to them.  Being a new field, it is pursued with passion by many but is also manipulated by larger forces.)  What I finally awakened to is the realization that my journey as an artist has to be absolutely authentic and tireless, and like no other journey that has ever come before me.  Success, whether measured by money, production, or social acceptance, should have no role in the motivation of the artist.  The only success is to be alive and to continue to create something for the world that reflects ones true existence in the world.  There are no models or templates or guidebooks, only hard work and intuition.  I have no intention to stop working.  But my work no longer depends on the narrow definitions of “productivity” and worldly success.  I am working even harder, because I have come to realize it is my soul’s work.  

I have something new to bring with me for the steps and leaps ahead.  A sense of peace like none I’ve ever experienced cropped up in the emptiness left my my “dropping out.”  The only thing I feel I need to fill the space with is love and the work of love, which is different for every person.  We are all here fulfilling an individual path that can’t be separated from the whole of the paths, the movement of the world and its beings.  All each of us needs to do is answer that for ourselves, not letting any one person or system or culture tell us what that is.  What an energizing truth.  It fills us with the energy we need to do the work that must be done.  We need to be in service to bring forth love rather than drain love from the world.  Because this is where the REAL WORK begins.

I will try hard to never forget how awful the rashes, the anger and angst and depression felt each time I am tempted by distractions, lulled into sleep or seduced by false dreams of “success”.  Because I am in the culture and cannot drop out.  That is the lesson.  I have been in it all along and now I feel whole enough to be in it without being seduced or sickened.  I envision myself walking through it with my head held up and my back straight and my eyes wide open, in a direction that I have never headed before.  As the true artist I have always been.  

That is my Manifesto.  An artist in the Age of Unenlightenment.

Dreams and Visions - paintings in their raw states

I have made two decisions this month.

One is to leave paintings in their raw state.

The Other is to share all of my visions, even the ones I have been quiet about.

I don't turn on a lightbulb. I see in the darkness and find my way through it.

What i see in the dark, i can't see in the light. Not yet. Go deep, wake up. One day you will do both. 

We are in Kali time. I am Usha. My time is not here yet, but I am preparing for it.

In Kali time the darkness makes the others remember. We are not smaller than the one controlling the story. We control our story. We heal and are unafraid of the darkness.

The governments of the world call it post-colonial. We ARE living in a Neo-colonial world

My ancestors came to me in a dream. They were refugees from a war with no winners. 

They were seeking shelter in my cellar.

I asked the smaller man in front of the group, 

"How did you get in?"

he said,

"We always find a way in."

I was afraid I could not care for them and I left them.

They left me.  For many years they were hidden in darkness and unknown to me.

I promised to stop hiding from the darkness of the world, 

as I promised to not let my grief for the world blind me.

I promised to walk out into the darkness and face every fear.

They are coming back to me.

The Holes in the Fabric of Forgetting

Ancestry Cloth is an esoteric act, a symbolic act, a metaphor for the immigrant, for the nomad, for the wanderer.  It is a daily meditation, weaving together a forgetful monochromatic present with the colors and patterns just beyond memory.

When I'm cutting and stitching, I often think about Indigenous peoples around the world, who were ripped from their homes and taught to forget.  When I listen to elders who are still connected to the sentience of the universe, I know what was almost lost, a wisdom for the present that we need for our survival.  Despite the suffering, the abuse and the losses along the way,  Indigenous cultures, by some miraculous triumph of the human spirit, have endured.  Their memories are not meant to be appropriated into the Colonial Culture.  Their memories teach us how to regain our own.  Those of us Enculturated into Colonial Culture have forgotten so much.  Yet, we have the memories of Ancestors in our bodies, calling to us.  We are also survivors, waking up to those quiet voices waiting to be heard, when we slow down and listen.
The survivors of this world, those who remember, create a strong and beautiful mosaic of memories from the fragments that remain.

I think of the dream I had as a child, everyone around me turned to skeletons as I hid to save my skin.  I can't get this dream out of my mind, my childhood nightmare haunts my waking hours. It is no wonder I sew.  I sew this cloth, made of layers and layers of past and present.  I am creating a new skin.  It often looks like the hide of a animal.  Sometimes I see earth and the fire within, and sometimes it is a topography of the soul.  Other times I see rhythms of a distant dance, ebbing and flowing through the holes in the fabric of forgetting.. 

I am making a new skin for the skeletons: connective tissue for myself and my human family.  I am making a cloth to cover our bones and to make us remember.  They are the Time Traveling Champion Capes for defending the spirit.  They are the Memory Headdresses for channeling what we have always known.

They are dresses of Armor, to warm us in the cold and steel our nerves when we cannot see through the darkness our forgetfulness has left us.  They are the ceremonial attire for the dancer who spins to the music that brings collective memories back to the surface.

They are the wardrobe for the Nomad on her long Journey Home.

Special thanks to photographer Kara Counard http://bloomphotographybykara.com

The Tiger and the Swan

Authors note: I wrote and illustrated this story over 15 years ago. I never really did anything with it except to send it to one publisher and read it to the Quaker Friends Sunday School, and to my elementary students in Washburn, WI.  Some recent events made me decide to share this story.  It was written by my younger self, but I still like the lessons.   Enjoy and share if you want to, print it if you like.  It is a gift to you if it is a story that speaks to you. 

 Every year, in the special place where land and water meet, mother ducks wait patiently on their nests, while the earth springs to life all around.

   One lucky mother duck was the proud parent of three handsome yellow ducklings.  But there was one egg left in her nest that didn’t stir at all.  Mother Ducks are loyal, like mothers should be, so she continued to wait, and wait, and wait, for the big egg that sat perfectly still. 

     One morning, mother duck felt the earth rumbling beneath her.  Up she jumped!  Lo and behold, the big egg was bobbing and twisting and crackling and crumbling.  Out came the most horrendous looking duckling she had ever seen.

   “Looks aren’t everything,” she mumbled as she pushed the big duckling out of the nest and into the farmyard.  Every creature, big and small, two and four legged, feathered and furred, laughed and laughed.

     “Well, you are rather unusual,” she took a critical look at the strange creature that had hatched in her very own nest.  “Could it be that you are not a duckling after all?”  

     A big tear rolled down the duckling’s face.  It didn’t make him look any more attractive.  But if mother duck could have seen his heart breaking, she never would have said such words.  

 Sometimes people, and animals, don’t understand just how much words can hurt.  The words the duckling heard that day caused so much pain inside he ran and ran.  He felt that if he could run fast and far enough he would run away from the pain.  When he was too exhausted to move another inch, he collapsed at the bank of a deep and dark lake.  Too tired to keep his eyes open, he dreamt a strange and beautiful dream of big white birds breaking through the black sky of night.

 That deep dark lake seemed to call to the Ugly Duckling, so he stayed there for days.  And the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months.  All the while he spent his time hiding from wild dogs and raccoons and searching for little bits of food here and there.  When a young bird is all alone in the world, life is a hard thing to hold on to.  Still, something made this brave duckling hold on, even as the days grew shorter and the north wind snuck up behind him.

     It was one of these cold dark afternoons when the duckling saw a flock of big white birds fly overhead.  Their calls pulled at something deep inside of him.  As they flapped their powerful wings, he swam out further and further into the deep dark cold water.  As the birds disappeared over the trees, he noticed he was much further out than he had ever been before.  Paralyzed with fear, he floated in the icy water as it slowly froze around him.  That night he dreamt he was being called away to a warmer place.  He was so tired of fighting to stay alive, so tired of being cold and lonely and hungry. 

   You can imagine the duckling’s surprise when he woke the next morning and was still alive!  Standing over him was the strangest looking creature.  It was bigger than any dog he had ever seen, and its thick coat of fur was covered with flames of orange and yellow.

     “I should run away from this fierce beast,” he whispered, but the warmth from the strange creature melted him right out of the ice, and he was no longer afraid.

 And that was the beginning of a most unexpected friendship.  Who would have ever thought that a tiger and a duckling would enjoy each other’s company?  Perhaps when a duckling does not realize that he’s not a duckling, and a tiger does not realize that she’s not a tiger, perhaps then they don’t know any better than to like each other.  The rest of the winter did not seem cold at all, as they traveled and played together.  Every night they would snuggle together for warmth and dream.  

When it seemed as if spring would never arrive, the warm sun melted the last icicles from the roof tops and crocus bulbs poked their little heads out of the muddy ground.  Duckling and tiger danced and spun and rolled on the soft earth laughing.  The friendship these two shared had caused them to forget the hardships and fears that brought them together.  And, it seems, they had also forgotten what they were running from in the first place. 

  That is why the young girl under the tiger skin felt brave enough to peel away the heavy fur that had covered her all winter.  Duckling gasped as his furry friend slowly transformed into a young lady.  She sat him down, and began to tell the duckling an amazing tale.  

  “One day,” she began, “there was a beautiful woman in a big house with a handsome husband.  She thought her life was perfect, as she filled it with all the things she felt she was missing.  Then one day she discovered she was going to have a baby.  This, she believed, would make her life even better.  One night the woman had a dream.  She dreamt of big red birds, breaking through the black sky of night.  The next day her baby was born.

 “Everything went well for the mother and her child.  She was a very proud mother and she loved to show off her baby to anyone who would look.  Even as her child grew older, she took her into town to make sure everyone could see with their own eyes that she was even more lovely than the day before.  That is, until something very strange happened.  One morning when the mother was helping to dress her child she noticed long red marks on her back.  She could not understand how they got there or even how long they had been there.  She was sure the people would be shocked, so she insisted that her daughter keep her back completely covered at all times.  The young girl soon learned to be ashamed.”

  “Shame kept that girl hidden inside her parents house for days.  And the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months.  She longed for the fresh air and sunlight.  Afraid to be recognized, she covered herself with the biggest heaviest thing she could find, the fur of  the Great Bengal Tiger, that her grandfather had hunted in India.   First she wore the fur out into the yard.  Then she wore it down the street.  When she finally went into town, the people stepped aside exclaiming, “Let the Great Tiger pass.”  She herself began to forget who was underneath the heavy fur.”

    “But your friendship has helped me to remember,” she whispered, as she pulled the fur off of her head and felt the cool breeze soothe her neck.

   Duckling looked at his dear friend without her tiger fur.  All he could recognize of her was the soothing sound of her familiar voice.  She seemed so small and pale, and yet strong and beautiful.

     “You’re no tiger!” his voice came out squeaky and strange.

     “And you’re no duckling.”

     In the warm reflection of his friend’s eyes he saw himself for the first time.  He was a beautiful white swan.  Only in his dreams had he ever imagined a bird so lovely.

  The young swan felt nervous and the young woman rose from the riverbank, leaving her fur at a bundle at her feet.  

     “Where are you going?” he pleaded.

     “I am going home,” she replied.  “And you have somewhere to go too.”  She gestured to the sky, where a flock of swans were returning to the lake.

     “But how will I live without you?” he was beginning to cry. 

     “You will fly through the sky and swim over the water.  With me you would always be stuck on the shore.  I will come back every spring to see how you’ve grown.  Promise you will look for me.”

    The two friends made a promise.  And every year, in the special place where land and water meet, they keep their word. 

Visionary Painting

Visionary Painting is a very broad term that many people claim.  In my opinion they are all valid but they are all not the same.
I am not borrowing other's philosophies that speak to me and making illustrative collages with known images in order to communicate my cause.  This is fine, it is a form of communication and it can spread ideas. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not what I do.
I am not envisioning an ideal world and painting it.  This is a valid process and can stimulate awareness and even change, but... not what I do.
I am not looking at the world outside of me and painting my vision of it, art like this can be very beautiful and stirring, but it's not what I do.

What I do is something different.  I am not the only one, but I think we're not very mass-market popular.  We are not commerce driven because this work isn't pretty and it's a hard sell.  We are not academic because we rely on our intuition and mysterious processes much more than our intellect.   We sometimes don't mirror the accepted academic stance on issues, we sometimes do. Sometimes I have no idea where we fit, but I know it when I see it.  We do our work in private, making sense of the world by listening to the muse of the spirit world giving us messages that are difficult to decipher. We "put them out there" when we deem them ready.  I have had to remind myself over and over again not to comprimise this, even if I never get recognition, attention or money for what I paint.  When I remember that, I am rewarded greatly by the process itself.   

So, why share it at all?  I guess I just get pretty excited about it.  I feel like a consciousness talks to me when I'm painting and I get very enthusiastic about that.   It feels like a wider and more expansive consciousness that I have in other areas of life.  So it's sometimes hard to understand completely, especially when I first hear it.  It's a bit like dreaming while awake.  I want others to look and maybe see it, maybe not.  At this point 90% or more  of you may be dismissing me as delusional, flaky or both.  But I'm ok, I function as well as most.  I am not convinced my thoughts are always clear or realistic, but they are not any more delusional that anyone elses belief systems.  (in my humble opinion)

I actually feel these "conversations" help me function better.  But only when I keep them balanced wth the rest of my existence.

When I was a very young child I dreamt I was on a boat, heading to a big destination with my family.    I think we were moving our residence.  During the trip a psychotic doctor was turning everyone into skeletons.  I hid and was able to escape, but I was terrified.  The rest of my family were skeletons.  I was torn between trying to save them and staying hidden.  I had no idea how to save them.   I didn't want to be a skeleton.  I woke up with the dilemma unresolved, a fearful wakening in the middle of the night.  I will never forget it.  

This symbolism is the subject of this painting and of a solo show I have scheduled for a year from now.  (The show is at UW-Fox Valley in Menasha, WI)  I have decided to name the show "Usha" after my imaginary alter-ego I developed when I learned my Hindi name.  

Usha is a character who resolves issues for me through stories.  They are stories I have never shared publicly, but they mean a great deal to me.  Literary World-wise they are not ready, well-written or completely resolved enough to publish, in my opinion.  But they really help me think...

This particular painting finds water and oil interacting.  The skeleton is from my dream, and my skeleton drips oils from all it's limbs.  I don't yet know where Usha fits into this, but I know she will.  She is coming out of the many layers, like the dresses I make.  She is hiding behind the ancestors, she is flowing in the water.  She wants to save the skeletons but she is afraid.  It just takes time.  For now there is water and it runs through the skeletons mouth, trying to bring it back to life, but it seeps through and waters the wheels of a great and powerful machinery.  The thing is that the water never stops flowing, even after the machines have stopped.

The ancestors keep watch.  They are witnesses to it all, but they cannot be heard by most.  What is it they want to say?  Can we listen?

I believe Usha will appear and she will help me once again understand my role.  It might be in a dream.  It might be a story that comes to me.  It might be the next time I am painting this.  I hope I have the answer soon, because I feel helpless and afraid sometimes, not knowing how to act and not react to the times and events we are all living through. 

I feel that I know more than I knew before I had the vision, but I certainly don't have any answers.  Just feelings, images and more questions.