Some thoughts on purpose and joy, from a whirlwind trip and longtime bubbling.

I was asked to reflect on arts organizations, space, and how we move forward for the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association's In Studio magazine.

SWEET HEART*

Keep it together, you say,

as I come to you like church,

to fumble with the words

and kiss behind the pews

between the tears in the

rainbowed loving light.

In that pierced darkness,

don't avoid it. Keep looking

into that ebbing horizon where

I hurt you, hurt me, we disappear.

I need you to choose light,

choose to swim, please.

The saints may not care,

about this body, but I do, I swear.

Let's fill up our shore-bound shells

with plants & paintings & relics,

to keep our friends close,

to have shelter, to hope.

It won't be much, but maybe

enough to play that song

again & again & again,

then listen to the album,

then keep playing the song

that sings yourself back.

Take what you've been given

and keep giving it away.

Mark your path with little flags,

ropes & cairns made from

scratchings & words, hands flittering

through the air invisibly felt.

Sight unseen the answer is yes.

As long as I keep talking

I know I'm still alive,

and as long as we keep

singing all your songs,

then so are you.

*Thanks to Aaron Dessner, Julien Baker, Kevin Devine, Craig Finn, Ben Gibbard and Rough Trade. Thanks to Grant Hutchison and all of Frightened Rabbit. Thanks to Scott Hutchison, always.

Stick around

It's #WorldSuicidePreventionDay, so here's a bit of personal history below - if you read nothing else, know that there are people who love you and there are resources out there for you. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Stick around, we need you here.

I've never tried to commit suicide, but I've come close. 11 years ago, before I got sober, in the midst of a depressive bender where I didn't go to work, got myself fired, didn't show up to meetings with friends, and wouldn't answer my door, I slept with a kitchen knife next to my pillow. You know, just in case I had to use it.

I didn't, thankfully, and thanks to the support of family and friends and loved ones, got help, got into treatment, and got some better coping mechanisms than a bottle of Johnny Walker Red.

But even with clarity, mindfulness, and therapy, brain chemistry is still a tricky, unpredictable thing, and quite often, my first instinctive reaction to a difficult situation is, "You should kill yourself." It's the razoriest of Occam's Razor solutions, and thankfully, again, one that I'm used to pushing away as not actually that great a solution. If I've learned anything it's that having a thought is not the same as knowing the truth, and that there are always other options.

That knowing takes practice. In the darkness, the thought comes like a permanent eclipse, blocking out all other light. I know how impossible it can feel when that thought does come, and how difficult it is to ask for help. Since I've gotten sober and deal better with these thoughts and stress, my life has still been impacted by friends who haven't, who are gone too soon. I wish they were still here, so that they, and I, could see who they would have become if they had stuck around.

Living is hard. Staying alive takes work. And I'm not great at it, I just believe that if I keep showing up and doing the work, I'll make it through, for myself, and for my family and friends, For you. I hope you tell people how much they mean to you, in the biggest and smallest of ways, each kind word is a lifeline. And if someone does leave us, it's not your fault, all we can do is love the best we can. But for right now, please, stick around, we need you here.

And if you need help, it's out there for you: http://www.dissonance.website/get-help-directory/

A POEM FOR WHEN YOU THINK YOU NEED TO FIX SOMETHING

Although it's useful

to know what to do

with your hands

while you're standing

and waiting, noticing

that the door is off

its hinges,

be wary of that voice

that tells you that

you can fix it.

It's easier to tell

where a screw

is loose on a door

than to know who came bursting through

and what the argument was

and who hung on

crying and why

they couldn't go

back. Who came

before and what

has been lost.

Yes, it is satisfying

to twist and tighten

and feel safe in your place

but nothing's fixed,

it's all becoming,

it's always a door,

always a way out.

The Heat

"Do you know what the secret of life is? It's people who change people."

I’ll tell you the truth, my favorite days are the ones where your internal body temperature and the air temperature are almost the same, a hundred degrees, a breeze, sweat blowing off you. They are the days when the barrier between you and the everything almost disappears, a feeling of having given over all of you to the air, and in that heat, anything can happen. This feeling will come back later.

The quote at the top came from Zeyba Rahman, program officer for the Doris Duke Foundation, quoting a 6 year-old boy, Jibran in a recent presentation on working with undocumented and at-risk artists at the recent Americans for the Arts convention. It was the capping quote to a week where I had spent the Wednesday morning sitting on the keynote panel for the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Leadership Conference, flown to Denver for an IdeaLab event with the amazing Youth on Record crew, and then been part of the AFTA convention. It was a week of professional highs and led into week following full with hosting a poetry reading for World Refugee Day, board meetings, and an open house and community celebration of Springboard for the Arts’ new building at 262 University Avenue West. This has been a breathless time, rolling forward.

Before the MCN Leadership Conference, I had shared that I would be on the panel, and someone had commented that they were excited to hear my thoughts, which, to be fair, I was too. In a panel conversation there are an infinite number of thoughts to share and directions to go, and the best part of a conversation with authentic, genuine leaders like the other panelists – Adair Mosley, president and chief executive officer, Pillsbury United Communities; Angie Miller, executive director, Community Action Duluth; Liwanag Q. Ojala, chief executive officer, CaringBridge; and Sook Jin Ong, director, Future Services Institute, Humphrey School of Public Affairs – is to have a chance to listen.

We had been asked to speak about what real community engagement looks like and how to lead with that frame, and there were a great number of practical points around keeping accessible hours, paying people and supporting them through food, childcare, and other needs that stop people from engaging. There were aspirational self-care goals – both Miller and Ojala don’t have work email on their phones – and inspirational stories about stepping up to the challenge of leading. But the thing that has sat with me the longest was a quote from Mosely, himself paraphrasing another leader – “We have two things to offer people living at the margins; our hubris or our humility.” Our hubris is in telling people what they need, our humility is in accepting the stories and knowledge of people, and trusting their ability to tell you what they need. There is a great concept from Augusto Boal’s theater and therapy practice about respecting the reality of the protagonist – that even if you do not believe what someone is telling you is real, you must acknowledge that they are perceiving and feeling it, and therefore it is real to them, therefore you must acknowledge it in their reality.

The two things that I had really wanted to include in the conversation, and made sure that I did, were also around openness and humility. With Anthony Bourdain’s suicide still raw, I wanted to make sure that I mentioned one of the themes around many of the memorials and tributes to the chef, that he was able to do what he did in his storytelling, and especially in his cross-cultural television work, because he was knew that he didn’t know it all, because he’d go to the kitchen and listen to grandmas, honoring their skills and knowledge, and listen deeply, taking the stories and troubles of immigrants, refugees, disempowered people seriously, and amplify those stories. We would do well by showing up in the same way, and by kicking it with grandmas.

The corresponding thought as was a quote from artist Nicole Lavelle's profound article, CODES AND QUESTIONS FOR ANYONE WHO GOES ANYWHERE (get it here: http://www.nicolelavelle.com/codes-questions/), “Community is necessarily emergent. It can’t be made by outside forces. It can’t be manipulated by ingenuity. It must rise up.” I love this notion of community as continually emerging, that it is not a fixed point or place or time, but something that people are continually in the process of developing, sharing, and understanding.

That emergent sense of replenishment was underscored in Denver when the artist Sol Guy was speaking about his practice. He’s a film-maker, artist, producer – you’ve most likely seen his collaboration with the French artist JR featuring a little child peering over the wall at the US-Mexico border. In his talk, he said, “I work in cultural currency and not financial currency, and cultural currency is something you cannot possess, but increases through giving away.”

That giving is what I come back to when I think about how leadership and community should work. It is what I find inspiring in so many of my colleagues and peers, in this rising generation of executive directors, organizers, and politicians, in the politics of joy. That the approach to the work is based in giving and doing together as a way to grow power, not taking and holding on to consolidate it. It’s also no surprise to me that so many of these inspirational leaders are women, and women of color, who have historically been excluded from the closed-fisted hierarchies of power. It’s a recognition that instead of generating just enough heat to keep ourselves warm, we can come together to really set the world alight.

A little while ago I tried an experiment, as a way to test out some professional development and insight. I designed a survey with a couple questions – Based on what you know of him, what is Carl's super (or secret) power? What is something that Carl has been a part of or done that is meaningful to you? Anything else? Stuff you don't like about Carl? – and shared it via my social media networks. I believe in the power of weak ties and loose connections, and this was an attempt, in an anonymous way, to get some feedback from those ties. Obviously, there is a bias from people self-selecting in, which tended to be people who would have something to say about me, and so the overall tone was incredibly supportive and positive, although I did have a category for “Mortal Enemy” just in case.

What I was struck and heartened by were the number of people who mentioned connections they had made through me, or who appreciated the transparency and stories I shared, how it helped them see themselves in new ways, or connect to their own values. As I’ve been on a 10 year journey navigating addiction and sobriety, as I’ve tried to develop as a formal and informal organizational leader, as I’ve worked through parenthood and relationships, I’ve tried to find the best ways to be open, as the quickest way to connect. You can’t take from me anything that I would give to you, and so at high points and at low points, I will try to say to you, this is what it is, this is where I am, and let you have that.

If you haven’t watched Hannah Gadsby’s brilliant and brave special Nanette on Netflix, stop reading this now, and go do that. If you have, maybe this is also resonating with you as it has with me, Gadsby’s observations that we give power to the parts of our stories that we focus on. Which is absolutely true, and yet we also get power from what we give away, and from what we share. Gadsby’s enormously powerful storytelling has created power for her to focus on her own story in a way that won’t resolve the tension for you, but sits with the responsibility to listen to the story.

Giving the story away creates power for others to see themselves reflected back, not in facile ways, but in ways that are profound and mundane and epiphanies all at once. That’s the fire in the storytelling, that’s the light coming in through the cracks. That’s the heat, that makes us feel like we’re one, the secret of life, the changing of ourselves and other people.

Rest well, chef

Some thoughts so that I can get on with my day and do the things that need to be done.

I loved Anthony Bourdain. I'm grateful to my mothers and grandmothers for teaching me how to cook, but I used to cook out of utility, out of necessity.

A couple years into our relationship, Stacy and I were falling into that pattern of having shows that we'd watch together. As we have different tastes in TV, one common area was food shows - Cake Boss, Man vs. Food, and then, No Reservations.

And holy shit, that was a great show. The episode of them in Beirut, when everything goes sideways and both the tension, but Tony's care and fear are palpable. The episode in Haiti, which gets to the heart of systemic failure and poverty.

But then all the laughing. All the eyerolling faces while eating something wrapped in dough and fried at a roadside stall, or some fresh fruit newly peeled, or some homemade drink. All the cynical shrugs, and dry stares, all the "Fuck it, let's just do this." All the love for people and their food.

And as a guy in recovery, seeing an ex-junkie going out and doing his thing, eating food, making friends, being with people in a fundamental, elemental way and making amazing stories - written, told and televised - was, is, a wonder.

Here was a complicated, cantankerous, deeply caring man, sometimes an asshole, difficult, flawed, and brilliant. A person who was trying to use his platform to attack hypocrisy and injustice, who was speaking out for immigrants, against sexual violence, doing that work with passion, awkwardly and publicly.

Tony Bourdain is one of the reasons I cook, and think about food more seriously now than I did in the past. I sat out on my back porch and wept this morning, looking out at my growing garden, which might not exist if not for Tony.

By loving Anthony Bourdain, I also came to love Eric Ripert, Tony's complete opposite and perfect foil. A gentle, quiet, dignified French Buddhist with enormous exactitude. That it was Eric who found Tony is the cruelest stroke, and as sad as I am for myself in this loss, I am so sorry for you, chef.

Some quotes that are floating around today, to remind me of the man, to keep in my heart and tattooed on my hands. Rest well, chef.

“Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

“If I am an advocate for anything, it is to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food. It’s a plus for everybody.”

“I don’t have an agenda, but I do have a point of view, and it might change from minute to minute.”

“As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

“Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom... is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”

"DID YOU DO THE CRIMES?" "THE WHAT?" "THE CRIMES!" "OH YEAH, THE CRIMES!"

May is Mental Health Month, and I was so happy that when we asked the incredible Caroline Smith to collaborate on an awareness T shirt, that she came through with a such a perfect idea, and that we got to put it together. I'm going to be rocking one of these very soon, get your order in before May 24: https://teespring.com/dissonanceMN

BETWEEN RAGNAROK AND YGGDRASIL

I recently re-read Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology. The first time, I read it because I'm a huge Neil Gaiman fan. He's probably my favorite contemporary fiction author, and American Gods is easily one of my favorite novels, with all of its magic crackling under America’s inherent weirdness. The second time, though, I read it with a more particular frame, to think more specifically about a cultural heritage that I have, as the descendent of Swedish immigrants, but one that I had not been taught or deeply considered.

Part of the desire to learn more about this cultural heritage and mythology comes from a place of personal history. Two years ago this summer, I took my then two-year-old son to Swedeburg, Nebraska, to bury my namesake, my great uncle Carl [1]. There in the cemetery surrounded by the mossy headstones of five generations of my Swedish Lutheran forebears, a sense of being from a place and having a thread back to another place out of my time and memory began to unspool. It’s been a quiet following of the thread, which feels only fitting for these stoic Scandinavians who came to farm the Midwest and start little churches and teach.

This contemplative unspooling has also come in the contemporary context of the Black Lives Matter movement, and with a desire to deconstruct the oppressiveness of what “White” means, as someone who definitely is lacking in melanin and comes genetically from northern Europe. Writing in the New York Times [2], professor and author Nell Irvin Painter says, “An essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between “bland nothingness” and “racist hatred.”…Eliminating the binary definition of whiteness — the toggle between nothingness and awfulness — is essential for a new racial vision that ethical people can share across the color line.”

Whiteness has always privileged my Protestant, northern European self. Even as it historically excluded Catholics, southern Europeans, and others, they have been, over time and in this country, sponged up into that emptiness. Whiteness is an erasure, of others and of the beneficiaries, an all-consuming blankness of power.

Breaking that toggle switch, filling that void of sameness, then, needs specificity. This is not to say that having a cultural heritage you are aware of and a participant in is a panacea for systemic injustice and prejudice, and history is filled with conflict because “you” are not like “me.” But if you are more aware of who you are and are comfortable with it, there is less need for an impulse to define yourself in opposition to, through power over others – if we white people are to dismantle whiteness, we need to know where to put ourselves.

Which brings us back to Norse mythology, something that I have claim to but have never learned. There is a grim inevitability in the Norse myths, in that we know how they end. All these tales are simply slouching towards Ragnarok, the final battle where the Aesir will be wiped out. In Gaiman’s hands it’s a dry, almost sardonic end, and one that is of the god's own making, rooted in their own hubris and self-confidence. Odin, the All-Father, may have wandered the world, given up his eye and crucified himself for all the knowledge in the world, but all his power still makes him powerless to stop the end from coming. The strength of Thor and his hammer Mjölnir cannot win the battle.

The agents of this destruction are the children of Loki, the trickster god who the Norse gods don’t trust but believe they can control. Loki’s children are Jormungundr the Midgard serpent who is wrapped around the world and spits poison; Hel, the ruler of the dead who did not die valiantly, with her bowl Hunger, her knife Famine, and her bed Sickbed; and Fenris Wolf, the eater of the world, and enormous wolf bound and held captive through the treachery of the Aesir. The god Frey had a sword that could have defeated the fire demon Surtr, but he gave it up in pursuit of his wife Gerd.

As Gaiman puts it in his introduction, “It was the fact that the world and the story ends, and the way that it ends and is reborn, that made these gods and the frost giants and the rest of them tragic heroes, tragic villains. Ragnarok made the Norse world linger for me, seem strangely present and current, while other, better-documented systems of belief felt as if they were part of the past, old things.”

There is rebirth – man and woman survive Ragnarok and emerge from Yggdrasil, the immense tree of life that holds all the worlds together. Balder, Odin’s second son who was the “wisest, the mildest, the most eloquent” of the gods comes back from the underworld. If myths like this are passed down with morals or warnings that we are trying to discern or give our lives shape and meaning, then the promise of the world beginning anew, after foolishness, violence and destruction, that is worth holding on to. It also demands that we question ourselves and who we are in this, how our own actions and history must be confronted.

The other, more unsettling reason to read the Norse myths with an eye to dismantling whiteness is that white supremacists love their conception of Vikings, love a made-up all-white Norse myth, and have, through the prison-industrial complex, spread a racist version of Norse heathenism. [3] What would the All-Father say about these morons? Maybe Gaiman’s line about Ragnarok, “Twilight will come to the world, and the places where the humans live will fall into ruin, flaming briefly, then crumbling down and crashing into ash and devastation.”

David Perry of the University of Minnesota did have this to say about the misguidedness of Viking-loving white supremacists in the Washington Post [4], that “the Vikings of Europe did not exist in pure white racial isolation. The Vikings…tapped into rich multicultural trading networks — fighting when useful, but delighted to engage in economic and cultural exchange with great powers of Eurasia. That included the Jews of Khazaria, Christians dedicated to both Rome and Constantinople and Muslims of every sect and ethnicity. Islamic coins, in fact, have been found buried across the Viking world, a testimony to the richness of this exchange.”

There’s something profound about that exchange, pointing other ways forward than the pillaging, blood-soaked, domination stories and assumptions we’re living through. Whiteness does not have to exist in this way, we have been as flawed, as self-involved, as short-sighted and as vain as the Aesir, and there is an end coming. “Burn it to the ground,” like Michelle Wolf’s note before the White House Correspondent’s Dinner put it. [5] Or this excerpt from Danez Smith’s extraordinary new poem, ‘say it with your whole black mouth’: [6]

so many white people are alive because

we know how to control ourselves.

how many times have we died on a whim

wielded like gallows in their sun-shy hands?

here, standing in my own body, i say: the next time

they murder us for the crime of their imaginations

i don’t know what i’ll do.

i did not come to preach of peace

for that is not the hunted’s duty.

i came here to say what i can’t say

without my name being added to a list

A coda, of sorts. I think a lot about these Scandinavians on the prairie, and what they did to survive, and who they displaced to turn the open fields into farmland, and I don’t have any resolution in that. But I did, last weekend, find an extraordinary collection of poems, Sacred Hearts, by Phebe Hanson, published by Milkweed Editions in 1985. [7] The daughter of a Lutheran pastor who grew up on the prairie and then moved to Minneapolis to become a teacher, she immediately fit into my constellation of great aunts. The collection is full of spare, precise, and unblinking examinations of mortality, gender expectations, sexual violence, and change. For poems a year younger than I am and about experiences far older, they are also poems for now. This, from ‘Why I Have Simplified My Life,’ knocked me flat:

I’ve had to give up my father,

Who went to join my mother, sister, and brother,

in that cemetery outside Sacred Heart, Minnesota,

one snowy November day.

Now that I’ve lost my last buffer against death,

there probably isn’t anything

I can’t learn to get along without.

Ragnarok is coming. There is work to do.

[1] http://catiyas.tumblr.com/post/152140001171/the-grace-of-a-more-perfect-union

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/what-is-whiteness.html

[3] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1998/new-brand-racist-odinist-religion-march

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/05/31/white-supremacists-love-vikings-but-theyve-got-history-all-wrong/

[5] https://www.npr.org/about-npr/607099827/fresh-air-interview-with-michelle-wolf

[6] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/say-it-your-whole-black-mouth-0

[7] https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Hearts-Milkweed-Editions-Hanson/dp/0915943085

Inquiry / Challenge / Comfort

It's my six year workaversary at Springboard for the Arts. I’m grateful to work at this place that supports artists, that creates ways for artists to thrive and connect to their communities, and that challenges the way organizations think about themselves and engage. I'm grateful to have had three distinct roles in my time here, to have been afforded the opportunity to grow and be challenged, to connect with amazing people around the country, and to have the flexibility to start and raise an amazing family.

Because of Springboard’s principles supporting the broadest definition of who is an artist, not focusing on an aesthetic agenda or discipline, and because my working here shifted me away from writing reviews of shows and making a lot of my own work (having kids will do that too) I'm also grateful for a chance to step back and think broadly about what art does for us as humans. I've been thinking about this a lot with it being National Poetry Month and participating in a Poem-a-Day exercise for my own edification, and thinking about art I've seen recently, and the artists whose work we profile via Creative Exchange and support.

We often use a definition of art from Allan Kaprow’s Essays on the Blurring of Life and Art, that art is, ““a weaving of meaning-making activity with any or all parts of our lives.” In that meaning-making, I become less interested in what the work is, and more in what it does, for us as individuals, for us as a community. It’s really liberating, as someone who at one point had pretty strident aesthetic opinions, and often wrote about those opinions, to work in this way. And don’t get me wrong, I still have a lot of opinions, I’ve just given up on the notion necessarily that there is some inherent rightness of my opinion, or that your aesthetic judgement somehow invalidates mine. I’m much more interested in the effects of art, to wit:

Does it open up inquiry, giving us space to explore who we are, what we do not know, what we want to be? My colleague Naomi Schliesman’s “What Else Is Possible?” installation and her sculptural work, my loves at Savage Umbrella, Ashley Hanson and the Department of Public Transformation, the poetry of Kay Ryan, Spalding Gray’s monologues, Rude Mechanicals, Abstract Expressionists, Mark Bradford, Arte Povera, they all live in this space for me.

Does it challenge us, our assumptions, the limitations of what we think is possible, the status quo, injustice, imbalance, systems of power? Creative placekeeping work, David Hammons, the calligraphy graffiti of eL Seed, the posters of Ricardo Levins Morales and Favianna Rodriguez, the choreography of folks like TU Dance and other locals, Forced Entertainment, Kendrick Lamar, D’Angelo, protest songs of the 60s that are still relevant today, we need these things now more than ever.

Does is give us comfort, heal our grief, connect us to the past, connect us to each other, give us common cause? Swoon’s delicate wheatpaste work, the voices of songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Elliot Smith, Cat Power and Laura Marling, Pablo Neruda, Alan Ginsberg, your favorite film, art that reminds of our essential and fragile humanity is a balm for our loud and sharp-elbowed times.

Art doesn’t have to do all these things, and often falls flat when it tries but can’t keep the impulses in balance. You may disagree with where I have certain things listed, and that’s fine, because art often does flit between them, as I’ve rolled up my own meaning in that art. Art also moves between the spheres in which it operates, from personal endeavor to public works, to expressly political art, and across those fields simultaneously. I made a little graphic for it, and thought I'd share it, if only to say thanks for past few years of work, for the work that you do, and to keep on making and sharing.

February 7, 2018.

10 years ago I graduated from rehab.

I’ve been trying to put something down about the work and the process, but mostly I start thinking about people who have made it possible, the song lyrics and riffs, and weird quotes and phrases that have run through my head in doing the work.

Don’t die.

Thanks to Stacy, Rosanne, Mark, Karen, Ted, JoAnn, Hannah, Bekah, Kathy, and Doug for making sure that didn’t happen. Others along the way have, and I remember their names – Amanda, Omar, Dan.

“I'm an alcoholic, I don't have one drink. I don't understand people who have one drink. I don't understand people who leave half a glass of wine on the table. I don't understand people who say they've had enough. How can you have enough of feeling like this?” – Leo McGarry, The West Wing

There’s always work to do. I have had an enormous amount of privilege in my sobriety and recovery. I come from an educated family, I have degrees, people who loved and continue to love and support me. I had jobs and homes to go to, I had the ability to choose to leave triggering locations, I didn’t depend on being in a bar for work. I have choices about meetings to go to, resources and networks to build connections and social capital. To be sober is to be continually humbled and compassionate, to be deeply grateful.

Be kind.

Thanks to Natalie, Colin, Lizzie, Eric, Kristina, Shawna, Brian, Heidi, Karen, Kathleen, Alexandra, Chavis, Chris, Dana, Brandon, Laura, Molly, Andy, Noah, Nikki, Michele, Naomi, Dominic, Daniel, Jun-Li, Peter, Sam, John, Caly, Dennis, Zaraawar, Nancy, Caroline, Adia, Anna, Susan, Ashley, Lindsay, Brian, Jamie, Erica, Danielle, Sarah, Jarell, Cary, Cole, Brandon, Lauren, Pa, Naaima, Josh, Kat, Matt, Ashley, Sarah, David, Ali, Jeremiah, and Katy for giving me work, for trusting and challenging me, for opening up new possibilities.

“But there are hundreds of ways To get through the days There are hundreds of ways Now you just find one.”

– Conor Oberst, Hundreds of Ways

My aunt once asked me what I put my faith in if I didn’t put my faith in God. I told her I put my faith in people. “Good Luck with that,” she said. But that’s where that faith lives for me, in our capacity for wonder and creation, in our curiosity and imagination. I know that I wouldn’t have made it through my youth without being an artist, and I wouldn’t be alive now without that conviction and that contradiction, that ability to hold conflicting ideas and process in ambiguity, to be open to collaboration, to the messy process that builds on itself. I wouldn’t be alive without saying yes to people, and feeling the joy of what we can do together.

Be easy.

Thanks to Jacob, Amy, Jake, Jayne, Jeremey, Dianne, Alexis, Carly, Laura, Blake, Hannah, Mason, Heidi, Lisa, Russ, Eric, Rachel, Tanner, Emily, Christina, Foster, Nick, Andrea, Ben, Kyle, Molly, Leslie, Jamie, Betz, Erik, Erik, Erik, Ali, Tom, Dom, Mike, Mischa, Stephen, Colin, Alexei, Stephen, Joe, Bobby, Graham, Lindsy, Scott, K. Alex, Gigi, Susannah, Jay, Joey, Pete, Janey, Christian, Johnny, Molly, jeremy, Chastity, Will, Brian, Sam, Chantal, Sarah, Levi, Seth, Brent, Tim, Bethany, and Jenny, for letting me create, letting me help them create, making things I enjoyed and found meaning in, making life interesting.

“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” – Miles Davis

It takes a lifetime, which is what I get to now. It takes the joy and support from the others who I have found or who have found me who walk in similar paths, who are friends, who go to meetings, who say the Serenity Prayer, who are making it work because they work it. It takes all the people named here, all the people not named but who have shaped the way, lit the path knowingly or unknowingly. I am so grateful for you, and your love and what is to come. Be in touch.

What’s next?

ON NOT REFLECTING

Usually at the end of the year I put together some sort of post looking back on the year that was – many of my friends and colleagues do as well and it’s always interesting to peek into the lives of others, and see what they count as wins and losses, what seemed important to them, what they were grateful for. For the past few years, my posts have read essentially the same way, “Having babies is hard and awesome, work is busy but fulfilling, politics is heavy but we keep hope alive, thanks for art and music and friends, and gratitude for this life.”

That’s a worthwhile sentiment, and it’s accurate for this year as well. But this year I didn’t write that post. I spent the end of the year with the desperate chorus of The Mountain Goats’ “This Year” [1] running through my, “I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me.” After a year of exhausting doing, and being, and trying, I wanted to spend the end of the year explicitly not looking back. We hosted family and fed each other. I made stock and read books and played games. I was mostly quiet. At some point in the week of cleaning and staying in, a printout of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Red Brocade” [2], picked up on a trip to the library showed up, and this verse popped out:

No, I was not busy when you came!

I was not preparing to be busy.

That’s the armor everyone put on

to pretend they had a purpose

in this world.

That’s the reason that I didn’t write the reflection piece, I didn’t want to tally up the busyness of the past year, because doing so would gloss over all the things that didn’t get done, perhaps the things that didn’t get done because I did not make enough conscious effort to makes space for them. I did not get enough writing done. I did not get enough reading done. I did not make enough things.

In a New York Times Opinionator piece from several years ago, Tim Kreider wrote about The ‘Busy’ Trap [3], putting into essay prose Shihab Nye’s verse above. But he also offers a countermeasure in conscious idleness. “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice;” he writes, but:

“it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

To access that idleness, also paradoxically, takes effort. It takes breaking the habits of checking my phone and flicking through social media to see what else is going on in the world. It takes the effort of trying to keep kids to a schedule and working to balance their joy. It takes some rigor in deadlines and planning so that I’m not working down to the wire. So maybe I don’t want to reflect on the year that was, but forward on what might be. Not resolutions like goals to achieve, that will make me busier, but practices that make everything else possible.

I have a little experience with that. This February, provided I don’t mess up, will be the 10th anniversary of my sobriety. I’m proud of that, and it’s something that is both monumental, but has been built through the daily doing of it. That also means that this past holiday period was the 10th anniversary of the blackout drunk that finally landed me in rehab, and I reflected on that by feeding my family in my home with my wife and kids. That is a quiet victory that I can cherish.

There is also something in that space of making space, in that practice of quietness, in that idleness to spark connection and action that feels appropriate for this moment. I know I need it personally, but also in the little and big political senses. Now is not the time for straight white men like me, who do not reflect the future of this country, to continue to take space in the way that we have. In that formulation of Audre Lorde’s that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” there is the truth that people like me, who have benefitted from institutional racism and sexism, are the structures against which self-care becomes revolutionary. Part of the work of dismantling these structures has to be more self-care, more care, more humanity overall.

In that Mountain Goats track, before the final chorus, there’s the line, “There will be feasting and dancing, in Jerusalem next year…” In 2018, more feasting. More dancing, more care and more quietness. Maybe to reflect, maybe to connect, maybe just to look up at the sky and dream.

[1] https://genius.com/The-mountain-goats-this-year-lyrics

[2] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/red-brocade

[3] https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/

As You Were

LG

Open up with Rock 'n' Roll Star, close it down with Live Forever. It's a crazy situation, but all I need are cigarettes and alcohol. These could be the best days of our lives, but I don't think we've been living very wise.

Thanks Alex Watson, and the pool room of the British Community Association clubhouse in Cairo, with a tape of Definitely Maybe and stolen Heinekens and gin. Disappear, chug, come back giggling and falling down with a headache coming on. The brothers Gallagher would approve.

Stand in line for the bar at the club. Liam sounds great, he always has, but there's something not quite right – he looks smaller on the stage, as if he's puzzled that it's not an arena. Maybe I'm puzzled that it's not an arena. Ringed by a fortress of monitors, he's pacing around, lunging at the mic. Like a tiger in a too-small enclosure at the zoo.

Circles, circles and circles. The couple in front order beers, she brought her own can coozie, because people are prepared to drink. He orders a shot of Jägermeister to go along with his. Maybe that's what I would start drinking again with. A shot of ice cold Jägermeister, something at a show. I could do that. Swat that thought away because sometimes thoughts don't mean anything. It's just rock 'n' roll.

Maybe I miss writing about shows. Maybe I should do that again, but then maybe I don't want to be a play-by-play announcer for concerts. Maybe I just want to write looping personal history and free-form thoughts about being clear-eyed and putting in a professional shift. You gotta make it happen.

Maybe it doesn't actually make sense, but if you can sing along with a thousand other people, that's as close as you get. As you were.

A Very Serious Man

Why is it that age and weight seem to dictate that the actions get ponderous, while the books get thicker? Get quicker to laugh and let what's wondrous be written instead. For all that gravity, don't be so heavy, and just dance.

Cohen Doggerel

Every time I'm with you baby, I'm soaking up the view. Every time I'm with you baby, I'm soaking up the view. One more sunset of you darling, Before the moon comes out anew. I'm standing at the doorway The Inquisition waits inside. I'm standing at the doorway The Inquisition waits inside. I could have escaped one day, maybe, Notw I'm just along for the ride. If I end up broke and hungry Won't be nothing new. If I end up broke and hungry Won't be nothing new. I keep expecting you to fail me, 'Cause that's just what I would do. In the darkness of the daytime, Just try to write a song. In the darkness of the daytime, Just try to write a song. The night will be here soon Then we'll have to get along.