Exausted by Art.

Exhausted by Art

I’m exhausted from trying to be artistic – in my art studio past the comfort zone of bedtime – an already challenged time when reading or television always compete to keep my from much needed rest, but my art teacher, guru of sorts – a creative director and wizard of artistic transcendence – directed me to set up a designated space in my house allocated to art only, where paints, paper, brushes, glitter, glue, markers, magazines, gesso, and all manner of artsy material are arranged in baskets on the table, strewn across the guest bed, poke from under the guest bed in plastic containers. I am now officially obligated to create that illusive product – art. Art – that category of mystic and mythic proportions that cannot be defined, and continues to be the subject of argument, awe, fear, and reverence. I am now on permanent assignment to be creative, in tune with the right hemisphere of my brain, and on alert to notice all opportunities to move spirit into matter. I, who cannot draw a straight line or anything that remotely resembles subject matter, am suddenly required to produce the true and the beautiful. I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of this spiritual assignment springing from the depths of my being and progressing under the guidance of my mentor.

It started out simply, when one day, two years ago, while I walked by the art gallery, a friend pulled me in to the art studio, and asked me to sit down and start decorating paper mask molds to be auctioned as an art gallery fund-raiser. I had not glued much since kindergarten, when I typically threw my own attempts at making flowers look like flowers across rooms. Yet while mask-making, it seemed he gluing and painting process became instantly addictive, and the right brainwave activity leading to suspension of time and space, had the profound effect of creating a yearning for a repeat experience of the out-of-the-box mode of operating, leading to a discussion with fully-credentialed- art-gallery-owner-and-art-instructor-par-excellence who recommended continuing art education at his gallery/studio on a regular basis to enliven that field where the creative so easily go, and, in some cases, never return. And now, just a few weeks into the exploration of this new terrain, with a few collages under my belt, and lots of time spent with Dick Blick, and a designated art studio on my premises, I am exhausted by the demands of the creative life and the expectations I have put upon myself to be “an artist.” There – I have finally uttered the A-word and now must suffer under the mantle of expectation, realization that I know nothing about art, and do not know anything about making it other than cutting out magazine pictures and pasting them on masonite. I am a fraud in a field where absolute truth and honesty are required for any modicum of success. And so, I often stay up past ten or eleven and sitting on a chair in front of the easel purchased on e-bay even before my decision to embark on formal but actually informal training, I stare at my board, gesso-ed and painted, with scraps of cut paper, faces of skulls, lipstick, words, lightly glued (still in process). I stare, worrying that I suck and that I am a wanna-be, and fuck the process only preachers who are adamant that product is not where it is at while they stick cool looking product on the pages of their books that claim process is the only thing that matters. And sometimes when in process, I feel that flow, that sugary rush of time suspended, and that light headed no-fly zone when I know that picture of the Goth girl is perfect for that spot directly underneath the orange torn paper in the right corner. I just know it and all is well.

Ashram Politics

It has been my experience it is possible to be in Nirvana one moment, and in the very the next moment, descend into the depths of that all too familiar, confining, egoistic hell. Just because you have spent hours sitting at the feet of some enlightened being, who may even be recognized throughout the world as at least on par with Mother Teresa, when you return home from a two-day retreat with your guru, you will probably find you are still living there. You will probably still turn on the television to watch Court TV if that is your habit. You will still desire the coffee that comes from the cappuccino machine at the BP gas station, where you will continue to stop each morning before work, and, putting your $1.25 on the counter, walk out with that sugary concoction of the total bastardization of coffee, and guilt on your way to work. Had you chosen the freshly-brewed, organic blend from the container on the counter, you would be sipping it throughout the hour, it would have been the conscious choice – it is of course, a Fairly Traded brand. However, the first thing you do when you return to town after having spent two days with your guru, is stop at the BP and fill up your cup with that sweet, foamy, liquid blend of chemicals, sugar, and artificial flavoring. At least, you rationalize, you did not pick up the glazed donut.
Your beloved guru may kiss you and take you in her arms, whispering sweet nothings in your ear, the promises of bliss, and for a moment you are able to simply be. You are able to taste a moment’s freedom from the world you have been battling with every day of your life. You are, after all, at war. You are in constant battle with what is. It starts when you open your eyes in the morning and wish you could close them and go back into the void, a tendency you have fought against since childhood. It continues as you wish you did not have to go to work, but would rather read your novel. You resent having to face, once again, the call of duty—the bills to pay, the dishes to wash, the demands of your job. If only you could see the face of your guru in the dishwater, see the face of God in the garbage. But, for about 10 seconds, while you rest in your guru’s arms, you are simply loved. So, for 30 seconds a year (the equivalent of three hugs), you have this blessing, this gift—she enfolds you in her embrace and presses you to her; you feel like Neo being unplugged from the matrix, as she releases you from mortality.
During these 10 seconds of eternity, you forget what planet you are on. In her embrace, there is no genocide, only tenderness. There is no global warming, only compassion. So, for 30 seconds a year, you are off the hook, lifted to some other plane beyond politics and the wars with what is—-free at last. You forget the arthritis in your lower back and the pain that spreads down your upper legs. You do not blame yourself for not being on a rigorous regime of exercise. You forget that you still owe some taxes that you put of paying, but the bill from the IRS is there waiting when you arrive home. You are wise enough to know your bills have not disappeared, so you put off opening the mail as long as you can. Your suitcase sits on the bed in your guest room, and you prolong unpacking and doing the dirty laundry. Your guru did not magically remove the stains on your white t-shirts or wash your underwear while you slept.
Of course for those 30 seconds you stopped asking questions and were free at last, someone who was sitting twelve feet away was pissed because the guy who had been sitting close to the guru’s feet for that past two hours was obstructing his view. While your mind stopped screaming and you were not asking why war—why sickness, why suffering, why sunlight, why sky, why ocean, why us—someone else was furious with the woman who was rude at the bookstore.
Someone once told me, “Why is not a spiritual question,” and I was tempted to ask, “Why?” But when I contemplated this koan, I saw the wisdom in not asking a question that simply leads to another, and another, until we land full circle back at the beginning, and none the wiser. For those few seconds, nothing mattered but her smell of roses. You wanted only to breathe deeply from her warm body, as if she were your breath and blood.
When you return home, of course some local ashramites will immediately become engaged in some painful drama, as one woman feels she worked too hard without enough support from others, and her feelings were hurt by something someone said, and she doesn’t think the guru had paid her enough attention. I realize we humans simply cannot stop ourselves. Who would we be without the power struggling bitching and moaning? It’s terrifying to consider. Would we be living like walking flat-liners through this world of opposites, as if everything is actually okay when we all know it sucks and is actually not okay because we are not okay and anything that we touch cannot be okay? Or would we actually be able to have peace on earth and all get along? Will we have to resign ourselves to our 30 seconds of peace a year in the arms of our guru as the only way to be free from the illusion that nothing is okay and never will be?

Deviant Art

Deviant Art


Deviant art rotating in my virtual space—an iconoclastic fuck you to the matrix

Bronzed and purple masks with spitfire and bird nests shooting from their heads saying fuck you to the man—it’s all the art of love because I’m a visionary stalker

I’m a closet iconoclastic rebel, hiding behind a smile and feminine frame

It’s incidental art, a product of get me outta here angst and existential pain at being held captive in a pain body sequestered by time

It’s the overwhelming desire to go AWOL that leads me to the easel—the path of the artists way

The world is saying I dare you to love so I’m taking up the challenge

The world is saying I dare you to be, I dare you to stop, I dare you…

And I am saying I will tattoo myself from head to toe.

My Karma is Better than Your Karma

My Karma is Better than Your Karma
In past lives I must have done amazing things, earning an abundance of spiritual brownie points. Perhaps I was an Egyptian high priestess – that seems to be popular one, according to many who access the akasha, and I have numerous friends convinced they lived lives in Egypt as caretakers of esoteric knowledge. I could also have been a Native American shaman. Many of my peers were Native American medicine men or women. I’m sure I must have been some type of royalty, or at least, in many lives, a member of the upper classes. It seems very likely I’ve been a martyr – one of the women burned as a witch for being a midwife who used mysterious herbs or something, and while I burned, I remained true to my cause and died with a saintly expression on my face. And, as one past-life reader mentioned, my soul did originate from Venus, the planet of love, beauty, and art appreciation. And, of course, I am here to be a spiritual teacher, a light worker in the wilderness of maya (the illusion that matter is real and all that).
I’m certain I was never a washer- woman from northern England whose husband worked as an iron molder coming home soot covered, coughing phlegm, bone tired, with three kids whose teeth were becoming rotten and bellies were often empty. That is what my ancestors on my mother’s side did, molded iron in Rotheram, England for several generations. Of course, I discovered that on Ancesters.com, not from my brother who always gives the impression we are from a line of blue blood, starting its course in England, and making its way to Plymouth where our grandfather was an international trader. According to Ancester.com, my father’s father, John Damon (originally Daemon), who lived in Plymouth, was a bookkeeper, and his wife, Fanny Mae Stevenson came from Rotheram where her mother was a housekeeper in Scotland. There is a lot of steel in our history - steel molding, blacksmithing, filthy lower class work that gave my ancestors backs of steel. It would be nice if that translated to a genetic predisposition to buns of steel. Of course, my brother never talked much about the Gatenby’s, or my mother’s father, Grandpa Gatenby, who came from England in the late 1800’s whose father molded steel. Grandpa Gatenby worked as a steam-engineering in the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota.
That is the region where whites stole the land from the Lakota Indians after discovering gold in the Black Hills. Philip always spoke of the Gatenby’s with a somewhat dismissive air as if our mother’s family were not a part of us, as if we were Damons, and being a Damon from Plymouth is how we defined ourselves. And I grew up feeling like a Damon, feeling the privilege in my blood that gave me an air of confidence even though I was an orphan and floated unanchored through life moving into land mines that kept exploding my existence into incoherent pieces. Even though I now realized some of the families I would land in were actually a step up from trailer trash by the standards of any self-respecting blue blood. Still I was gifted with that false sense of one-upmanship that lives just under the skin, that sense of entitlement that privileged Anglos have over everyone else – perhaps earned by good karma generated from past lives, I would later rationalize this sense of privilege, as I tried to put these disparate influences into perspective. Now, I am hip to the fact that all of this is an illusion, of course, so we really cannot quantify good karma, versus bad in that simplistic and formulaic way designed to stack the cards in our favor, making us believe our history is a pristine slate of good deeds spotted with periods of politically correct martyrdom and grandiose roles that compare to Russell Crow in the Gladiator.
That being said, and ego aside, the very fact that I am hip to the perils of karmic grandstanding puts me in the category of someone who must have learned some pretty heavy lessons in past lives, and most likely done something right or I certainly would not be able to discern the complexity of cause and effect, bringing me back full circle to “in my past lives I must have done some good things being as spiritually savy as I am in this one.”

Mt Lipstick is Bleeding

My Lipstick is Bleeding


It is not as if my lips are on fire or anything extraordinary is happening. It’s not as if I need to be rushed to some emergency room for immediate lip surgery because some collagen injection caused an extreme allergic reaction threatening to blow off my face. It is not as if I’ve had an injection of botox that has frozen my lips making it impossible to display any kind of emotion. It is simply that now when I apply lip color, there is a spot where a trace of rose bleeds outside my lip line. This is not a tragedy, yet considering I need glasses to see the details of any make-up application, it can be aggravating. When I put on my reading glasses, the kind I only needed after forty, I see small hairs under my brows that need to be tweezed and the small line at the top of my lip where the rose bleeds. I see other things I chose not to report that remind me of inevitable and unforgiving time. My outsides have changed and my insides, too.
One thing I notice is that when a certain man calls me to have lunch, I cringe. I decline, saying I have other plans even though I may not. I don’t feel like making small talk with someone new. I don’t feel like trying to look a certain way. I don’t want to be forced to look down at my midriff and regret the scones I have consumed on days when I was convinced I would never have to look down at my midriff and consider a guy looking at the roll that shows under my tee shirt. In other words, I don’t have the energy to market myself. The hormones that once drove me like some completely mad, mindless woman have diminished. I once did sit ups so my midriff would be taught under a tee shirt, and thought a great deal about what I looked like first in the morning.
I believed lip gloss should look like I had not actually put anything on my lips, when in actuality, I had spent quite a bit of time choosing a gloss that would look like I had not spent any time at all on making my lips look pale peach. The goal was to appear not to have spent much time on making myself look attractive. The reality was, like many women, my life was filled with such enhancements as: perms to achieve that naturally wavy look, blush and face powder to make my face appear naturally smooth and glowing, and trips to the tanning booth to achieve a naturally, sun-kissed glow. I considered undergarments very carefully, and embarked on a program of daily Jane Fonda exercises.
The question is, at fifty seven, has laziness made me overweight and am I simply making excuses for not caring so much, or have I reached some exulted state of wisdom, where I have transcended superficiality and the trivial concerns of youth? Or could I be rapidly vacillating between the two states at the speed of light and thus, am caught between laziness and enlightenment. Am I declining lunch because of disinterest, or because of fear the man will notice my midriff? When I encountered a man the other day with whom I had had a brief romance ten years ago, I noticed he looked old. He had a belly and his hair had lots of gray. The skin on his face looked looser. I turned to him and said, “A blast from the past,” and we talked and I remembered how slim I was and how fit he was when we lay together on my bed, not actually making love but kissing until six in the morning. As we stood in the art gallery, we talked as if we didn’t notice each other’s changes. It happens to them, too, I thought.
When a woman my age and her husband enter I restaurant where I am having lunch with a friend, and she is thin and in great shape, and her husband looks happy and they are smiling, am I being cynical concluding that she swallows. I imagine she lives for him the way I could never live for the men I believed I loved. She smiles, serves, and swallows as naturally as she breathes; she doesn’t mind that he always gets the channel changer. I wonder, is she naturally a good listener who finds her man genuinely interesting, perhaps more interesting than she finds herself?

Ashram Politics

It has been my experience it is possible to be in Nirvana one moment, and in the very the next moment, descend into the depths of that all too familiar, confining, egoistic hell. Just because you have spent hours sitting at the feet of some enlightened being, who may even be recognized throughout the world as at least on par with Mother Teresa, when you return home from a two day retreat with your guru, you will probably find you are still living there. You will probably still turn on the television to watch Court TV if that is your habit. You will still desire the coffee that comes from the cappuccino machine at the BP gas station, where you will continue to stop each morning before work, and, putting your $1.25 on the counter, walk out with that sugary concoction of the total bastardization of coffee, and gulp it on your way to work. Had you chosen the freshly-brewed, organic blend from the container on the counter, you would be sipping it throughout the hour, it would have been the conscious choice – it is of course, a Fairly Traded brand. However, the first thing you do when you return to town after having spent two days with your guru, is stop at the BP and fill up your cup with that sweet, foamy, liquid blend of chemicals, sugar, and artificial flavoring. At least, you rationalize, you did not pick up the glazed donut.
Your beloved guru may kiss you and take you in her arms, whispering sweet nothings in your ear, the promises of bliss, and for a moment you are able to simply be.
You are able to taste a moment’s freedom from the world you have been battling with every day of your life. You are, after all, at war. You are in constant battle with what is. It starts when you open your eyes in the morning and wish you could close them and go back into the void, a tendency you have fought against since childhood. It continues as you wish you did not have to go to work, but would rather read your novel. You resent having to face, once again, the call of duty—the bills to pay, the dishes to wash, the demands of your job. If only you could see the face of your guru in the dishwater, see the face of God in the garbage. But, for about 10 seconds, while you rest in your guru’s arms, you are simply loved. So, for 30 seconds a year (the equivalent of three hugs), you have this blessing, this gift—she enfolds you in her embrace and presses you to her; you feel like Nelo being unplugged from the matrix, as she releases you from mortality.
During these 10 seconds of eternity, you forget what planet you are on. In her embrace, there is no genocide, only tenderness. There is no global warming; only the cool breeze of compassion. So, for 30 seconds a year, you are off the hook, lifted to some other plane beyond politics and the wars with what is—free at last. You forget the arthritis in your lower back and the pain that spreads down your upper legs. You do not blame yourself for not being on a rigorous regime of exercise. You forget that you still owe some taxes that you put of paying, but the bill from the IRS is there waiting when you arrive home. You are wise enough to know your bills have not disappeared, so you put off opening the mail as long as you can. Your suitcase sits on the bed in your guestroom, and you prolong unpacking and doing the dirty laundry. Your guru did not magically remove the stains on your white t-shirts or wash your underwear while you slept.
Of course for those 30 seconds that you stopped asking questions and were free at last, someone who was sitting twelve feet away was pissed because the guy who had been sitting close to the guru’s feet for that past two hours was obstructing their view. While your mind stopped screaming and you were not asking why war—why sickness, why suffering, why sunlight, why sky, why ocean, why us—someone else was furious with the woman who was rude at the bookstore.
Someone once told me, “Why is not a spiritual question,” and I was tempted to ask, “Why?” But when I contemplated this koan, I saw the wisdom in not asking a question that simply leads to another, and another, until we land full circle back at the beginning, and none the wiser. For those few seconds, nothing mattered but her smell of roses. You wanted only to breathe deeply from her warm body, as if she were your breath and blood.
When you return home, of course some local ashramites will immediately become engaged in some painful drama, as one woman feels she worked too hard without enough support from others, and her feelings were hurt by something someone said, and she doesn’t think the guru had paid her enough attention. I realize we humans, simply cannot stop ourselves. Who would we be without the power struggling bitching and moaning? It’s terrifying to consider. Would we be living like walking flat liners through this world of opposites, as if everything is actually okay when we all know it sucks and is actually not okay because we are not okay and anything that we touch cannot be okay? Or would we actually be able to have peace on earth and all get along? Will we have to resign ourselves to our 30 seconds of peace a year in the arms of our guru as the only way to be free from the illusion that nothing is okay and never will be?

A Chain Reaction

It was Monday morning and I was in a hurry to make it to my appointment with the accountant, trying to arrive before I needed to be at work. I was hyperventilating about tax issues and my status as an independent contractor with my own recently formed corporation created to allow me maximum freedom from the demands of the man. But I was terrified by the costs of that freedom, as I contemplated my accountant giving me a long overdue reality check. Naturally, the weather had been brutal, with 50 mile an hour winds the previous night and when I stepped into my rather small garage, my feet touched ice and I braced myself for a fall just before breaking through ice and finding myself standing in 4 inches of water. I quickly accessed how far my new Uggs were submerged, and pissed I had not purchased and used a water resistant spray, thinking I already had a can, but of course, didn’t or couldn’t find it, screamed fucking shit, and ordered Beardog into my backseat (he always comes to the office with me because my boss loves dogs – being a proper English person, and there is already one other Chow mix who comes daily to our building. I squeezed into the front seat – my garage is tight, as I said – and began pulling out and realized I was stuck, my wheels spinning on the ice as water splashed madly on the walls, the tables, the summer clay pots, the garbage cans. It was basically like being in a car wash. I moved forward a bit and then backward for about five minutes, trying to rock my way out of being stuck, and as I finally got unstuck found the only way my car would get enough traction to move was if I backed out in such a way my right review mirror was knocked off (already did that once last winter and had to have a new one put on) - fucking shit, I screamed.

Once at the accountants, I waited for about thirty minutes to see Fred, who apologized for the wait, and I smiled and said no problem, of course you are always willing to kiss your accountants ass. And, after chatting realized I didn’t have my ducks in a row, and needed to find about 300 receipts and get busy deducting stuff if I didn’t want to be in deep shit with the IRS – fucking shit I screamed, once back in the car and on my way to work.

Later, after we had lunch downtown, my friend asked to borrow my car to get back to her job – no problem, I said, and as she backed out of the parking space in front of the restaurant and started to move forward, an SUV backed into my side door. Kartika, she screamed, it wasn’t my fault. I know, I said, she backed into us. It was seven degrees and we got out of the car and a sweet girl of about 22 walked over saying she is was so sorry, it was her fault, and she would pay. I don’t know what to do, I said. And of course, my friend took charge saying, Kartika we have to call the police and called 911, and a young cop came to the scene and I noticed he is the son of a friend of my friend, and of course, I remember seeing him once when he was twelve. He asked for her license, which she readily produced, and at that moment I realized I did not even know where my own license was (I was uncredentialed), and thought, wow, I am lucky I wasn’t driving. When the policeman asked for proof of my insurance – I told him I would be right back in a jiffy and ran quickly around the corner to my insurance company where they produced a copy of proof of insurance and put it in a nice blue plastic folder (I was deeply impressed and resolved to immediately place it in my glove compartment and never remove unless to present it to an officer after an accident). When I returned with proof of insurance, the officer kindly remarked “that works for me.” Fortunately, he didn’t ask to see my current registration, because it was not in the car. But immediately upon leaving the scene, I drove to the courthouse to pick up my current license plate and registration one day before my deadline.

Upon returning home from work that evening, I went through a basket of purses in my closet and finally located my license, discovering it had been expired for one year – fucking shit, I screamed while throwing purses into the corner of my closet. The next morning I drove illegally to the courthouse to renew my license, and was told I needed to take the written test. Do you want to study, asked the lady at the desk. No, I said, I’ll wing it. I took the test and failed. The lady then informed me that had I passed the test, they would not have been able to give me a license any way because the name on my social security card and the name on my license did not match (after 9-11 they always check on this) and I would have to resolve this before getting a new one. Oh shit, I said, now I have to hassle with getting that duck in a row. So, I called the social security office and was told I had to bring in proof of my name change - an original copy of my divorce papers and some other form of ID such as a doctor’s record – so I spent two hours trying to locate my divorce papers to no avail and the next day paid the court house $10 to get a copy. Then I went to the doctor’s office to get a copy of a record and was told I needed to pay $150.00 on a past due account before they would give me my record. Oh shit, I said, concerned about my checking account balance. This was not a good week on the surface of things.

However, I am convinced the chain reaction caused by a large number of AWOL ducks, was indeed a blessing. In one week, I got a new social security card and license, paid off my doctor’s bill, had updated my license plates, and had current registration and proof of insurance in my car. I had also asked to be made a permanent employee at my company and was on my way to having taxes taken out of my paycheck and would be enrolled in a health insurance plan the following week along with other employee benefits. One week later, we had layoffs at work and I just got hired before the hiring freeze.