Made Line

2011-11-20T13:49:00.001-08:00

I miss the big broad windows of Ojai. The open space. The secrecy.

I have ridiculously good news: I am coming back to myself. All things becoming clear, like someone wiped an open space in my foggy window.

To Do

Update domain.
Be grateful for jar of pens.
Buy a plant.
Read mom's book.

amen.

Coyote

2011-09-08T12:21:00.000-07:00

I have rejected you, longed for you, lost you and sought you all in the span of a morning. I am finding you, now, again, in photos and memories and a song. At least I am feeling.

These morning hours of solitude are proving to be more useful than I originally thought.

Ojai, CA July, 2011

So much of you, and of us, is defined by the space that exists determinately between us. It is like the third person the two of us make. Always I am touching you, seeing you, hearing you through a veil, however thin, that hangs where I cannot get to it, can't tear it down. Sometimes the veil is lifted and I touch you soul to soul and look into your eyes and you are looking back. Like that time in the car, when you looked at me and let yourself be open. Then you got scared and lowered the veil again and I wait for you now, always, to come back. But I don't know. Maybe this is the human condition. To know that you are alone, no matter what, like Rilke says, that we would become guardians of one another's solitude. But I keep waiting. And sometimes, when my feeling for you is the most full, I am painfully aware of this thin separation and it seems like a gulf of lightyears. Sometimes it doesn't matter how thin it is, because it is a thousand miles high and a thousand miles wide in each direction and I never pass through it.

This morning on my way to school, I saw a coyote run out in front of me. I was just about to turn the corner to the long drive that winds its way to the art department when a great big crow flew out low and directly in front of me at the speed of light. Then, dashing behind it, was a coyote. It turned its head and looked at me as I stared, startled and transfixed. I was filled with so much electricity from seeing it, running, totally wild and totally unconcerned with me or with the city. Something in me shot up and was awakened. The coyote was lithe and light as air and seemed to me to be made perfectly well for all that it needed to be.

I ran after it and turned the corner but it was gone. The only strange thing is that all around was desert landscape, and I cannot image a single place where it could have disappeared to. Maybe it was a shaman like Don Juan and turned into something else before I could see it. Maybe so.

Later, after class, I sat down later next to a lavender bush to write about identity. I thought I might see you. I found a piece of rose quartz at the base of the lavender. All these things are stirring in me, big feelings like a flooding river or a heavy cloud. Someday they are going to break, and we had better have an arc to ride it out in.

I will keep waiting.

Vancouver

2011-06-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

I have tried to eat the lumpy pears, they will not get ripe. I have tried to keep the freedom, but I can't seem to find the balance between the things I think I have to do and the things I really do have to do. I have been drinking vanilla rice milk, however, and never has it been more decadent.

All I want to do is walk, for hours, and lay down and write. There is no city for me to walk to from here. There is Culver City but it is less a city and more a movie facade of a Disney World-like town with pretend vintage street posts and cafes that are too shiny and too new. There is writing in me now, though, more than there was before. I have the small lino block we bought on Granville Island sitting on my desk, stately, on top of a pile of tiny notebooks, none of them perfect like those red ones with improper binding. I also did make lentils and brown rice, and I bought nutritional yeast. They were delicious. There doesn't ever seem to be enough. Enough time, enough work, enough food, enough writing, enough sky, enough distance to walk. For a few days though, there was just enough and not too much.

I'm trying to adjust to my new resident, my Chandelier, hanging, I am sure, uncomfortable from the the top of me. I wonder if it knows the important job it will carry out?

oh dear, the rice is burning.

Speed the Plow

2011-06-05T16:06:00.001-07:00

Everything I write on here is so secret. Like little insects wrapped in their gauzy cocoons. Or like Simone's photographs of bare flesh and bodies hidden beneath surgical cloth. Maybe I write for myself, mostly.

I am up in Pacoima today. Or should I say, down in Pacoima. Down in the Valley where the smog hangs low and the swimming pools show the heaviness of the sky reflected in their glassy blue tops. I've been working on something lately, I've written about it in little bits and little pieces off and on and it's finally about to happen. I want to document it like I documented Ojai, especially because it is the fruit of that journey, the fleece at the end of the expedition. I've been sort of circling it low like a hawk trying not to show too much interest in case I spook the prospect. I've balked more out of fear though, than actual caution. Fear that it's too good to be true, fear that it's not possible that I actually could be, am about to be, as free as I think I am. Such a big change, such a big change in this world that is changing so much. Storms and out of season weather, the tornado's in Saint Louis and the great dragon that rocked Japan's shoreline and shook free the radiation from its concrete tomb. My mother told me Obama was on the air allaying people's fears about the radiation reaching our shorelines. It's not that bad, he said, just don't go outside. I never did look it up to see if that's what he said, but I believe her, I believe her. Everything feels like Speed the Plow, Mamet's play about the book that is about the end of the world. "All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace."

I had a dream several years ago about the end of the world. I was 17 and in the dream was a map upon the earth and on the map was a dove, and the dove marked the places that would be destroyed. And the only safe place to go, was the highest place. I remember when Howard told me I would be a painter. I thought he was crazy. I am an attorney, a women's rights activist, an anthropologist, a politician. But paint flowers? You've got the wrong girl.

It is amazing to me how little we can know about ourselves, until some great event or some slow and consistent tapping, tapping etches away at the hard white shell that is the world and we finally break free. I suppose for me it's been a combination of the two, of the great events and of the slow tapping. For me it was a knocking. Something outside of this world, this shell, knocking on the door that is in the middle of my soul and it did not stop until I answered. Thank god for that.

I am moving to Santa Fe.

Judy Watson

cypher

2011-01-27T01:25:00.000-08:00

I know now what had been growing in me all that time. What I felt, so suspiciously, in the cavity of my chest. I remember how, even after the show and the residency and all that making, I somehow still felt full and unfinished. I felt like a carton of eggs with only one missing. I remember, too, how I wrestled with that feeling for months. The most awful sense, impending birth of something totally unknown. It was as if the sky was either about to rip apart or come together and I didn't know which or in what direction. The sleeplessness, the dreamlessness, the slow agony.

What was growing in me was subtle awareness. The eggs that waited in my cardboard carton where plenty, and they were fertile. You see, sometimes, when we are drowning, we get aboard whatever ship comes by. And we love it. But that ship might not be going where we intended to. And, if we are not careful, after a time, we will forget our original itinerary and be content to mop decks and play solitaire on sea-sick nights. And that is what happened to me. Ojai was the whale that rocked my ship apart and swallowed me whole. Only, instead of spitting my up on the shore of some far off land, it rather delivered me, piece by piece, back to myself. Like those bones I wrote about so long ago, it is the nature of something that belongs to come back to itself.

While I was aboard that rescue ship, I knew, I knew, that part of me was still drowning. I knew that something was getting lost in all that mopping. But great things carry with them great inertia and the ship that saved me was the greatest of them all. Ojai was just the beginning, and it was so big, and so different, that despite my weekly mandated journeys back into Los Angeles, it ripped up the soil long enough to drop seeds inside of me beneath the roots of foreign trees. Each seed, each vision I had up there, each dream, each word I wrote, each thought, lay within me growing and growing like different pieces of a puzzle. They got so big, first I had to make a small change, then another small change, then a bigger one, and then, at last, I made colossal changes left and right, up-rooting what did not belong and making way for the new, waiting to see what shape it would take.

Well, it's been almost a year. And the shape is clear.

But I'll tell you later....

goodnight.

Event horizon

2011-01-25T00:21:00.000-08:00

Jingle bells. Jingle bells. A creature stirs, in the tiny dark spot beneath the floor boards. Suddenly there is light in here again. It's like a wide and steady swell, and I can see it, if I squint my eyes. It is the Future and it is worth having.

In my dreams these days there are lots of flying animals. Sometimes they dip into mirrored indigo pools at midnight and sometimes they circle around my drive-way with prey in their mouth. Always, though, I am watching them through a window, some secret peeking place. I am just happy to be having dreams again. Or to be writing again.

I am about to embark on a new adventure, but it is still a secret. It seems to me that great changes happen in my life in two year cycles. Someday I will make a map of this. Like a celestial map of the zodiacs, the different constellated phases of a journey.

Recently, I have been researching Einstein's Unified Field theory and the Coriolis effect. I find it very interesting. I am finding my cosmology again, the one given to me through Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. The one given to me through great and magnificent synchronicity.

I should go to sleep soon. A good day's work tomorrow.
I can hear my upstairs neighbor snoring.

Oh, and I went to Joshua tree. It was like fire that burned and ripped through the sky, and in the day time, snow capped mountains against desert landscapes reminded me of home.

goodnight.

2010-10-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

I have a body that cannot be touched by caffeine. Or sleep, enthusiasm, or rest in any form.
I am helpless in the moonlight, like a bird falling through the air.

'till death do us part

2010-09-07T14:08:00.000-07:00

My watch started working again today. It stopped, abruptly, the day I arrived in Ojai. No way to tell time, no way to track progress. Has everything I learned disappeared in the mire of re-entry? I never came back from Ojai. Not fully. There are parts of me left wandering around in the black and silver hills looking for white sage, looking for a way to tell time. Something steady to chart my passages by.

I haven't written in a long, long time it feels. I couldn't. I couldn't bare the feeling of the truth coming up from my body made of concrete and out my hot and living mouth. Words become real, they make it honest. They make me honest. But something in me opened up when I looked at my watch and it told the time - 1:43, Standard Pacific, something remembered, remembered the page and the voice and the story I'd been weaving. I think I'm on a long, long journey. Into some deep wilderness with no day and no oasis.

If I was a braid, tight and neat, a thousand strands separated into three, and woven back together again in a fish tail, then I have been unbraided. I've been pulled apart, and separated again, and again, putting things in and taking things out, undoing it all from me. Taking out the land, the animals, the love, the hope and possibility. Unbraiding from myself the memory of delighted expectation. Removing, one by one, the pieces of thought and memory, projected on the inside of me 1000 lumens bright. I lied, in Ojai, I lied. About the work and what it meant. That work was about abandoning self and choosing descent because of an inescapable love of pain. That work was about getting lost and no one comes to find you. It was about breaking a promise to myself, a promise of fidelity and chastity to my purpose. I broke my own marriage vows. It was about trust vested in those unworthy of it, and the terrible consequences of not following you're own inner authority. It was about how you can ruin everything.
Nothing in me believes that you love me anymore. Nothing in me believes in the future.

Quick, no one witness me. I couldn't bare the site of you seeing what I see. The hot feeling of your gaze on my broken and open skin. I am so ashamed.

Finally, my watch told the truth and so could I.

And they'll come home, wagging their tails behind them.

Psychoidal

2010-08-19T00:32:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time I saw things
in my mind. I saw a heart inside of a ribcage, a woman who glowed in the dark, transparent. I heard a voice in the silence echoing in rooms filled with the images in my head.

Once upon a time I wrote these things down on paper and believed in them. My days were not so filled with activity and socialization. I had a lot of solitude. I do not know how to reconcile this.

If I was standing on a dark path and before me was a road that led to the East and a road that led to the West, what would be the way to go? How would I evaluate such a thing? It is at times like these that the little doll in my pocket becomes very handy. I can't hear her over my fears. I hope she jumps up and down and tells me which to go. I have a strange suspicion that she will tell me to look up, that no divergence exists. That there is only one path, and that path is the Secret Heart of things; not the reality of life, but the dream.

I hope my hands are almost all grown back now. There is so much mystery in what I write, only you could understand it fully. And maybe that is why I write. My rope, you know, around the North star. My bread-crumbs along the forest floor. You are the only one who knows the truth, the real truth. Please don't forget me.

The Secret Heart of Things

2010-08-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

Every once and a while, I catch up with myself. It takes an awful lot of running, though.

In my mind right now there is the heat of Ojai, pale green shelves with bleached out deer skulls and sea-shells. My heart, I think it's half open, maybe broken, something is spilling out of it, contents, evidence. My limbs are bags filled with sand that is wet in some parts and dry in others. The sun either shines all day without rest into the night, or never rises at all and leaves me in the dark. I'm starting to get restless again, like I want to fly away from myself.

I told Zanna how I'm feeling and she told me to pray, to pray in my bones. I like the sound of that. It sounds like the South, it sounds like Meaning. I think restlessness is a hunger for meaning. How could I have forgotten everything I came to know? God help me.

"Well, I saw straightaway that the lay was steep
But I fell for you, honey, easy as falling asleep
And that, right there is the course I keep

And no amount of talking
Is going to soften the fall
But, like after the rain
Step out of the overhang, that's all"

- Good Intentions Paving Company, Joanna Newsom

True North

2010-08-09T23:15:00.000-07:00

People are so complex. They are like many layers of something very fine and changing. Like baklava. Is everyone like that, or is it just you and me?

I had so many dreams about it all before this.

If my day was a pinhole photograph taken with one long exposure, would there be something steady and clear in the very middle, like the way the north star anchors the sky?

A moth flew into lunch today. He said, "An omen." His hair is brown and his skin is white with small yellow dots like confetti on his shoulders and a few on the tops of his cheeks and along the bridge of his nose. Something so changing as a man's face. I looked up at the moth and thought. "Transformation," I said, and he agreed.

Reality changes in the blink of an eye. Like a turning gel flash and everything is suddenly red, then suddenly green, then suddenly white again. The things themselves don't change, but their appearance does. This makes everything so complicated. He says there is the Great Reality, the ultimate truth, that we can't really comprehend or interpret because of the limitations of our humanity. But that the closer we come to this, the closer we come to sanity. I will pray, then, to the Great Reality.

In one of the dreams I had there was an ocean with great waves that came with strong surges and fell, invisibly, over us. Each one was poured through me with such intensity and release. In the other there was also a beach, and I a swimmer in its ocean.

People are so complex. Reality is so changing. Find something that can sit in the middle of the exposure and never move. Something to measure against.

Fire in the Skull

2010-07-18T18:24:00.000-07:00

A terrible heat-wave has hit Los Angeles and Culver City has not been spared. My room is like a furnace and I am baked in the center of it on my bed, my great boat of books and pillows. I am likely to catch fire and everything will go up in a burning inferno and nothing will be left of me.

I guess there is evidence of my life extending beyond my body and these four walls, evidence laced in memories rooted in others. Others. God grant me a cool breeze and the ability to get out of here.

hot ashes

2010-07-15T00:22:00.000-07:00

Displace:

to remove from a position, office, or dignity.

Obsolete . to rid oneself of

Mater

2010-07-13T23:19:00.000-07:00

I am alive again.
Some great sage burns candles for me in a far off bathroom alter; marble and gold and white, white candle wax. My mother's tiny white feet with knees bent over feather pillows books in piles and reading glasses on. Hot tea everywhere and Dakini dancing on all four walls. Rescued me in the infinite blackness. Just one thread to pull through the needle, the tight weave, the labyrinthine cave. A Mother-light a Moon-shadow, a mighty space, a voice uttering in the dark by means of thought. Hundreds of prayers whispered in the humid night air.

thank you thank you thank you thank you.

A little nourishment for your belly a little beans for your bowl of white rice. Some sunshine in your spirit and last but not least, at the bottom of the box - what was it, Mama? Hope. A little bit of Hope, too.

and one tiny rose to remind you not to fall asleep -- for too long, my pretty.

inner space

2010-07-08T02:00:00.000-07:00

I took a bath so hot, steam rose from my hand in the air like smoke. My skin is rosy pink, every inch of me is warm. I feel no pain. I am swimming. Inside myself.

I wrote this a few days ago.

Pain feels like death.
But pain is not death. Pain is life. Pain is reality so vivid it becomes unbearable. Once I was in so much pain, I thought I was going to die. I felt consciousness start to slip and, in spite of myself, something within me fought like hell to hold on. Something fierce willed me to stay awake. I would not abandon myself.
It was the will to live. And it was inborn.

Right now, I am warm. I feel no pain. Right now.

braided

2010-06-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

I am at risk of falling asleep.

I put down my branches my berries my candle wax and marched to the drum-beat of someone else just so I could find a steady rhythm. I had to clear away the garden to see what would grow back.

Three things grew back in once voice now. I wish I was integrated. I am exhausted.

beadless wonder

2010-06-23T01:27:00.000-07:00

I bought myself tulips. They are pink and white with long green stems and they perch happily in their glass vase that rests on my wooden table. Three tall candles sit next to them behind three seashells in a perpendicular row. I never returned after I left you last. I broke my promise. That night was too beautiful to write about, as if the writing of it would diminish its power like the telling of a secret. I wanted to keep it snug, wrapped up in the bowl of my mind, of my heart, the memories on file. In fact, I wanted to keep it until it dissipated into nothing but vague fogs of feeling and nostalgia because it was too beautiful to hold perfectly forever.

I have appointments to make, invitations to send, thank you cards to write. I have accountants to call, visits to cancel, and a grandmother to update. I have so many things to do but right now I can't stop thinking about the shooting stars and the Milky Way, and the owl that flew right above our heads. I can't stop thinking about the coyotes who howled when the world agreed nor my long white dress and the way the bright day turned black and swallowed everything whole in glittering starlit mystery. I think there were more stars in that one night than in all my 31 days in Ojai combined. I still don't feel like I'm finished with that work. It seems like I am waiting, still, for the thing to come and find me. Waiting for the egg to hatch or the acorn to open and grow into a tree. I feel like something is gestating, some dear notion knitting itself inside, one pearl at a time. I wonder if I failed.

Ojai rests obediently on the cliff's edge of my mind. It is suspended like a backdrop, there to remind me of the hills and the green places I have yet to go. To remind me of the magic and the secret questions I found in the pinkness of its mountains. Those places that call to me. What will happen to me if I get swept up into the business of making a life? What will happen to me if I get smothered by the literal and forget to breathe, to dream, and I die wide awake? What will happen to me if I forget? It is possible, to forget, to lose one's way. I have done it many times. I told him today about the time I was 15 and left Canada to return to my father's home in New Mexico. I was worried I'd made a terrible mistake and I clung to my prayers wondering, if I have chosen wrongly, will God send a whale to swallow me up and spit me out on the shore of my destiny? I remember I was sleepless. I am not sure now what I believe about God and whales, but I do know that the choice I made was mine and mine alone and it greatly altered the course of my life. I have reaped the rewards and paid the consequences for it ever since. It's a strange thing to grow up. To see the moments pass and the experiences accumulate. To see myself walk through those things that seemed like they would never end. To see life begin again, sometimes making the same mistakes I've made before.

Part of me wishes to be alone again. The solitude. The singularity of things. The belonging to myself. The walks and the changing of the clocks. The sunsets, the roadrunner, the rattlesnakes. The photographs.

We will see what becomes of me, what I make of the moments. I know for sure that art and writing save me every time. They save me from the losses. Save me from distractions. I wonder if it matters to God what I do or what becomes of me.

If god is art - it matters.

retournee

2010-06-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

My room is damp and feels like when I was a child and would nap and wake up in the moisture of Texas dusk. My skin feels sticky and the fan blows a thin breeze on my brow. Magic is alive and god is afoot.

Last night all my dreams came true. I just didn't know they were my dreams. Dreams feel real and reality is a dream. What is it? A dream within a dream. I feel like I walked inside of a mystery. There is something mystical about Ojai. I can't wait to go back. Every time I am there something unexpected finds me.

I have 80 pictures left to be imported from my show over the weekend. I can't wait to see the photos. I am resting before I have to leave again in half and hour. And then I will be back. And then I will write.

hypothesis

2010-06-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

I woke today as though from a black cloud. Maybe my mother is burning candles on behalf of my soul on some alter a thousand miles to the East. Maybe it's the Vit C packet Ilya gave me that I drank before bed. Or perhaps it is the prayers I mumbled under my breath all night until I fell asleep. What ever did it, I feel like I am back inside of my own eyes looking out onto the world. It's so painful to lose that gentleness of self, that natural trust in the unfolding of things. I'm not sure what took over and possessed me - my fever, my cough, my stress, some demon from my past or a complex triggered without my even knowing it - but it has loosened its grip and I can breath again, despite the pressure of infection in my lungs.

Nature is a curious thing. What causes my perceptions of things? What is the actual reality? I think sometimes that we do not live in reality, but that there is a state that we collectively agree upon as being what's "real" and that's the "real world." But it's not so real, I bet.

Mothe in the Logan 5/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

before bed

2010-05-23T22:46:00.000-07:00

There is a bee trapped in the living room. It is inside of a beautiful honey-comb colored lamp made of mother of pearl and it sounds like a motor or an approaching storm. The lamp shade magnifies the sound like a cave or a seashell.

I wonder if this is a reference to my first days at the center when I said I would swarm low like a drunk bee and collapse on the floor and sleep for an hour or two. I am tired today like I was then. Tired and hot with sun on my face and my shoulders. I have to clean the kitchen floor before I go to bed. That, and finish sorting through the footage for Kevin and call my darling mother. Tonight I am in my home and my eyes feel dry and red and my even my tongue feels raw. But I am home and all is well.

Sometimes I pretend to be just a girl. With just a smile and just a face and a mouth that opens wide and beckons with white teeth and curling lips. But it does no good. Everyone knows. Everyone knows I have a basket of dreams and thoughts that do not belong to this world.

or do they?

Rose and Gold Ojai, CA 4/10 Lucy Madeline

The camera on my iPhone has broken. The shutter won't open. It just sits there and stares at me like a closed eye or a silent mouth and it will not budge, despite my prayers and petitions. So many things in life are like that. So many things.

me temo que

2010-05-18T23:56:00.000-07:00

I have to tell you a secret.
The secret is that I have a Secret. It's small and white and sometimes looks yellow and it has a tiny beak that's also an eye or a mouth or an open hand. Its name is hidden under its eyelids and you have to kill it to find out. You kill a secret by telling it.

There's a strange scent of sulphur in the room at the moment. At least I am writing. But I do wonder where the smell is coming from. It takes a fair bit of distance and little bit of resolution to really get at something. Or at least it takes honesty. The secrets I keep creep out on lined pages kept in red notebooks and eventually they sneak out of my mouth and into the ears of friends, like bowls catching falling fruit or dying birds in flight.

My eyes are heavy again. My head tightening. Tengo miedo.

Tengo miedo.

settled

2010-05-16T15:02:00.000-07:00

Sunday, May 16th is considered the most auspicious day of the year in the Vedic Calendar to start new initiatives, the Day of Lasting Achievements.

Working at last. It's such a beautiful feeling; to be surrendered to something. A pot of pinon roast coffee, final cut totorials and David Lynch behind the scenes. Life is beautiful today. And it is beautiful because of this.

Sealing Plaster - Beato's Studio 4/10 Ojai, CA

My Studio 3/10 Los Angeles, CA

bootless

2010-05-14T16:29:00.000-07:00

Mood changes so rapidly. Exhaustion permeates every moment every movement. I haven't written in days. I fear the worst.

Time is different here. There is no doubt about that. Tasks accumulate in lists that never get looked at, nothing checked off. Words are different. I forget how to say things. I can't find sounds that stand straight up, poised on the end of my tongue. There's nowhere to be but always somewhere to go, something to do. My heart feels like a little tiny bird trapped in a cage with the door wide open. Little tiny bird about to have a heart-attack.
Maybe I'm the canary in the cole mine.
Something like that.

I want to do some body casting. I want to lie down and be cryogenically frozen. I want to go to bed.
I've had too much coffee. I think I'm dying.

I wish I could blame it on L.A. I wish I could blame it on Time and Place. Maybe there is no answer for these things. Everything seemed so much clearer before.

Deer Skull Lucy Madeline Los Angeles, CA 3/20/10

1. Record the sounds I need
2. Edit the video
3. Ask Kevin about the interview footage
4. Relax
5. Email the woman about WOMANHOUSE
6. Be grateful
7. Remember to look at this list

oh, and
8. I will not have anymore coffee today

keeping fast

2010-05-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

I saw a rope by the side of the road. I thought it was a snake. And as I got closer it wasn’t a rope it was a branch and the branch was black and it twisted
and curved
pointing its small head

Towards the sky

I remember

Ojai

I remember the roads and the snakes

And the black sky.

Wednesday

2010-05-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

Mercury is in retrograde again. Yesterday, the steering wheel was so hot, I couldn't touch it.

I miss this place.

How many words does it take to tell a story? And how many hours of sleep do I need so that I can face the day anew?

A lot, said the Cat. A lot.

Shaman

2010-05-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

two pieces

2010-05-03T16:04:00.000-07:00

The writing, the writing. Always in the writing. If there’s anything I got back in Ojai it is my process of writing. That, and color. My all-black wardrobe has been smothered out in bright pinks, whites, and blues like the kind on Topa Topa mountain. And the voice, it has come back like a light that’s been lit inside of my torso, my rib cage, the cavities of my heart, and it shines brightly. It makes a sound and the sound is like the clicking of the keys on my laptop, like my mother always wrote about.

I am back in Los Angeles. The sounds here choke me out they come down on me like a thousand angry birds and drown out the voice, put out the light. I miss Ojai. I miss it. I miss it in my teeth in the length of my hair and the roots of my eyelashes. I miss it in the backs of my legs and the bottoms of my feet. I miss it so bad I am dying. I feel like a sage bundle hung up to dry out. I feel like I got shot in the head.

Estuary Gone 5/1/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

For the past few days I’ve been writing, silently in my mind, over and over, the things to say, the things I was seeing in my last days there. But I couldn’t pull myself away from the land long enough to sit down and write. I finally got footage of the swallows building their nests. And on that very last day, something beautiful found me. A gift from Happy Valley.

I woke up early, took a shower, made some tea, and prepared to leave for the morning. I walked up the long hill to where my sage grows. I had decided to make several bundles before I left as gifts and as tokens of remembrance. I made my way up the hill and saw that the estuary pond, which was full when I arrived, had dried out and left a brilliant green stain against the landscape. As I walked, I looked for a rattlesnake because, as they say, if it happens twice it will happen a third time. I moved carefully and found a patch of cleared ground right at the top of the hill before the path divides into two golden lines that curve down out of sight towards the sage-lined trail. The ground called to me and I lay down and felt my body sink into the dry hard earth beneath me. The sun was bright and the air was warm with a slight breeze. I could hear all the sounds that I love and that have become a part of me. The low drown of the bees on the wildflowers, the robins with their flute-sounding song, the cawing of the crows and the occasional call of a hawk. I could hear the wind and the tall golden grasses blowing; I could hear the earth itself in her moaning, beating, waiting and holding; the sound of life growing, up, and wild and into me. Life that spills and sounds and echoes forever and ever because it will never stop. Life Is. Life simply Is. Even back here in this loud city Life Is and Life Will Be. I have to hold on to that. Life is bigger than I am and goes on beyond me. And I am a part of that sound, that endless Sound of the universe. The song of Time.

Hawk on Road to Besant Hill School 5/2/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

I gathered my sage to make my last few bundles, evidence, captured and wrapped of my time there. Preserving the magic after the ritual has been performed, like shamans painting on cave walls. I had spools and spools of embroidery thread, feathers, turquoise, silver beads, needles, purple and yellow wildflowers, two kinds of sage, and two kinds of lavender scattered out on my work table in front of two laptops, cameras, and my other equipment. All that nature swallows up all that technology. This is how much wildness I need.

Man and Woman 5/2/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

I sat and wrapped and thought how funny it was that I had indeed not seen a rattlesnake on my walk. I considered for the first time that my saying was wrong. I was contemplating how profound this new information was to me when Susan, Kevin’s friend who was running the center while Kevin was away lecturing, came into the studio to see what kind of work I was up to. She told me she had just found a rattlesnake. It was right outside, against the wall of my studio. She asked me if I wanted to come see it. I grabbed my camera and went.

At first we couldn’t find it. Walking behind past the rose bushes to where the kilns are located, we peered into the corner behind a large water heater. “He must have moved, I guess. Or she.” Susan walked closer to get a better look. My heart was beating. My finger on the trigger of my camera. “Oh! There it is, it moved.” I walked closer to where she was pointing and the blackest most beautiful snake was coiled and coiled and coiled with a diamond shaped head resting on top with two slits cut out for eyes. The coil was fat and got thinner as it moved up. Its tail, or bottom half, was stretched out and resting on top of a hose. It was big. I walked closer to get a better shot. It was like my blood turned to ice and fire at the same time. Something very primal happens when a snake like that is so close. So much death and poison, sleeping. So beautiful and so dangerous. Totally wild. There is no reasoning with a rattlesnake.

Susan wanted to see it move. I moved back a few yards and she threw rocks at it. Small pebbles that hit the wall and gently tumbled down. Then I went over to look. I realized the stupidity of this. But something compelled me. The snake had tucked its head away. We went around the other side of the building to come at it from a different angle and I saw that in fact there were two snakes. Two snakes with alternating patterns lying together in the shade. The lighter colored one moved slowly, slowly, up to the other one and put her head right next to his. It was mythic, like DNA or the double snake or yin and yang. The two, always the two. Two horses two snakes two sage sticks. I had to zoom in all the way so it was hard to get a steady shot, but I took some more photos and we left them there. In peace.

So I finally got my rattlesnake picture. It was my going away present from Happy Valley and from Beato. And that reminder of the rattlesnake: take off your sunglasses and pay attention to the path you are walking on.

Everything feels different now. Different but good. It feels good to come home to a life. It is my life and it is a stable life. My survival is not dependant on the emotional and mental stability of any person. I’m not coming home wondering what the mood will be of the person waiting. There are people I love, and I love them. But they do not compose the bedrock upon which I have build my foundation. I am safe and I am secure. So I am happy. I waited and worked so long for something like this. Something real and beautiful. My room with my Indian print curtains and my little doll from Mexico, her hair made out of sunbeams. My Tibetan shawl hanging on the wall behind me, my wooden furniture my metal bed my art my bowls my incense my magic. My life.

I wonder if I am meant to find another rattlesnake to lie in the shade with? I wonder if I am meant to walk this path alone, or if that is even possible? I think my heart’s broken, or no, I’m pretty sure of it. I cried in my sleep last night. A white wild rose with nary a thorn, with her wild red heart in two pieces torn. I’m not sure what broke it or when. I’m not sure why or even what to do about it. I miss my Ojai, my other home, my wilderness my rattlesnakes. But I know I will go back.

Ojai Foundation - Night 4/30/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

The drive home was short and dark. I listened to my music and thought about the last 30 days. I felt manic and hungry for something I didn't know what. But slowly this peace starts to pervade, no matter what. It's a good feeling, a calmness that comes with no explanation.

I’m on my bed again, my great boat, my office, laid out with camera equipment, art supplies, books, and more thread. Two of my sage bundles need mending. Something in me needed mending, too. I think that’s what Happy Valley did. It mended me back up. All the broken out and disjointed pieces. All the adjustments I made to my natural order to fit into the world. I am still raw from the sutures, but I know I’ll be up and well in no time. California feels good, the sunlight. LA is still bright and Culver City still smells like the ocean sometimes.

Kevin says, “Even if you have to leave the real world, and go back to work and life in the city, I know that Happy Valley isn’t quite finished with you yet.”

I hope he’s right.

Art Spirit

2010-05-01T00:11:00.000-07:00

If the Angel deigns to come

it will be because you have

convinced

her, not by tears but by your

humble

resolve to be always beginning;

to be a beginner.

- Rilke

yin and yang

2010-04-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

I have found the perfect tea. It is called Black Sash Tea. Here are the ingredients:

1. Oolong orange blossom.
2. Reishi mushroom.
3. Tibet wild lavender.
4. Holy Basil.
5. Lotus leaf.
6. Organic raspberry leaf.

When I opened my window this morning, this is what I saw. I shot these through the glass.

It is a beautiful day today. And I am on my way to see the River Bottom.

Love always,

Lucy

dead\line

2010-04-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

It is April 30th. I have not written in 4 days.
It's felt like a tourniquet was tied around my tongue.

A few nights ago, I drove back home into the valley after 10pm. The mists were so thick I couldn't see in front of me. I was driving with my brights on. I heard my friend's voice in my head reminding me not to use high-beams in the fog. I turned them off and suddenly a clear path separated itself out for several yards, a few feet below my headlights. I drove home, three yards at a time, until I reached my front door in the diffuse darkness.

I've been talking a lot more about time now to people. Every time I say it out loud I see something I didn't see before. Last night I decided what time is for after all. I decided last night what the purpose of all this is, all this remembering.

I have been haunted by two things all of my life: my memories and my fear of the future.

The future stretched out before me in an invisible timeline that I have carried with me since I was a child. I have an idea in my head of where I'm supposed to be at a certain time in the future. By 15, 16, 17. Time was something to be feared, to erase, to deny, to avoid. Something lorded over me like impending doom. Time was not my friend, I raced against the clock, watching it, hearing it, ticking, ticking. The sound of the clock was like someone banging on my door abre la puetra are you done yet? Are you there yet? Better hurry, better hurry. I hated time and time kept moving like a river that wouldn't flow downstream. I have watched each year as another age passes and another birthday goes, and I miss deadline after deadline after self-imposed deadline.

I have to ask myself now, here in this timeless place, this Happy Valley - where do these deadlines come from, from what sources have I built my timeline, culturally, socially, biologically, familialy?

The admonition of my American culture is to deny time: erase it from your face with surgery, makeup, better lighting, lie about your age, hide it, cover it, conceal it at all costs, do not recognize it. Mourn it and its passing if you must, but most of all ignore it and spend all your energy suppressing it. Dream about living forever, eat raw and never die, drink bluegreen algae, get facelift acupuncture, even meditate the years off your face, off your body. Don't ever "date" yourself by revealing that you've been doing something for 20 years, do not show your experience or the breadth of your life knowledge.
Stop. Time.
And if you can't stop it, pretend that it is not happening.

But Time will not be denied. It so patiently, patiently passes on into the second and final acts until the curtain call. How can I live in peace with such a hostile relationship to the most inevitable and unflinching fact of existence?I always thought that time was the evidence that I am behind my fellows. Time is the marker that proves I will not make it because I have not made it yet. My memories are the way that I relive this truth again and again in my own mind.

In the last 26 days, I have come to a new understanding.

I wrote earlier, Time is the measure of change and exists because we remember. If we did not remember, we would not count, record, take note of the changes in the seasons, the light of the day, the birth and death of others. But why? Why remember when remembering is painful? Why not live in the constant bliss of the present moment with no past and no future, no measuring and no measuring up? No failing and no falling short?

Because: Time exists as memory so that I may benefit from the experiences of those who have gone before me. So that I may pick up where they have left off. Time is a gift to me, it is my gift. Memory is how I re-member the broken pieces of the lives past and pull them together into the fabric of today so that the story goes on. In this way, the object of the game cannot be to succeed, it cannot be to arrive at the right place on the timeline. It has to be to take personal responsibility for each moment I have, to learn from the past in the choices and mistakes of myself and of others to try again a different way, or to keep doing what's working. My faculty for remembrance is a Great Gift to me and to human kind. It is through remembrance that the universe is articulated and expressed. It is good to be older, to grow. To change and develop. It is like a second chance. Without remembrance there can be no creativity. Without remembrance there is only error and inevitable tragedy with no chance of rebirth. No passage. No diatoma. No transcendence.
Without remembrance, there can be no life.

Last night I decided the Future is not something to be feared. My Memories are not something to try to forget. They are the map. And the map leads to freedom. It is cyclical and never ends. It is a spiral that ascends and it is worth it. I will not hide time anymore. I will not fear the sound of the clock or the evidence of my birth and my passing age. Because Time is the point. I won't make a choice or not make a choice based on how much Time it will take or how old I'll be when I finish. This is my response to Beatrice Wood and Annie Besant. And I do it in remembrance of them. Because without them, I would not be here today. Without them, I would not have remembered.

I think I have to make a great change. It's like these winding roads up here on the way into the valley. Those curves so sharp you can't tell if you're turning or turning around. But each one is practice for the next. And then, finally, a real turn comes, one that changes the direction I am headed entirely. I think such a turn is upon me.

"And time, itself, the magic length of god."

careful

2010-04-26T17:46:00.000-07:00

I feel like roadkill.
My hair is full of sticker burs and I'm sunburnt. It feels good. I laid out on the hill and let the sun and the wind bleach everything out of me and make me new again. Heaviness, and fullness.

I have a friend who is full of broken bones. It will take time, but slowly, if undisturbed, they will knit themselves back together again. It is the nature of something that belongs to come back to itself.
All there is left to do is wait.

from Latin, Memor

2010-04-25T16:57:00.000-07:00

Infinite; the measured and the measureless.
Is time infinite, does it exist?

Time measures the movement of matter through space. Whether we are counting it or not, matter moves through space and matter changes. Galaxies collide stars die planets form atmospheres. Time measures change. But what if there is no one there to see the change? To remember: "That was when Orion was born, when Mars died, when Jupiter got a moon. When Earth birthed her oceans." Time exists only where there is a witness. Time exists because we remember.

The swallows are building their nests behind the wire mesh now. It was designed to keep them away, out of human traffic. The swallows don't know this. They only know that somewhere in them, so deep it is imperceptible, is the understanding that this is where they are supposed to build their homes. It is so true to them it is fact unnoticed. They cannot speak it, even if they could speak. They cannot think it. They remember.

My copy of the Nag Hammadi library arrived today.

From Three Forms of First Thought:

"For I shall tell you a mystery of this age and tell you about the forces in it. Birth beckons birth, hour gives birth to hour, day gives birth to day. Months inform the month, time goes around following time. This age was completed in this fashion, and it turned out to be short, as a finger releases a finger and a joint separates from a joint."

This morning when I woke up, there were people around, I could hear them. Moving and speaking, voices. Telephones. Footsteps. I worked late and slept late. It takes so much energy to surrender.
That's the humor of it. And this is my vocabulary today:

Memory:

The length of time over which the recollection of a person extends.

So as to keep alive.

Record:

To take to heart.

To remind.

To bare witness.

Remember:

To bear in mind.

To think of or recall with some kind of feeling, intention.

Recollect:

To collect or gather.

To bring back again.

Light is the means by which matter becomes conceivable, and can be remembered. Collected. Again and again.

Speaking of time: I can't believe the coffee shop closes at 5. What kind of people can live in a world where there's no coffee shop after 5pm?

Not I, said the cat. Not I.

through the looking glass

2010-04-25T13:02:00.001-07:00

midnight

2010-04-25T00:48:00.001-07:00

Tonight I can't get my thoughts straight. They're all mixed around like egg whites.
I put on my blue and white striped espadrilles and my black fur collared sweater and walked outside to talk with the moon.

Lights from the neighboring ranch diffused through the thick mist in the valley like a soft white blanket. The moon is so big and so bright I can see the ground in front of me. No creatures, all clear. And when I turn to look behind, nothing but stars and blackness. There is a chorus of a thousand frogs echoing in the night. I feel better out here. Out here everything feels clear.

It's an unusual night. There are no boogie monsters. Only some noisy rats and dreaming quail. But everything keeps its distance. I am utterly bathed in moonbeams.

I think the important thing to remember is that, ultimately, everything is going to be okay. That is so hard for me to believe. But it is a mistake to think otherwise. I have a very tender heart.

Today I talked with Robert for a long time. Or at least it seemed a long time, anyway. I listened while he talked about life, the various variety of religious and psychedelic experiences, art, art school and love. We talked about what women have to do or give up if they want to have children. That's never actually seemed real to me before and it made me afraid. I want to have children. I won't give up art. Or love. Or would I? I can't believe in the counting anymore. That there's only one equation.

You say that 4+1=5 but so does 3+2. That's more like it.

The owl is right outside my window hooting.

She says, "Everything is going to be alright. Get some sleep, you'll see."

I believe her, I believe you.
please let it be so.

You and Me

2010-04-24T13:38:00.000-07:00

1. Into or in a condition of unity,compactness, coherence.

2. Formed or produced by the uniting of things.

3. Taken or considered

the universe

2010-04-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

I want more. I always want more.

The rose bush outside is covered in buds. I wonder if I will be here when they unfurl.

On the drive home the mountains looked like green dragons.

Another image, another word, another sound. Another day another hour.

inside

2010-04-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

white sage needle thread
1. to pierce or pass into or through.
2. to enter into the interior of.
3. To arrive at the truth of.
penetrate

rainsong

2010-04-21T16:53:00.000-07:00

I drove home today through the mountains. I didn’t want the rain to ever stop. I rolled the windows down and let it fall against my face. The air smells like ground like wet wood like the forest floor. Driving into Los Angeles is a funny thing.

I’m standing now on a balcony in West Hollywood looking out at the streets below. This is the city I live in. It is a grey city filled with ash and sidewalks. But it is also lush and green and mysterious. Last night I had a dream and the dream said, “Pray: Thy will not Mine be done.” I’m looking at you, God. I’m looking at you and I’m handing it all over.

The moon will be half full tonight. Half of its faced shrouded in darkness. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And just because I can’t see you or speak to you doesn’t mean I don’t feel you and hear your voice in my dreams guiding me, telling me what’s next. The moon doesn’t wane or wax it absorbs and reabsorbs into itself, into the night sky that holds it so perfectly above me.

Mobile Upload 4/21/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

I think the worst thing I can do right now is stop. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t take the impulse to take a photograph or write a paragraph as insignificant. Fill every page that calls to you and when it’s time to sleep, sleep then, and don’t wake until it’s time again. I made three pots today. Only two of them came to term. The other, in anger, was aborted. But that one is like the moon. Just because I can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there, that it was never made. It just got reabsorbed back into the potter’s wheel, back into my bucket of slip.

Last night I went out onto the hill just as the sun slipped down over the mountains and out of the valley. The valley is like a bowl of black sky and a sea of stars and I’m at the very bottom with my tiny light and my heart full of prayers. I brought an offering, of myself and of something magic.

I think there is something to this. This ordering of things. I have primitive images dancing in my mind of figurineson cave walls in torchlight. I see the moon in all its phases. I see fire and swallows building nests of clay and beating their wings in the air. I see sage, thread, dirt, rattlesnakes. I see my body on the ground. I see time, moving, passing, stones in a circle. A clock. What is it? I see the ring of robins in the field of wildflowers. I see the students at the school. The pathways. The agony and the surrender. All the pictures I have taken and the time. The time that has passed so slowly so dearly into the walls of space and matter.

The Moon on 4/22/10

Last night I realized there is nowhere to buy espresso after 5pm on a Tuesday. So I drove a few miles out of town to a Starbucks and ordered a tall double mocha. I am sorry to say it did not do the trick. But maybe the dreams I had did. We’ll see.

pipe

2010-04-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

the water has been shut off. in the studio, in the home. there is a leak in the pipe they are still repairing.

i will build a bridge from me to you through meaning. the bridge is like a pipe. here is my vocabulary.

to repair:

to restore or renew by any process of making good.

to remedy, to make good, to make up for.

to make amends for.

amend:

to alter, modify;

to add or subtract from.

leak:

any means of unintended entrance or escape;

an unintended opening through something;

to allow to become known;

to leak out.

hole:

a hollow place in a solid body.

hollow:

hungry, having an empty feeling.

solid:

whole or entire, without separation or division;

without openings or breaks;

having the interior filled up all the way.

interior:

being within;

inside of anything;

internal;

inner;

further toward the center.

something in the center of me is empty, hungry; a place where things can escape, can enter, accidentally. something needs to be changed, to be made good again. i need to go within, further towards the center, to the shadows to the void to the potential of things.

language curves and folds like a rope that carries or hangs and is misunderstood. it binds and gives rescue, it saves me. causing me to cohere, to hold fast. undo these ropes these bonds these tangled webs of hair and matt and cloth and grass. undo the mud undo the turning and the twinning. let me see the fibers as they are, as they grow. right out of the ground. then cause me to cohere again to come together righted. let me understand the message in these things, these twirling strands of meaning. unlock them.

wrap me up in swaddling clothes wrap me up in language let it be like a ship that sails at dawn and anchors down deeply on the right shore my destination. show me the way home.

to pipe: to convey, to carry or bring from one place to another.

how can i carry myself from me to you? these are the questions to be asked.

i am counting on god to interfere.

to count:

to check over one by one

to list or name

to consider or regard

to have worth

to include

misty mountain tops

2010-04-20T12:48:00.000-07:00

today: I am searching for the Tao.

It is raining again today. I wonder if I am really an artist. What is an artist? They think the word originally meant to join or fit together, to bring together. A mender. A recorder. Maybe then I am a documentarian.

I see myself today alone in all this mist not a word, not a voice, not a sound outside of nature. What happens to a person in a place like this?

What happens when you are all alone with yourself and god?

I think I am angry a little bit.

start

2010-04-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

How long does it take to fill a pot with water?

How long does it take to fall in love?

To remember?

To wait

for something great to find you.

how long does it take?

One Sheet

2010-04-17T12:35:00.000-07:00

BODY OF TIME

Spring 2010 – Residency

“I hang on to the statement of scientists that there is no time…Choosing to live in the timeless, I am now at the easiest and happiest time of my life.”

- Beatrice Wood

In her current residency at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, Lucy Madeline will make work that is both inspired by and a response to the intentions and lives of Beatrice Wood and Annie Besant. Leaving all preconceived notions about art, life, and making behind in her Los Angeles studio, she approaches this experience as an out-of-time and place happening – an experiment in receptivity of inspiration from outside sources. So far in her stay at Happy Valley, she is confronted with notions of time. Through a series of personal revelations, she will make work that discusses the relationship to and the recording of the passage of time. Her visceral vocabulary consists of themes of waiting, absorbing, and counting, in the body, in the mind, and in life.

You can follow her chronicle of her experiences in Happy Valley at her blog, which she keeps in the spirit of documentation and preservation of that ever fleeting substance – time.

Lucy Madeline is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in video and sculptural installation, performance, photography, and painting. Her work is characterized by a fundamental search for understanding, redefining the relationship to body, self, sexuality, personal history and transformation. By utilizing form, the passage of time and repetition of ritualistic actions, she connects with archaic imagery and tradition, communicating themes of voyage, separation, and the sacralization of the mundane. She presently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

www.lucysartposts.blogspot.com

www.lucymadeline.com

waiting

2010-04-16T21:56:00.000-07:00

i have nothing to say.

not a thing.

what happens when there's nothing left and everything's gone?

home and time

2010-04-15T16:18:00.000-07:00

Time is the measurement of matter through space.

The earth is a clock. Our bodies are clocks. We are the walking dancing clocks of the universe. Our lives our existence measure our movements through space, space the body of God. We move through the body of God and time is the measure of the length of our movement.

I finished my meditation this morning late. My body is tired and depleted from the drive in and back out again of Los Angeles. Tired from the excitement that gets rooted in my shoulders and down my spine. I overslept and woke on the foot of terrible dreams that filled me with a sense of mild dread as I entered the world again. There is another artist here who is hanging her paintings in the space that I usually do my morning research in, so I moved across the patio out towards the studio to Beato’s house to do my prayer. I walked down past the tree and benches and over to edge of the courtyard. Down below is Annie Besant’s house. I looked at it and imagined what it felt like to live here and have Annie Besant a stone’s throw down the hill. Her beautiful cottage visible and a few steps away past a potted rose and wildflowers growing between flowering thyme. And then to have your dearest and best friend living in the house connected to yours – private and single but not solitary, guardians of each other’s solitude. Krishma Murti near. Otto Heino a short drive away. And all this space in between. So much space above, into the sky and over the mountains, and so much space below, down the swoop of the valley and so much space within.

Besant House 4/12/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

This is what I want most in the world. To live close in a community of other artists and thinkers and to live with meaning. To have so much space. To be in the rhythms of nature and the cosmos but to be in the world at the same time. These people did not retreat from life. They found life in the retreat. They built something here. Something that has outlasted them and provided a home for me. It has spanned past the measure of their lives and still exists for me and for others. I want this. This is what I want. I don’t ever want to leave.

I’m sitting outside looking out over the violet flowers and the tree tops that come up towards the patio and there are green hills that literally roll and spill and fly into green and blue and rock faced mountains with clouds that look like they are coming from outer space, a berth so wide I can’t believe it. I can smell things. I can taste things. I can hear things I can’t usually hear. It has taken some time, but slowly this space has taken hold of me and I am myself again. It’s so hard to measure the loss of self. It’s so necessary in order to get along in the world, especially Los Angeles and Los Angeles is not the world. But it certainly feels that way when you’re in it.

Besant House with Clouds 4/13/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

I don’t know what time it is anymore. Yesterday was the first time I got into my car in five days. I don’t brush my hair. I don’t wear makeup. I walk when it’s time to walk I work when it’s time to work. Work is always. Work finds me in every moment of the day. There is no separation between life and work and god. I have developed a relationship with a roadrunner and there is an owl I have seen twice and heard a few times at night. I found a feather when I needed one. I gather sage. I have seen two rattlesnakes and learned a lesson from them about life and purpose. I have been afraid, of failing, of making work that is not acceptable, I have been totally and utterly lost – the moments of the day becoming tangled like hair filled with wet clay. But all in all, through the waiting and worrying and the passages through time and despair, I’m getting back to the place where I can hear myself again. I see how this is the most important thing and must be guarded at all costs.

Owl 4/13/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

The question I ask and am asked over and over again is: what is the stick by which you measure your life? How do I measure the passage of time and how is it recorded, in my life, on my face, within the shadows and broken crags of my heart, in the dried up or flowing ravines of my soul. Do I measure it in my bank account, in how the numbers grow and dwindle, do I measure it in the aging skin of those around me? How do I count, how do I know what time it is, when it's time to stay, to work, to sleep, to go? What are the clocks that I watch? What sound does their ticking make?

I am going to cut my fiberglass today into small squares like a quilt. Then I will quilt a sphere into a magic clock of flesh and time and space and containment. I will use hot resin that burns and melts and converts the quilted cloth into clear liquid glass and I will paint it with gold dust, woman.

I will sit outside today and read my new book Martha got me for my birthday, a book that is so perfect, so needed, I am sure it will have a profound effect on my work up here. I will eat sprouted garbanzo beans and drink tea and black coffee when my eyes start to fall. I will panic about time and ask someone for help.

I will see how it goes.

Kevin asked me today: are you happy? Yes. Today, I am happy.

a note

2010-04-13T20:00:00.001-07:00

Can't talk - havin a baby. I mean a break through

Topa Topa Clouds 4/13/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

Dear Nina:

2010-04-12T13:54:00.001-07:00

WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES?
Not I, said the Cat.

Studio

2010-04-12T00:44:00.000-07:00

2010-04-11T22:51:00.001-07:00

I'm in the studio working. I walked from the main house with my umbrella carrying books tea and my laptop under my arms. I hear noises comming from Beato's house. Doors opening and shutting.
Kevin says it must be the wind, or spirits. He also says there is no such thing as the supernatural. Only the natural; and it is far more expansive than we can even imagine.
Perhaps it is the wind.

Perhaps.

down in the hypogeum

2010-04-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

"On this day,

I am descending to Kur, into the Netherworld.

If I do not return,

Set up a lament for me by the ruins.

Beat the drum for me

In the assembly places,

And circle the houses of the gods.

Tear at your eyes,

At your mouth and your belly,

Dress yourself in a single garment

Like a beggar."

Mobile Upload 4/11/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

down, down, down she went. through the mud that tore the gold from her ears.

Very, very, very tired. In the clutches of Ereshkigal. Zanna came and fished me out from the Netherworld. Some god got hold of me down there. What is it that they say, about the wisdom of no escape?

It is raining outside. After Zanna hummed me back to life and I had rested and had some hot tea I put on my rubber boots and walked to the studio to get a pile of books. I love it in there. It smells so good. Sage and lavender and incense and jasmine and plaster and water and clay. Old. Smells like Magic.

silence pervades when the wailing ceases.

1. Containment

2. Time

3. Passage

4. Open

5. Descent

6. Absorption

7. Darkness

8. Loam

9. Blood

10. Waiting

Keys, clocks, and time.

length of god

2010-04-09T16:02:00.000-07:00

I am currently fascinated with the passage of time. I just sit here and notice how I don't feel the same way I felt a few moments ago or how I'm now in the future of the past that used to be the present moment and I feel just the same.

I always think the future is going to be different. That I am going to change. But all it is is the passage of time.

Or, like Leanoard Cohen wrote for Buffy Saint Marie to sing: "Flesh itself is magic dancing on a clock, and time itself the magic length of God."

fascinated.

Studio 4/7/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

Red Eye

2010-04-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

The best part of waking up defintely is not Folgers in my Cup. Even when it's "supreme gourmet."

Today I bit the dust, I mean the bullet, and made a pot of coffee. Which I did so I wouldn't bite the dust oddly enough. I prefer pinon roast from New Mexico as seen bellow with my leather moccasin boot. But this will do. This will certainly get me back to work.

to work.
to work work work work work to WORK!

2010-04-08T22:33:00.000-07:00

Topa Topa 4/6/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

I am reading a book called Mysteries of the Past. I am still waiting.

4/4/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

beato

2010-04-07T00:37:00.001-07:00

Today was my birthday.

I walked. I walked down a trail this morning lined on one side with acres of wild flowers growing on rolling soft hills. There were so many bees. I heard them like a groan, like a great low buzz. I thought the sound was in my head. A fly flew by close to my face and it was so big it sounded like a helicopter overhead.

I walked into the field of wildflowers. They came up to my armpits. I thought of Persephone and I waited for the earth to open up and for Hades to come and take me into the underworld. I waked right into a ring of red robins that flew and hopped in concentric circles around me, singing.

Sometimes, if you walk long enough, you can walk something, or someone, right out of you. You can walk yourself clean. My mother says some people are like dry land. And dry land will keep you forever in a way that fertile land never will: with the promise of growth that never comes. Always, with the promise.

Today something broke open inside of me. Wide enough for me to let go. Wide enough to tell the truth, out loud. With no one listening but the robins and the bees and the great big flies. And that is enough.

Vulture 4/6/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

There are so many stars in the sky. And when the sun sets, it burns so bright and so pink it leaves a stain on the horizon forever.

I’m tired. I’m going to see what my dreams have for me tonight. And what tomorrow will bring.

I found something today, something great and something meaningful. I found the truth, I found the answer or maybe the question or the secret. And the secret was silent and could not be spoken so it poured from my eyes and whispered prayers between my lips.

I am going to tell a story.

Birthday Walk 4/6/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

birth

2010-04-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking that there is something I have to do.
There is nothing.

I keep thinking that I'm running out of time.
There is no time.

I keep thinking there is somewhere I have to be.
There is nowhere.

I am already there.

Mobile Upload 4/5/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

Topa Topa

2010-04-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

Great clouds gathered over Topa Topa yesterday. Last night the rains fell out of them like colossal grey buckets emptying onto the land. This morning when I woke up, I could hear the sheets of water falling on the ground and against the windows. The mists came. And the mud. By mid morning all had cleared and bright sun broke everything apart and put it back together again all new and clear. The grey clouds still hang, but now like low lanterns or ships docking in a clear blue sky. It is beautiful here. So beautiful it is impossible. It is impossible for the world to shine this bright. To see this many colors in a field of grass and wild flowers. It begins to change something in my mind. Something drastic. I eat tons of blueberries, blackberries and raspberries and I drink tea and contemplate the impossibility of it all. I am very sleepy most of the time, still, but I fight it. Every once and a while I circle low like a drunk bee until I collapse on the floor by the screen door or the fireplace and I sleep for an hour or so. Yesterday, I woke and crawled into my bed. The sheets were warm like someone had been sleeping in it.

Mobile Upload 4/4/10 Ojai, California Lucy Madeline

I am not afraid here at night. Something holds me through my sleep, something like the sky, or the stars or the night air. All this darkness. It gives me a break.

I keep waiting for the inspiration to come. To sneak up on me and catch me unawares. But sometimes it is the doing that brings the knowing. The doing that unlocks what I already know but which lies deep within my bones in tiny secret sinuses.

Mobile Upload 4/5/10 Ojai, California Lucy Madeline

body

2010-03-26T18:34:00.000-07:00

I wonder
if cave women felt the same way that I do?
And that's why they made the things they did.
Searching for a relationship with their bodies.

thoughts

2010-03-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

so tired
my eyes fall
like a small ball
down a case of stairs.

heart-sad
feels like a dream
wondering around now in wordlessness.

containing and enveloping

2010-03-12T13:58:00.000-08:00

It’s been a struggle for me to talk about my work. There is so much I want to say. That's the problem – I cannot speak it. The things I want to say cannot be spoken. That’s why I make art. To say the unsayable. To open that hidden and interior part of life, that precious nucleus bound so tightly beneath language and thought. Those best thing that cannot be told.

There are images everywhere, experiences, whole worlds within worlds. There’s no way to verbalize all that we know and all that we see. A symbol can say so much more than a word alone. Or what about a symbol with a word? Or what about the symbols embodied in the language itself, its visage and sound? How can I express to you what I see in the world? There is always that distance that Rilke talks about, that un-crossable distance between two people, that distance that enables us to see each other against the blue sky. How can I give myself to you so that you see as I see?

We may never know each other, not really. But if I make my work and it is authentic to me, and you make your work and it is authentic to you, then we may come to each other and know each other as ones who have lived and journeyed, and in that way we become familiar.

With everything that I have become, everything I have seen, the places I have been and things I have realized. All my epiphanies. I am a Universe in and of itself. Come into me and see as I see. That's the universal impulse, I think: to be known. To know. It’s vital and it is intrinsic to human development. I say through visual metaphor what I cannot say through language. Through image and sound and space and body, I come to myself more fully so I can come to the world whole. I know myself so that I may know you.

My art is how I find my way through the day. It’s spontaneous to me, like breath or hunger. I don’t know where it comes from and I seek it every day. It’s how I weave myself through my life, the river I am carried on, to what end I don’t know. It’s inseparable from me and there is no loss like the loss of its voice guiding me. When I don’t hear it, I wait for it. I wait for it breathless and in terror of it never returning to me.