I've been working on a whole lot of new things and this is why I've seemingly disappeared. New collages are in the works. A revamping of some of my marketing tools. Loading up my Etsy shop as part of an online switchover plan - which includes some other things, soon to be revealed. Man, my thumb hurts. I'm not sure if that's from typing so much. Mostly though I'm in a crunch with this writing challenge I'm the middle of. 40 days to write 40,000 words of a book I'm working on. So far that's been the craziest fun of all. I've been ever so slightly mysterious about my move to L.A. and this book pretty much explains the whole thing. Written much more in the style of my China trip, if you followed that here on my blog. A bit of a departure from my usual misty eyed love poetry blahblahblah. Not that that is blahblahblah - I mean love is the all important thing, but you know what I mean. Or perhaps you might one day know what I mean. 

L.A. is still blowing my mind. Hiking in Topanga yesterday really helped soothe the nerves though and made it all feel real again. Was reminiscent of Santa Fe which I try not to miss but sometimes can't help it. It's mostly the TV that is...wow. Not always in a good way. I was thinking, if aliens were watching us and they saw who represents us on TV, they would think we was some crazy mo-fo's. Ladies with big lips and people getting drunk all the time and getting in trouble, just acting stupid. Oh my gosh. Where have I been all this time? Zoning out, for sure. I'm glad to be here, though. It's really good for me to get plugged in to what's actually happening in the world. I think that as an artist it's my time to re-enter the world and react to something other than the bubble of my own world, my own thoughts. Whoo, it's crazy. Good times. And getting caught up from 7 seven years without real Asian food. The food, the food, the food. 3 full-fledged, fully stocked Asian food markets within a 5 mile radius of where I live. Etc, etc. Plus the ocean. Plus the mountains. Plus catching up (slowly) with all kinds of people I knew when I last lived here. And making some new friends too. But mostly wanting to hide away and write.

So if I disappear for a bit more it's because I'm preparing a whole new batch of something special. Love brew with a little Botox puffy lip effect. (Oh my god, can I just say how that's just...I was telling someone how I don't think I could have a conversation and not be totally STARING at the person's lips. Uh, super sexy and age-defying as they might be. Anyway...)

Love to all,

L

This is a photo from a show called "Marxist Glue" at the Hold Up Gallery in Los Angeles. Marxist Glue, also known as wheatpaste is vegetable starch and water used as an adhesive, and in this context it is used by subculture activists to adhere their renegade messages onto buildings and telephone poles. I love it. 

I have not posted here in a while. Struggling for what to say as I assimilate all that is Los Angeles into my system. What is the message? How to deliver it? Appalled by news as I get caught up from 10 years without TV. Appalled by images of lip surgery and burnt out celebrity DUI arrests and sex changes. How to rise up and tell a story of beauty and love and not have it drowned out before it even hits the air? I don't know. I only know it's important to keep telling it, keep telling it, keep rising up into it, even if in the process it becomes smoke and vapors, we become smoke and vapors.

Caroline Myss has a newish audio book out called Navigating Hope in which she talks about forming "crews" (as in crewing, the sport) to help get through intense times of change and help us in making soul choices. I'm into this. Good to form our own teams and build community around what's important to us. Feels too often like swimming against a raging current to get to what we truly desire, and to even discern what's important. Oh my gosh, what's important? I forgot because I was transfixed by the images of a celebrity having the size of her lips reduced! Anyway. Let's keep rowing. Hopefully not into a future of smoke and vapors but into something solid, something real, something true. Yes, please, let's. 

"Naturally, we are wise to be patient with this process and give ourselves unlimited time. It's as if we've been kicking a spinning wheel all our life and it has its own momentum. It's spinning rapidly, but now finally we're learning how to stop kicking the wheel. We can expect that the wheel is going to keep spinning for some time. It won't just abruptly stop. This is where many of us find ourselves: we've stopped kicking the wheel, we're not always strengthening the habit, but we're in this interesting middle state, somewhere between not always caught and not always able to resist biting the hook. This is called "the spiritual path." In fact, this path is all there is. How we relate moment by moment to what is happening on the spot is all there really is. We give up all hope of fruition and in the process we just keep learning what it means to appreciate being right here."

from Taking the Leap by Pema Chodron

I was making collages yesterday with two kids in the ten year old range. One of the kids was my niece, the other was the daughter of my good friend. There was no hoopla, no ego parade, which is the benefit of art-making with ten year olds I suppose, we each just painted and pasted and arranged with no goal but to sit there in the doing of it. The TV was on, the sky was gray and cold air seeped in through the window behind us.  At one point my friend's other kid, college age, surveyed the chaos of papers and torn up pages of magazines and tiny pots of paint from the doorway. She's a math and science major. She said, "This just does not look like fun."