Make the Work

if I were to go to any of the people that love me who also understand art making and dancing and I were to ask them for some piece of advice, some small bit of crucial wisdom they would all say what *Kristine Eudey said to me at 4:50am this morning. They would say, "make the work." It is a sentence that brings tears to my eyes. Because I have everything I need to make work. everything.


So I read this email she sent me at 4:50am. I read in my bed only 1 hour later and I laid there and felt that paralyzing abyss that I sometimes feel in the morning. The abyss that brings forth the tip of the fear of the world and of life and of the mysteriousness. That deep respect for the proximity of death and for the life that was given without explanation to us. And we hold that life everyday and sometimes we seek answers and explanations, but without fail, the humility of mystery stays with us and so we are humble and beautiful and we must practice acceptance. To be human is to accept the awareness of life without the understanding. So, sometimes, in the morning, when I wake up, I see that and then I turn my attention to... well, normally, to coffee. I get up and I make it like a religion, like an elixir that will help me be and do.


I am aware that most of my writings and work are kind of sad and kind of deep-set in the dark spaces of life. But by no means am I a sad dark person. In fact, it is my own light hand-in-hand with my awareness of our cultural obsession with pretty light things and makes me want to make art about the integrated realness of things. That dark and light are one in the same, both worthy of respect and both here with us and in us. 


*Kristine Eudey (one of the most fascinating photographers based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an artistic colleague I respect and trust deeply) and I were discussing making work and the vastness of what one can do with a day, etc, etc. this morning and there in the sky outside my window, a rainbow extended itself up and over the air beneath it, and a big fluffy orange kitty cat crawled through a hole in the fence, prowling through the wet grass of my backyard, with intention for mischief and discovery.