Touch

To stay in touch. To be in touch. To get in touch with. To be touched. On the physical level, as sensation, touch distinguishes the lover from the fighter. We need to be touched one way or the other. Human touch, especially affection, feeds us deep down, through our skin, muscle, blood and bone. Without touch something inside withers.

Then there is the "tuned in" sense of being in touch with something. This is a particular mental state, one of receptivity and connection, and one, I would argue, that is every bit as essential to human well-being and overall health as physical touch. This is a mental state that I have seen very little of these last few months. After the loss of my pal, Lily, I fell into a bit of a depression, in the sense that I have not been able to make things happen. I am not getting things done. I am not taking those precious incremental steps toward the sea and the voyage of a lifetime that awaits me out there. I had, to some degree, lost sight of my aim, and lost touch with the part of me that manifests dreams. I have felt unconnected and vulnerable to negative emotional states. And my peeps are not here to slap me around in that loving way that can get me moving again in some direction or other.

(Penning my first play. Age 22)

I am, thankfully, coming around. Reawakening. Getting in touch with what brought me here. Steve and I have been toying with the problems of living in the woods with Nomadness hours away, and my friends, family, and vibrant community even further. The sense of community that feeds my soul is something I remember, but in which I no longer participate. Having an online community is wonderful, but having a face to face, hugging, laughing, bullshit calling, group of comrades to puzzle over problems with and be in touch with is something all together different.

We've come to a conclusion that while we prepare ourselves and our vessel for the journey we dream of, we have to stay in touch with the day to day pleasures of living. We have to create a community. Steve has his vision of the Flotilla, and I have mine. They overlap in our heads, but to manifest them, we need to touch others in a way that sparks up a firestorm of enthusiasm and forges something none of us, individually, could have envisioned. So the short of it is that we are looking to sell the Camano Island House and purchase something on the water and nearer to my community in Olympia. The logistics of boat installations and the lack of communal excitement can both be alleviated with a move.

(Camano House with 6 Acres For Sale)

It sounds like a huge distraction from our goal of moving onto a boat and voyaging forth, but in fact, it is not. We are in one of those places where we keep bumping into the same obstacles, turning from them for awhile, and later returning to bump again. The boat projects (solar installations, water works, geeky talking-ship nodes of information, comfort inducing cabin alterations, etc.) are getting planned, developed, and discussed, but not installed. Things are moving, but sometimes very slowly.

We both know we can be far more productive, both individually and together, than we currently are. Why? Well, when we talk about the best times of our lives, the most creative, productive, and satisfying, we both return to times when we had a community around us. I had my theatre, and Steve had his geeky interns helping him develop Behemoth (his over-the-top bicycle) and the Microship (the sweet home-built trimaran in the lab that awaits the next adventure). Basically, as I see it, we have lost touch with the energy of community. The thrill of the brainstorm, the all nighters that produce art (and engineering) amidst the sound of laughter, coffee percolating at 3am, huge pots of soup to feed the workers, and that blessed shout of "I got it!"

We need this kind of touch to do our best work. To be our best. We need to be in touch with other minds and in love with the process. When we are in love with our work, our work is always better. So, although it seems crazy, we are probably going to move. And although it will mean that this summer will be another summer of cruising the islands (poor us!), not blue water, world voyaging, I believe it is a step in the right direction. And if being in a community can reawaken the playful, anything is possible, attitude that is requisite to ingenuity, any delay or hassles moving brings, will most certainly be worth it. Perhaps a few more hugs, and few more late night brainstorming sessions with sailors and artists and adventurers will put us back in touch with the parts of ourselves that will "git busy and git 'er done!" One can only hope.

Dramanautical Urges

Steve is eager to get to Anacortes today to have the boat hauled out for some work that includes rust repair around the anchor locker and stern steps, bottom cleaning and paint, and a big tunnel through the bow with an electric motor in it (aka bow thruster). His mind races around on all the winter projects he wants to complete before we go "full time" next year. I, on the other hand, am growing accustomed to this life. I can easily imagine going on with this for another couple of weeks, or a month, maybe a year... Especially now that the Little Cod (little god) is in and oh, soooo cozy! Once we remodel the settee into "the nest" (more on that later) and get the mandatory pillows, artwork, and girly touches, Nomadness is going to be a regular love den in spite her supreme high geekery. Afterall we do plan to live on her for extended voyaging.

With the coming of fall, my pace has slowed and my eagerness to go go go, north north north, has finally calmed. I am meditating more regularly again and creative thoughts float up more frequently. (Hmmm...correlation?) Snippets of scenes on the "stage" of a boat play across my mind: amplified sounds of rigging creaking in the dark, a spotlit acrobat swinging from the top of the mast whispering almost inaudibly to a rapt audience about the plight of the seas, flutes and drums beckoning across a quiet anchorage conjuring a skiff in a gush of bubbles from the bottom of the bay... some mythic sea story is seeking a mind through which it can come into being. Again.

Fall has always been a fruitful time of year for my imagination. Perhaps this stems from those childhood days when autumn signaled the return to school. My siblings and friends mourned the end of wild, dusty summer, while I secretly celebrated the first sign of autumn and the promise of new things to learn and new friends. If I can kindle my imagination now, it may burn through winter and yield some roughly forged story for the future dramanautical productions. The key is not that I need, nor even want, to create a "something" for some future group to execute, but rather that I get in touch with the source of my creativity and exercise it. My muse has been drowsing for a bit too long (a little seasick perhaps); it is time she awaken and blossom again.

For the past week here on Orcas Island, while lazing in bed, or rowing the dinghy round Fawn island, or sitting amongst the work clutter of half finished projects, or while gazing into a fire in the midst of dinner party chatter, the questions of the role of art in my life and in society at large have been haunting me.

Artist, writer, and teacher, Suzi Gablik in dialogue with James Hillman:

Hillman: Now suppose the question doesn’t become what art should do, but rather how do we find that which art should serve? Art is already in service, so we could perhaps change that to which it is in service?

Gablik: So the question is what could art better serve than the things it has been serving, like bourgeois capitalism, throughout our lifetimes?

I am tangled up in this notion of art in service to something. Many artists proclaim that art is for art. Period. Art as aesthetic. As ornament. Decoration. Something to brighten up the den. While I strongly agree we need more beauty in the urban world of waste and decay, and that art should be beautiful (as in the eye of the beholder), I also want art to have be socially relevant at some level. Is it our responsibility as artists to bring light to this dark world, or to reflect back the darkness? Should we represent the way things are or conjure other possibilities? In the past decades discussion of art seems rarely to center on beauty, and when it does it often points toward the impulse to deconstruct beauty. Life is often ugly in our day and age, but we humans need beauty in all its forms, visual, rhythmic, and aural. The earth is fantastically beautiful. To see beauty is to witness the divine.

Again Gablik:

What we have lost is the ability to feel the divine in all things. Institutionalized religion in our lifetimes has once again become a war-making tool. How, then, do we get past our embarrassment about God? Everything in modern society has progressed except our spiritual understanding. We have yet to learn, for instance, that we can't survive without beauty, and that the loss of it is killing us.

If you are a sailor (as I hope many of you are) then you already appreciate visual beauty and the beauty of motion/rhythm. For what is more beautiful than a boat under sail on the rhythmic sea under a vibrant ever-changing sky?

Beauty heals, so I want art that soothes both the artist and the audience. Art that acts on our souls. Not mind numbing entertainment, but spirit raising and awe inspiring. Art as a call to action and to kindness. Art that offers something different and serves something greater. We are all hurting, and we are hurting each other and our environment. Art must stop being "more stuff for sale" that will eventually fill another landfill. It must become a salve for the diseased cultures so many of us are living in. Art can be useful and promising. Art can be a guidepost for the lost, and a seed for the fertile.

How? It is easy to theorize such an art, but how can we produce such art. Gurdjieff referred to Objective Art, art that transcends the personal experience and communicates truth. This is a tall order, for sure. I can't say how to do this but I suspect that ultimately we must live an artful life to produce this art. The experience of living intentionally together-- doing our best, learning, giving to and caring for one another and the environment -- is the raw material, the very food, for the metaphoric excretions we call art. I want to be with folks who turn life into myth and travel a life path paved with choices. Sharing our words, images, and songs with the communities we encounter, will do that magic thing that makes Art a necessity: it will transport experience from one mind to another, from one heart to another, and in the process plant seed for a new way of being. I'm not talking about high brow art; I'm wishing for art that serves something other than ego, capitalism, and individual self. Art that cleans up after itself, and leaves the world a little better.

Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe my ideals are ridiculously out of this world. Maybe I am lost in a fantasy. Or maybe I am on the right track. How? I don't know. For starters I'll write about it, sit with it, and send out this electronic beacon.

Wish oil on wood 2005