Thank you to everyone who responded to my call out today (and in the days leading up to today). Light has been shed on the matter, and "god"willing, we will be able to move forward with selling the house with people we can trust. It's an awesome house. Someone is going to LOVE it.

 

...

 

Today is hard. I'm not going to lie, but I'm immensely grateful for everyone who has come forward, and I'm going to keep putting one foot in front of the other and remember all the people who show up in my life with honest care, respect, and their own vulnerability and let me share what gifts I can with them, too.

 

I still have a couple of days to get my next paintings in the show I want to submit them to, so I can still do that even though today derailed me pretty hard.

 

Courage to Change helped me ground my pain and fear, a walk on the hill nearby with some stellar epic friends in mind, even ones I'm no longer in touch with, looking at wolf and deer tracks, and a few songs from the Spotify DJs.

 

After all this, and letting go of my words and my grounding work, I went down to the local bookstore to pick up a book I've been waiting for, stopped over in the drugstore for some toothpaste, and came home but went next door instead, sat down with one of my new adoptive grandparents for a while. All soul food and salve for a breaking heart. Now I'll be putting on What about Bob? for some comedic relief, then dinner, then a new puzzle, this one of the Ice Age... or just to bed early because I'm going to need a lot of sleep for the next while.

 

It's painful ... dealing with life's biggest challenges and disappointments, but then... a really good friend calls or texts and somehow says those things you needed to hear to remember hope and #biglove because they are real.

 

And s/he reminds you of the unconditional love in the world that is REAL for you, the REAL voices and actions of REAL people who do what they can for us even though they're having a hard time in life, too. I remember, but today is hard, so I'm struggling, but then a friend calls or texts at whatever time is convenient for her (or him), and it's somehow perfect. As I struggle to remember, s/he brings it all home.

 

And she says I helped HER. (crying emoji face) That's not my story to tell, but she affirmed for me, and I know it's true: We are here for each other. That's the #biglove I felt today from everyone, and things are still going to be hard, but... I can rest in this.

 

And I know I'll be able to sleep tonight.

 

I hope you all find yours, too, that #biglove that is REAL even when it doesn't always look like we expect. I hope you find yours, too, if your day is hard today.

 

One foot in front of the other, one day ... sometimes one moment at a time,

 

J

I've switched over from Rushdie to Chang just because I needed a break from the adolescent dreams of the first young men who took the seeds of the future to imagine not what they saw and learn from it but to be kings. I didn't get very far, so I'm not writing it off, but sometimes I need to have another perspective that understands the problems with that dream side-by-side to witness it... because, I do want to hear the whole story.

 

I'm also reminded by Coy Leray that "girls is players, too." And the world needs to remember that gender is only one element of power politics.

 

But still, I don't think the world understands the male/female story we've been living. We're waking up but still so precarious in that waking. So I listen to my world DJs and Chang along with Rushdie.

 

Writers do research when they write novels. We learn from them whether they do or not, but good authors do research in building their worlds and characters. To me, literature and other arts are the balance to "history" and news media, which are Arts themselves, though they've gained the status of truth. Science, too, to an extent.

 

For people interested in understanding how we examine facts to construct knowledge into our worldviews, which justify our wars and beautiful dreams alike, ... I learned from school but no one said it better than a group of Indigenous Canadian voices I can't remember at the moment.

 

#clashingworldviews #askindigenousvoices . I can come back with my own research if/when I can manage that, but I'm not sure if/when that will happen.

 

For the time being, I am making it through the day, finding glimmers of reasons to keep going, eyes open, doing what I can while still taking care of myself. #airlinepictures : put your own mask on first SO THAT we can save our children. #alanonwisdom

 

Take care of yourself as part of the community that takes care of you. Thats one of my ways of being I have to remind myself of daily because sometimes it's all I can do to remember to eat and breathe, and no one person can save the world. It takes all of us.

 

The Porcelain Moon. Thank you, Janie Chang

 

 

Xo,

 

JWK

 

 

Name echo in the chapter before: Camille 👋

I'll have to wait to get an audio version of this, but putting on the list.

Currently listening to this novel on Libby, which connects me to libraries I've belonged to in different cities, so if the Vancoiver Linrary doesn't have a copy, maybe one of my other ones will. I buy books when I can, and otherwise, I love subscriptions like the library, which did not exist a few hundred years ago. I LOVE that we still have these.

 

I'm still waiting for a book I ordered a couple of weeks ago, so in the meantime, I hit up my libraries.

 

I have sadly not yet read much Rushdie, bit there's no time like the present, after 2 days of much needed sleep.

 

 

Enjoy,

 

J

Originally posted 5/2/2023

 

This was me exploring the duty I have as a descendant of colonial settlers, knowing some but not all of my own settler legacy, but very much slipping between fact and fiction, dream and reality. Performance art again.

 

The idea was #BigLove

 

I don't know how well I did here, but I'm going to put it back out there, hoping no one wants to murder me for it. It aims to be reverent and sincere but almost certainly fails in some important regards. It's not a historical document. It's art.

 

Is there a difference? Maybe anthropologists and Indigenous communities can answer that question??? If they can sit in the same room without our First Peoples rightly trying to kill many of them...

 

Homework for the lay(wo)man: The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King

 

xo,

 

Frank

_______

 

 

Dear, Dear Chief Dan George,

 

Chief Seattle,

 

and All my Indigenous Relations,

 

humbly including my local Relations, like the Ltakho Dene, whose territories* I stand on as I speak,

 

Please skip the following note, which is for other newcomers to Turtle Island like myself.

 

 

*These are unceded territories, which for us who don't know yet, means not paid for or treatied or surrendered or traded or otherwise ceded. Most of us don't know this, but pretty much the entire province of BC was never treatied or traded or paid for or otherwise ceded. Do your research if you don't know much about this yet. This is my last direct address to my non-Indigenous Relations here in this post.

 

 

All of you above, I wish to know but also wish to respect by keeping a loving distance while I learn how to love with respect.

 

Trigger Warning: I think the first sentence sort of captures it.

 

Start here =>

 

I am so sorry for what my family, my lineage and forbears did to your family and forbears, and to your land and all the life upon it.

 

I am so sorry.

 

I cannot say much in our defense. All I can say is that in all honesty, we needed those talking wires to figure out how to find God again, how to find each other again. And in our recklessness, we nearly destroyed you and ourselves, but mostly you.

 

And I am so sorry for this. We needed you more than you could bear, more than any one could. And in this, we abused you to save ourselves. We stepped on you to lift ourselves up, and we continue to do so, not necessarily because we don’t value you. We certainly could value you a LOT more because you are the gold, the diamonds in the rough. We did this and continue to do this often because we don’t know how to stop. We don’t know how to save ourselves without climbing on top of those who have the wisdom to save us from drowning… because we are drowning.

 

But more and more of us are starting to learn to swim, and some of us are becoming strong enough to see what we've done and to try, without stepping on you further, to help give you a hand up from where we've shoved you down, to help support your strength rather than tear it down because we still can't stand on our own and don't even know it. The best of us are still doing this.

 

It is the worst sort of ignorance. Shameful.

 

For this, I am deeply sorry.

 

All I can say is that I’m trying to give back what I can of the gifts that were stolen from you and your families for hundreds of years.

 

This is a terrible, seemingly insurmountable task, this reconciliation, and most of us are too afraid underneath whatever form of defense or offense we show, to even touch it. We can't face it because it is a truly horrific shame what our families did to you and yours.

 

But to me what is more important than shame, or perhaps more accurately, what is EQUALLY important to the shame is healing, and as always, I need to let it begin with me.

 

I will work on my swimming and finding the ground of God, the Great Spirit, Yaweh, Zen, Buddha Light, and so on, Mother Earth, beneath me. And I will find a way to share it with you if you want it, and I will wait until I can do this without pulling you down with me.

 

You know this, but I think it's also important for me to say it to you in recognition. It is not your fault, and it is not your responsibility, me and my family being lost in the depths and confusion of 1000s of years of cultural light and darkness, a lot of darkness the last five or so hundred years, probably more. We have been lost and found and lost for a long time. And this freight train of cultural baggage collided into Turtle Island like its own continent, but instead of pushing up some tremendous yet balanced mountains and hills and lakes and rivers and trees and birds and beasts, we climbed on top of you. And our weight and our diseases very nearly destroyed you. It did destroy so very many of you upon Turtle Island. We were like the Woman who fell from the Sky, and Otter and Duck, and the other animals did try to swim deeper and deeper into the ocean to find the ground and bring it back up to put beneath our feet, except we never found that balance, the balance between the twins the Woman bore.

 

Please forgive my certain clumsiness in trying to relate. This story has touched my life in very meaningful ways. I mean absolutely no disrespect. I speak of it with reverence. And it is not MY story, I know. It is how I imagine it might have been if we had made true partnership with you all those years ago. It could have been so beautiful.

 

The death of that beautiful possibility is utterly heart-breaking to me.

 

If it was simple enough to go back in a time machine and correct everything with one cultural moment, I would go back to the Wampum belt, and tell my forbears what it truly meant, what they were agreeing to, what they were instead agreeding to. You gave us democracy, and we gave you our pain and our fear and our inability to relate to others without dominating them, without raping and robbing them and blaming them for the state we put them in to assuage our true guilt and shame, which we were not strong or wise enough to bear.

 

We took and took and took and still continue to take even despite our most loving intentions because we were spiritually bereft. Our God had died.

 

In our hearts we felt betrayed that the atrocities we had ourselves committed were even possible. God couldn't let this happen, could he? He would surely stop us from committing such evils, wouldn't he?

 

Wouldn't he?

 

But he didn't.

 

And we took this to mean that God was dead or never existed at all or had abandoned us.

 

We are a culture of abandoned children at heart. And in our pain we hurt you, with the same pain we had been hurting each other for as long as we could remember, as long as we CAN remember.

 

You know this, but I will say it again. It is not your fault, and it is not your responsibility, me and my family being lost in the depths of 1000s of years of cultural light and darkness, a lot of darkness the last five or so hundred years, probably more. We have been lost and found and lost for a long time without a God we could trust.

 

But in killing our Father God, we also, tragically, killed the Great Mother, the Woman, our source of light, of heaven, our connection to the Great Mystery and the Great Creator, or in our own language, God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or just God.

 

Which is of course neither male nor female but also both or one or the other as they choose or whatever.

 

Not the man in the sky, but the real thing that is no thing and every thing at the same time but also never into infinity and beyond.

 

The Omega. No, that word isn't right either. Sigh. Yep, lost.

 

We were, and still are, spiritual runaways. We are all, many of us, still lost. That is why we culturally appropriate. This is not an excuse, only an answer to the question, Why.

 

We have been desparately trying to find our way back to the "real God" for centuries, some of us for thousands of years, women in particular. But that's another conversation for another day, and I don't know how to have it yet without being grievously offensive... because I don't yet fully understand it. It IS important. I believe it may be at the root of our bereavement for God, actually, but I don't yet understand its spiritual root or its larger spiritual meaning.

 

Either way, we were are are still lost.

 

We became so entranced in our desperate search for the creative mother, thinking we could replace her perhaps? We became so entranced by our own creations, our talking wires and the like that we reveled in them, forgetting to also listen for God in them and tend to the ground beneath our feet, to appreciate those who came before us and still stood with us or, tragically, stood crushed beneath us.

 

We forgot, or actually, I think we did not know how to let others stand beside us and share in this amazing land and its life.

 

We had forgotten that it was not US who created it, and we believed a horrendous lying fear that we had to take it from others to have it for ourselves. We did this to each other much like we did it to you, in our old countries.

 

We learned it there and brought it here, and shared with you what gifts we had, which were actually terrible, terrible burdens and toxins and cancers, and poisons and so on...

 

When we came, we brought our baggage with us, mostly not realizing it, in childlike and naive optimism but also adolescent hubris. We are still only teenagers in our understanding of ourselves in relationship to the world, to you and to our forbears. And to the land and all life upon earth.

 

We are idiots.

 

But we do have love in our hearts, and we are starting to find our own ways back to spirit, in large part due to the gifts of Turtle Island and the buried treasures of our homelands. We are excavating those in a searching and increasingly fearless moral inventory, and some of us are doing the same of what we brought and buried here, too….

 

Sadly, so many of your children....

 

God, forgive us. I cry with all my heart of this, not for you to feel sorry for me but because it was and continues to be so, so painfully wrong. I cry in shame. I am sorry.

 

But I know only God has the power to make this right for us and for you, and so I continue to learn and practice at swimming and finding God beneath me for myself to stand upon and anyone who wishes to stand with me... without climbing on top of me, too.

 

I, too, have been broken in this way. Do not feel sorry for me. That's not what I mean, not at all.

 

I cannot know the pain we have brought you and exchanged for your gifts. What I can know is that it does hurt when someone does this to another person in a single lifetime or through a family's generations long wounds passed down from one generation to the next. And I can try to break the pattern. I can try to let the blame stop with me, the responsibility for 1000s of years of pain stop with me, not by being a hero, but through (yes, through, not by) learning to swim and to find God beneath me.

 

I am still learning how to do this, but it is happening, and I have many people and places and animals and plants and mountains and lakes and rivers and novels and stories and songs to thank for this.

 

Other's lives, other's stories. We need stories outside of ourselves to learn from, in order to find our own, not to replace our own, but to let those other stories lead us closer and closer to our own, and as we get closer to the center of our own unique stories, through the stories of others, we bring the universal gifts from the stories of others with us. We let go of them. We stop consuming them, eating them and thereby destroying and transforming them for our own purposes. We set them free, in a sense, or stop trying to grasp onto them like life preservers, which they legitimately are at times in our lives, when we gain our own strength and begin to touch the ground of our own individual Truths. It is then, I believe, that our truths can become life preservers to others.

 

Stories are great gifts. They are gifts that have blessed me, or who have blessed me, I could say. They are gifts I would like to give in return some way some how.

 

I am still learning how to do this, but it is happening, the ground appearing beneath my feet, I mean.

 

And when I am ready, I will share my gifts with you. When I understand how, I will share them with you.

 

So while I cannot promise that I won't hurt you again in my terrible ignorance, hubris, and adolescent angst and confusion (I'm 43 by the way lol), I can promise you this. I am trying with my whole heart and soul to give the world everything I've got, all the gifts I have been blessed with.

 

I will learn how to find and share the ground beneath me. I will come to know that we are loved.

 

For your culture did not give me much... it and this land, Turtle Island, gave me everything. My life, my heart and soul. This is a fundamental part of my personal Truth, my story. It is not much. It is everything. But I'm telling you right now, you no longer need to live and die without dignity for me if there is anything I can do about it. I will find a way. That is my promise.

 

 

 

So if you will, when ever, if ever, here is my imperfect offering for you to accept or not. I love you and will keep becoming stronger for if ever one day you want to, we can meet in a safe place of true reconciliation, upon a common ground of Truth and the Great Spirit of Love.

 

Yours truly,

 

J

 

 

 

Some Links:

 

Chief Dan George

 

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/the-carillon/local/2021/07/14/column-carillon-flashback-feb-16-1972-chief-dan-george-shares-his-views-of-culture-brotherhood

 

https://www.strongnations.com/gs/show.php?gs=3&gsd=779

 

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/644321.Dan_George

 

Chief Seattle

 

https://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Classroom%20Materials/Reading%20the%20Region/Texts%20by%20and%20about%20Natives/Texts/8.html

 

 

 

 

This is the second thing I posted, performance art, 3/7/22

_______

 

Hello...

 

Testing, one two. Testing...

 

Pffp pffp.

 

"Stop tapping the mic, Larry. It's on."

 

Is it tho?

Originally posted 7/22/2021

This was the first thing I posted on this web host.

I've not been able to go through everything again. I just don't have the capacity, but I still like this weird little poem.

Enjoy,

 

xo,

 

J

 

_______

 

There is a pink flamingo in the dark forest.

 

 

This dark forest that is the center of this deserted island.

 

This deserted island that is warm and sunny and placid.

 

Imagine yourself on a deserted island. What do you see?

 

A pink flamingo at the edge of the dark forest.

 

 

I was going to see if I could watch the new Pete's Dragon, but Netflix doesn't have it, and I already have way too many subscriptions to pay for, soooo The Secret Life of Pets it is. So far so good...

 

xo,

 

J

 

This is a painting in progress that has had me stumped for a few months. I'm looking at Kandinsky's earlier landscape paintings for inspiration and hoping the vision will start rolling again. Painting is not a top-down, painter-is-boss process. It's a negotiation between mind, paintbrush and paint, and canvas. If a painting stops "speaking" to me, I essentially don't know what to do next.

Why Kandinsky? I saw a bunch of his works at the Guggenheim a number of years ago with my sister, and the landscapes in particular resounded, sort of echoed with my own earlier style. I did a couple of small paintings directly inspired by his abstracts. Some of them are all-time favourites of mine.

At this point, I'm trying to dislodge my creative process from the procedural focus of the last couple of years... work learning classical portraiture, impressionist landscape, and just trying to still be able to paint with little to no energy #chronicillness.

So, I'm going back to this artist, loving his earlier works as I want to work more with landscapes but not in the most common aesthetic of a lot of beautiful art today. I hail from Group of Seven and Emily Carr Canadian legacy, and I love the art that continues to build on this tradition, but somehow Kandinsky's work as both abstract and landscape artist is "speaking" to me now.

Hear hear, painting?? 🤔🫶. This one is a commission for a family dining room. I'm waiting for its personality to reveal itself so I can continue. It's sometimes  not easy making these decisions, where to go with a painting next. There are infinite possibilities. Thus, I wait for the canvas to speak back 😉.

#paintinginprogress #juliekareyart

By Celine Song...

 

Who wants to go on an epic, music centered vacation???

 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWVSceA8xRt3a?si=Pz3CEwnbSX6clEkriHSwmw&pi=u-Fs7PUdxWQT-B

 

#BigL

 

 

🫶⛈️🌈

 

Avett Brothers, included. I'm searching for who is playing live around the world and thinking about where "we" might want to go. If we could afford it hahaa.

 

Everlong,

 

J

 

 

I'm still working on this list. #wip

Curated by Shawnee Kish

 

Super jived I found this on Spotify! None of these Indigenous artists were making it through.

 

Thank you, Shawnee Kish 🌟🫶🌈

 

#bringontheflood

 

#idlenomore

 

 

 

#whitegirlpuppyloveeyes 😻