A Pause and a Purge

A mix of resources for the present moment

Plum Village Zendo, 1990, colored pencil, 6x11”

Over the past several months, as part of my grieving process, I’ve been working with Nicole Steinberg, a lovely, efficient, compassionate, local grief & death doula to help sort through, purge, organize, inventory, and process the accumulated stuff of a 34+ year marriage and an art career. Going through boxes that have traveled, mostly undisturbed, from one move to another, has given me pause. I quickly discovered that much of what I’d been hoarding: diplomas, old research papers, letters from particular friends, and activist art ephemera from 1970s to the present are no longer of any use to me. I will hopefully be sending some of the latter to an archive at NYU, and some of the correspondence from famous people will be sent to places that house their papers, but otherwise, we’ve been happily disposing of things in the dumpster outside my studio building. Thankfully, there are no paparazzi waiting with bated breath to cull through this detritus to carry home artifacts that they might attempt to sell on Ebay.

This exercise in non-attachment is filling me with relief; it seems that grief makes it easier to dismantle the past. I’ve been very curious about the distinct history that these boxes contain and what it says about my evolving values: Why did I feel that particular issues of two newspapers (the Village Voice and the Soho News) highlighting John Lennon’s murder or one of the biggest protests against the Vietnam War needed to be saved? Does anyone want them? What do my teacher’s words on old report cards from elementary school reveal about a persona that was already firmly in place in 4th grade? I’m still not able to let go of my high school diploma and MFA diploma (the college one is missing), so what does that say about me? I suppose they will be good kindling someday.

Last week, in one of the boxes, I discovered the small, smudged sketch of the Plum Village Zendo which I had not laid eyes on for 34 years. I felt compelled to share it here, given my recent post about our time there and the fact there seems to be no photo documentation of that part of our journey in 1990. It may be time to start drawing & painting the visual memories of that deeply influential time.

For those of you who want to explore meditation as a practice, or who, like me, need support in deepening your meditation practice, listening to the latest two episodes (#61 & 62) of “The Way Out is In,” with Jo Confino in dialog with Sister True Dedication (aka Sister TD) and Brother Phap Huu, will give you some great tools. They give some of the best instruction that I’ve ever heard about how to find your way to a sitting/walking practice. With all my years of exposure to meditation (I can’t say “experience,” honestly, since my solitary practice on the cushion is not frequent), I still have an occasional inner voice that says, “am I doing this right?” I learned a lot from listening to them.

I also wanted to share a couple of resources that I find fascinating for those of you who are trying to organize in your neighborhoods and communities. If you’ve been feeling despair about the state of the world and your own community, you might consider figuring out some strategies for creating more local resilience and mutual aid. I found these links on the Deep Adaptation page on Facebook, and plan to dig into them more carefully as part of my research on creative emergent strategies: The Handbook of Handbooks for Decentralised Organising, A TOOLKIT FOR VIRTUAL COMMUNITY BUILDERS, and Network-ing Does Not Equal Network WEAVING.

For those of you who engaged in ongoing activism to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and elsewhere, to increase awareness about the climate emergency, growing fascism, and the backlash against all liberatory movements, I want to thank you for your work. Many of the people I know are navigating tremendous personal challenges, yet they are finding a way to do something, and I also recognize that there are times when many of us feel we have little to offer. May you find ways to resource yourself and direct your energy in solidarity with others. “None of us are alone in any of this.” Michael J. Morris (dancer, activist, astrologer)

Finally, as part of the inventory work in my studio, Nicole helped me get a bunch of old canvases photographed and digitized so that I can share the imagery of decades ago with folks online who might be interested.

Some of you may know that I’ve always been a reluctant painter, but despite my misgivings about the medium (I’m sure I’ve written about this before), it has been one of my sanctuaries when things go awry and one of my go-to refuges between projects.

Now my ambition is to find spaces where these works can be shared so that more people can appreciate them. Several of these paintings were first created when I was working in southern California in the early 1990s. They were created in response to consumerism, ecocide, agribusiness, and conflicts in the Middle East. Despite their age, they have not lost their relevance in this moment.

“Peace Negotiations?” 1991, acrylic paint on canvas, 59”x59”

“Extraction economy” 1990, acrylic on canvas, 70”x59”

“We Have What You Want” first painted in 1991 (and gently revised in 2019) acrylic paint on canvas, 68”x 59”

“Collateral Damage” 1990, acrylic on canvas, 81”x59”

“Season Finale?” 1991 (updated and revised in 2019), acrylic on canvas, 59”x48”

The painting below was created in 1985 when I was a visiting artist at Carleton College in Minnesota. Witnessing the cruel destruction of small family farms by the banking industry in cahoots with agribiz, something that I had only read about before, felt potent and necessary to paint. I wanted to alert more people to this tragedy and its impact on what we put on our tables and into our bodies.

“Another Farm Foreclosure - Minnesota”, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 38”x 47”

Update on my fractured memoir: my next substack post, a riff about social ecology, has been in process for a few weeks, and it feels like it needs to cook for a bit longer.

I am always curious how my posts are landing in your lives, so don’t hesitate to write and share whatever is emerging for you. Blessings for this time of so much muchness.