By the time one has updated, downloaded, found the batteries, checked the Bluetooth settings, updated again, restarted, and then made a much needed coffee – it’s a wonder anyone – me – has time or energy or thought left to say anything at all. Sometimes I think that’s the point. Tire everyone out with meaninglessness – ess -ess – ess – until the dry white noise hum of tedium covers everything with a thin motel style blanket. But – there remains a little voice, somewhere, saying, “no, not yet, still here-come get me please.” So until a new round of strange work demands follows the early alarm tomorrow morning, I’m here. Everything seems very strange right now. Impossible to know whether the unease comes from the events in the world, or is part of a sense of liminality, a threshold.  Strange how one thinks in the middle of the night of potential work requests, stranger still that office work is permitted to wash all aside. Money can’t be the only justification – that’s too easy. Work is an easy excuse because we are permitted to do it – encouraged even. My mother used to say you’d know if you were an artist, with the implication that doubt equaled forget it, go clean your room. This is how women’s voices and lights are dimmed, resting on a methane bed of permission, words from decades before still seismic, even if the original event happened in a darkened room of depression and loss. We all have toxic legacies to uncover and explode. Harder to remember we “are stardust, we are golden”, to find/refind/refine the garden.

I’ve made yet another promise to myself, some sort of yearly reckoning, to put more energy into what matters, regardless of the currency my efforts may generate in the “real” world. We create the real world, and then say that the world created us. Uncanny to comprehend the simple blasphemy in that statement, the rejection of what could be called Ten Commandant Tyranny. We have permission to accept the “real” that we are instructed to believe. Fighting back is revolution. Didn’t Bob Marley say “if you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on earth.” Or close to that. The great prophets tell us to create heaven here. The great frauds ask for our money and tell us our reward, or the part of it they have given us permission to have, is coming soon.

Back here in the US of A, after a trip that wasn’t very long, but compelling enough that all I could do some days was absorb, not reflect, I’ve started to look back at the photographs. Each day of the journey, I scribbled some journal entries, mind wandering through time zones and time. Psychogeographies of streets with histories, memories, and soundings, like depth charges sinking watery thought, loosening, clearing. It will take time to sift through all I uncovered. One moment keeps pecking away at me, like a friendly corvid. Then that moment leads to other thoughts, and heads purposefully in a direction. It’s not exactly drifting, or what student writers in a workshop I took referred to contemptuously as stream of consciousness. You have to be conscious to have a stream. You only need rules to write a sentence. Drifting along, ocean bound, watching where thoughts take you, you might lose sight of the shore. Not all that wander are lost? No, being lost can be a gift. Or more. Much more than that.