Pithy Title

Notes from the Underworld

Hi! I’m back. I’m here!

It’s been a long time — three months, to be exact. Exactly? To recap, quickly:

My show at Oranj Studio opened on July 21st — a total success of an evening! I moved to Portland only three years ago and the turnout was a fantastic counterpoint to my oft-whined complaint that I don’t have as much community here as I’d like. And — the weeks following the opening were a much spikier reminder that if that’s true, it’s because I have a persistent tendency to self-isolate when things get thorny. Things got thorny.

How thorny? Dude. Where’s my car?

Maybe I got Covid, or maybe I was just naturally exhausted following the release of an excruciatingly personal, years-long project of grief, introspection and mythological interpretation (you think?!) … my search history repeating some variation of “is it long covid or depression?” for weeks … but regardless of the cause, I hit a heavy wall and couldn’t do anything really at all. Still, I’ve made it through some hardest times by packing up, packing it in and battling forward more or less full-bore... so for awhile (Leo season!) I kept trying to bust through said-wall by continually running into it forehead-first; fighting near-constant migraines, stomach fuckery and constant fatigue with yet more supplements and workouts and travel up and down the entire west coast of this potentially godforsaken country (tbd?). Down I spiraled until my dear, warm Virgo friend Rafa took me to the OHSU ER on a Friday night (don’t recommend) with my heart rate in the low 50s, my brain a-fogged and my body hardly able to move (except for crying). We can call this rock bottom, and it tracks to the Ten of Swords.

we doordash’d Vietnamese and watched the Golden Bachelorette on Rafa’s phone while around the corner someone vomited every 2 minutes from cannabis hyperemesis syndrome and how’s that for a zeitgeist?!

I started feeling better after that. I cut out all the supplements and s l o w l y weaned from a medication that had probably been causing more ill than well. I canceled my workouts for several weeks and began doing s l o w yoga in the morning every day. I found an acupuncturist who specializes in addressing trauma held in the body and I worked with Dante on our emergency/disaster response kit and plan. Mostly I surrendered. I made incremental movements in a new direction. The migraines went away.

Then last week or so the Two of Swords fell out of the deck just as this song was playing — a heavy undertowing remix of “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” that was heavy in my rotation at the time this card was being drawn, in the early spring of 2021 — a deeply undertowing time that also glittered with new, emergent feels. I sat on my bed and experienced one of those crystalline epiphanies that sometimes come and always sound so simple spoken aloud, yet so hard won. I remembered, viscerally, what it’d felt like and why I drew it like this and that it had nothing to do with publishing deals or viewer stats and it needn’t now, either. Each of those 81 images was born of searching the magnitude of the Tarot for a personal truth, a truth of that particular time. The completed deck is a document of process, a story of itself. But for the last several months I’ve been viewing it gingerly as if it were unfinished business, stuck between the needs of a former self (the Designer for whom the final product is Everything and always where the value lies, more being better ad infinitum) and something emergent but heretofore unnamed — privileging the process, continuing to explore.

Trying to reconcile these parts — those contrasting goals and desires — felt like the figure pictured, aiming in opposite directions without quite being able to breathe. Being both near-naked and totally restrained. Having the card pop up again did what the Tarot does best: aided by music and an internal need, it helped connect the dots by plucking some neural threads and making them sing: I didn’t make it for the mass market, I made it while The Designer was quitting her jobs and cutting out clients and if she’d been in charge the Pentacles would all look the same, but they don’t, and that’s probably because over the course of their illustration I was wrestling with all that they stand for: home, career, money, family, body. Those supposedly solid things.

I let go, I let the Designer take the holiday she clearly deserves, I let myself back into the process and the making, the Be Here Now of it all, the mess and moment. I don’t think I need anything more from this than that. And by this I mean, like, life. lol.

I felt there needed to be an image here: thus, a duck. is it a metaphor?

Like any epiphany, this one’s subject to change. It’s like life that way! But I’m here now because after I sent out all those decks and hung all those frames¹ and even after I basked in the warm glow of recognition and heartful delight I just felt… emptied out. I realized that as long as that Prior Self stayed active and insistent on making most of my decisions (Bigger, More, Better) while the emergent aspects just made the most of them, I’d always be striving — and I understood, suddenly but also only after months of integrating the understanding, that the striving was a cultural imperative wrapped in a trauma response bundled with good Lutheran self-sufficiency and packaged in the desire for external affirmation toward a goal that mostly masked a hole… because for the systems that benefit from perpetual dissatisfaction, the hole is the goal. And I’m like… fuck that.

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with striving — it got me here, it helped me put my big girl pants on when I was stripped and bare and it got me to the finish line of a huge undertaking that wow, look at that word there in the end threatened to be a burial if I didn’t shift some things inside of me to accommodate what we might in the parlance of the day call “enoughness.” There’ve been many times in my life I’ve had to strive to survive — financially, emotionally. But if I continue to act as if this is currently true — the I who has the insane luxury of being able to decouple my work from my income, my portfolio from my portfolio (as it were) — I’m just letting the old selves stay in the way of the fledglings.

Fledgling self made …this?

Long story shorter, if you want to buy a deck that’s great. If it works for you to read with, that’s amazing. If you can relate or learn something from my process and interpretation of the cards, that gives me pride and gratitude all at once. Please tell me all about it! I love it. I love you so much.

But once again, for the crowd in the back (of my head): What’s always been important to me about the Tarot is the way it tells story, the stories it opens us to, and I made my own because I desperately life-or-death needed to reimagine my stories and because the process of making it helped me re-inhabit my own life. And if I’ve learned anything over the past three months it’s that that process isn’t over and what I need now is to play with texture and pattern and stretch the text and practice being more open with the people close to me and spend time with my son while he still wants me to and help my body release years of pent-up self-protection that’s veered too far into hard armor and … NOT worry about marketing my shit or being a savvy business ma’am when literally the one thing I have more than enough of now and likely forever is money. Those of you who’ve been reading along all along know that this is far from the first time I've wrangled with value and value and value but I guess this is just to say, as Trevor would, “we’re just getting started…”

Intentions are important, so here they are: every two weeks, an open (free) update about what I’m up to: the art I’m making, the things I’m playing around with (materials, ideas, cats, fire). And every three weeks, or maybe once a month, a longer pay-walled thing wherein I share some longer writing and some more personal shit (like this has been).

INHALATIONS (things that have informed this process):

• Transitions by William Bridges — the very, very condensed but pivotal (to me) thesis being that within any major transition there is an excruciatingly uncomfortable period that he calls The Neutral Zone but that I've come to understand as the underworld, or the inverted Tower — a time of blankness and stasis that the prior selves will fight to end prematurely but that must be allowed to breathe (into) if a true new idea/way of being is to follow at all.

• Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee — An easy, conversational primer/reminder on how capitalism is the only real winner of our constant hustle for success at the expense of our health, joy, relationships, wonder… & it wasn’t always like this, it doesn’t always need to be this way.

• Podcast episode: Gabfest Reads 10% Happier — I’ve talked about John Dickerson here before, one of my more meaningful parasocial relationships … here’s a sweet conversation between he and author Dan Harris about meditation and mindfulness in election season (and always).

• Rice bowls: rice, protein, veg, some kind of pickle. Repeat 4-5x a week with minor variations on the theme. Enjoy every one.

Ok love you bye!

 ♥️!Z

coming soon: pattern swatches and color studies, jewelry making, another rice bowl, things I have yet to imagine

1. In fact I didn’t hang the frames — someone else did! & this is possibly the most meaningful marker of success for someone who puts off hanging art for actual years, after all that. I bask.