Listening to The Flowers

Literally

Click a little Sunday listen

A few days ago I attempted an explanation of a piece I wrote for Khôra, an online arts and literature journal. Now you can listen to the piece, another cut, but you wont see the pretty pictures accompanying the piece, so maybe after your listen if you’re compelled, go to Khôra to see. It’s a beautiful issue and the other writers artists on the team truly blew me away.

I find myself explaining it again and again “It’s an allegory. It’s about all the things happening at once and all the things we are and want and sometimes all the things we are and don’t want. ITS ABOUT BEING LIKE FLOWERS! It’s like real life,” I say to myself and now to you. Again.

Explaining work for artists can be hard. It bends toward philosophy. I am giving an artist’s talk at the end of the week and now I am a state of “awwww shit”.

My friend Alex in New York once said, “you know what saying I really cant stand?”
“What Alex?”
“IT IS WHAT IT IS. I really hate that saying.”
“But it is what it is Alex!”
”I just don’t like it.”

Film still from Poor Things, produced by Film4 Productions, Element Pictures, TSG Entertainment, and Searchlight Pictures

Maybe he doesn’t like it because he thinks nothing is actually what it is, it’s never what it is and thereby we are cutting out any possibility that the thing isn’t what it is, that the thing someone says it is might be another thing entirely.

But I get it…we see things the way we are told to see things, a flower, a war, the planet earth…the way we fall into roles, the way we get stuck, the way we don’t try to unstick, the way we stay in ourselves out of trauma, out of real fear, out of a stuckness, the ways we can’t move out of out own mud. The way we silence ourselves, the way we sometimes have to silence ourselves, the way we can fall so easily into a category of helplessness, accept the language of marketing, think THE MARKET is a real thing.

We ARE the market. But what do we know? We like shiny things. We need to cope with the cacophony, the apple carts. All the IS WHAT IT IZZEZ is why I always want to upset the apple cart.

Sometimes what we do have are small powers. To pull the weeds, to restore our own lands, to make what we want out of our one small life. Not everyone gets this kind of is. So we do it for them. We experiment and shift old language, learn from younger people, learn from older people, listen to the world. All I want is to figure out ways to understand what I don’t, ask for help, find my own blind spots and write and paint into them so I can see beyond whatever it is someday into what it might become.

I get it now Alex. It has not been what it is for sometime now.

From here, we pick out tiny little ragweed seedlings that have situated themselves all over our small spit of New Mexico land and trying to make an “isn’t what it is” out of it, make it beautiful.

Finally…

A neighbor here in my small New Mexico town told me she listened to the piece (above) while she was gardening and was giggling as she plucked Spring weeds, fed her chickens, covered the kale to protect from frost, stressed about the many expenses of the upcoming wedding of her daughter. Another wrote to say, “Zinnia was especially resonant….the images of tattoos above beautiful knees, all those oyster and clam shells are particularly indelible.” Then I went to teach at LDBA yesterday, a class about seeing flowers in a new way, as cohabitants in this world, and painting the parts that live inside you, like a folktale. I heard someone come in and ask if this was the gallery where Deborah Stein’s paintings are. Who, me? And then I talked to someone who had seen the show, hand over her hearts, like she felt it. I looked around to see if there was another Deborah Stein. I’m sometimes not sure who made all that stuff

My Flower workshop yesterday at LDBA in Santa Fe

I don’t know…it’s an incredible thing, like another magic maybe, to create something and have it be seen or heard by even a few people. To feel something resonate between you and another. That connection to other humans feels so human. Like we took an is what is, experimented with it’s DNA, added some secret recipe which could have been disastrous and made it new (see Poor Things, above, for reference). A response of any kind, has become such an unexpected pay off to the work and sweat that goes into making a thing with a language that is all yours.

It feels unexpected, like being a flower at its primiest, but really the flowers are just doing their work along with us animals and the sunlight and the ocean waves and the rivers and rocks and the moon, the weather, the earth. I am a very slow song, a very slow blooming thing. This is what I know. This is the work.

Thanks for being here. And for listening. And if you want to tell me who you are, thank you.

“Invisible Countries” work from the show Vibrant Matter at LDBA in Santa Fe, New Mexico