PREFACE
The giant display blocked my view of the AV guy who would run the technical details of the workshop that I had agreed to facilitate for a local arts organization. The presentation would focus on helping artists to understand the difference between Artist Bios and Artist Statements, and how to go about writing each.
Months before when the executive director had reached out and asked me if I would be interested in running this workshop as a part of an ongoing professional development series, it was really a no-brainer: I’d spent years teaching English 101 to undergraduate students, and, by this time, had been employed in one way or another as a professional writer for nearly two decades. And yet, I knew I was talking to artists, which is to say people that may or may not like writing very much. As a Soul-Based Coach, I know that sometimes language itself isn’t a strong enough tool to move us toward transformation and change. Sometimes we need to involve more than just our minds; we need ideas to inhabit our bodies.
This is what brought me to David Grove’s ideas behind something he called “Clean Space.” An extension of Clean Language, Clean Space begins with the premise that the space around us (and within us) is a potential source of information that, through our seated, sedentary intellectual methods, is often left unexamined.
Instead of leaving space as space–an emptiness that we often fill the need to fill with “stuff” in order to be comfortable–Grove thought that space, too, could be a source of information. This is revelatory: after all, most of us fill empty rooms with furniture, our yards with trees, grass or flowers, or draw the cosmos with stars and planets as if to say: space is something that needs to be filled. In other words, we often read space as emptiness– as in art, what we call “negative space.” However, in “Clean Space”, the process invites participants to orient themselves and their topic of interest and then to move around it in order to see what information exists in front of, behind, or beyond them–in other words, to see information as it exists in specific spaces.
I decided this was what I’d use to help artists gain insights into their relationship with their art. After all, it would engage kinesthetic and visual learners, those who might not otherwise engage in a virtual seminar. The process would enable me to ask them in a meaningful way: What were they hoping to create? Or, what would audiences gain by encountering their work? Why was their work important in the world (and where in the world was their work?)
What drew me to learn more about how to facilitate a Clean Space session rested at the heart of Soul-Based Coaching and David Grove’s work, which was that metaphors are key to our understanding of ourselves, ourselves in the world, and the ideas or states in which we inhabit. Think about it: how do you express an emotion verbally? We are in love or have fallen out of love. We are on top of the world or down in the dumps. These are all, of course, metaphors. When in love, we aren’t really inside or outside of anything. And yet, the way that we articulate that thought uses a preposition that presupposes a kind of spacial relationship between us and love. Clean Space begins with this premise and takes it (literally) one step further: “When you are in love, what kind of in is that in? And where is that in when you are in love?”
Clean Space is also iterative, which means the process repeats, building on itself in a pattern that, David Grove proposed, is predictable. It relies upon a system he called “Metadrivers”—questions that are independent of the content that clients offer up, and yet, that drive a very specific kind of exploration. The first three times you ask a person about something, they offer what their conscious minds can know. The first three responses often follow a pattern of “exclaiming” the information, “reinforcing” what has just been stated, and then “expanding” on that view (a panning out and demonstrating how this belief or idea could also be universally true.)
However, by the fourth iteration of a question, the conscious system has literally run out of ideas. This “wobble” is the gateway into another source of information beneath or beyond the conscious mind. The fifth question is when “everything goes up in smoke.” This is also when participants can get very frustrated– I had one client who, when questioned the fifth time about her creative process, simply wrote: Fuck this shit. Later, she realized that she often gives up on creative projects when she encounters resistance very much like the resistance she encountered in herself during the session.
But in the moment, you could feel the hot anger vibrating around her skin. By the sixth question, however, the uncertainty and struggle all become worth it. The “phonetical” response is like the Phoenix emerging from the ashes. Sometimes this is a new insight, a new perspective, or even something entirely different from what had been offered at the beginning of the exercise. In this way, the participant arrives at new knowledge: something they may have already known, but of which they were not consciously aware.
What is important in all of this, however, is adhering to the Clean Space process, and remaining as non-reactive as possible (regardless of what the client says or does.) The point is to let the client have their own experience with all their own thoughts, ideas, metaphors, and words. Because, quite honestly, how often are we ever left alone with our own thoughts? Most of the time conversations entail us trying to impose our viewpoints on other people. It can be an enlightening experience to truly listen to yourself.
PRE-WORK
Minutes before the workshop would start, I thought I had twenty attendees from around the United States who were pre-registered to attend via Zoom. Facilitating Clean Space via Zoom has its own challenges, but ones I’d worked through by practicing with several other groups and that I felt ready to tackle.
Yet, with less than a minute to go, the universe sent me a gigantic curveball: people began streaming into the gallery’s front doors. We did not have chairs or tables set up and the gallery staff scrambled to locate something to accommodate the handful of local artists who made an impulsive decision to attend the workshop at the last minute. Three were muralists, one was a painter, another woman, well into her seventies, was a poet-turned-portrait artist.
I’d facilitated online and in-person sessions using the Clean Space process, but a hybrid format presented challenges I had not, honestly, prepared for. Could participants use Post-it notes on the gallery walls? I hadn’t asked since I’d been informed everyone would attend remotely via Zoom. How could I track the time, given that people attending remotely would have to figure this out on their own, while those in the gallery space would have the benefit of being in the room with me?
For something billed as “Clean Space” this felt like a hot mess and a total shit show just waiting to happen. But, that, too, is part of the process: circumstance, what the more mystical among us would call the Universe, offers us divine gifts and insights. Often, these “blips” are the “ah-ha” moments when unforeseen challenges turn into bursts of insight.
AND PLACE YOUR TOPIC OF INTEREST
On one post-it note, write or draw your topic of interest.
One simple word looped in my carefree script.
Love.
And what do you know here?
To the participants in the room, I tell them to write or draw something that represents the art for which they want to write a statement. This could be an exhibition. It could be a mural. It could be one piece of art or every piece that they have created. They eagerly do this, excited to articulate the thing that they create.
And then I say, as though it is the most natural thing in the world: And place that where it needs to be.
When no one in the gallery space moves, I only blink into the silence until one of the muralists asks me: You mean– like anywhere?
I nod, but stick to the Clean Space facilitation process and its precise instructions. I repeat, kindly, like an invitation: And place that where it needs to be.
At this, the muralist rises, walks to the gallery’s front glass doors and sticks the post-it at the highest point of the glass and returns to his space. Another muralist bends down, and sticks his post-it note to the floor just in front of his feet. I wait for a moment to allow the Zoom participants I cannot see, and who also cannot see the participants in the gallery, find the space for their creations.
I know not to take it personally that the majority of the in-person participants did not place their post-it notes anywhere. Instead, they sit, unmoving.
EXCLAIM
Definition: what the client can put into words. The response comes from “now.” It gives information about the client’s experience.
Describe the space: And what do you know here?
For no particular reason, when I was thirteen, my mom bought me a beautiful hardcover journal. On the front was an ornate golden sun outlined in golden foil and when you opened the journal’s pages, they were the color of summer sunlight with golden suns on every page. The magic of the journal, though, was if you flipped it over the back cover was equally beautiful: blue and dark, a silver sliver of a moon presided over a starry night. These pages were tinged light blue and not only asked that you enter the journal in the opposite direction, but were written “upside down” as well.
On the side of the journal with the big, bright golden sun, I wrote about my life. My goals- to get straight As in school, to make the varsity cheerleading team, to read more books, to learn a new tumbling pass. These were the thoughts and dreams that occupied my daylight hours, and as close to true “journaling” as I would do in my early life.
On the mysterious moonlight side, however, I kept an ongoing list of what I secretly wanted, but that I did not believe that I could ever have. These wishes formed into a kind of cryptic prose poem longing to be loved, to find my true purpose in life, to not be afraid of things like darkness and loneliness. I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted to write stories about my life. Mostly, though, I wanted to be loved.
Over twenty years later, I look back and marvel not at what I wrote, but at the gift itself. It was the kind of thing my mom did regularly: the almost spiritual devotion she had to beautiful things and beautiful spaces. Easter was never just the gift of a basket with my mom: I’d wake up to a house filled with trails of pastel foil-wrapped chocolates that led me to the eggs we had hard-boiled and stained–always in some new, creative way, sometimes with glitter others with multiple dyes, decals, or drawing on the white eggshell with a clear wax crayon, creating inverse tattoos on the surfaces of our eggs.
Endless delicately foil-wrapped chocolate trails that would eventually diverge to one which would lead to the sacred Easter basket, which was a remarkable work of art. Laced in flowers, and draped in ribbons, this was not just a repository for candy. This basket held gifts like the two-sided journal, like my favorite books by Piers Anthony, or wildflower seeds that I could plant in the garden and watch grow.
These baskets were so beautiful that I never stop thinking about them, not even now that I’m 40. When my partner’s daughter visits us - from the time she is eight until the time she is 13 - I make her my renditions of these baskets, which I think she found very strange, leaving behind the flower seeds, the soft stuffed animals and even the foil wrappers dropped onto the hardwood floor like fallen leaves.
Yet, it is the love I feel like an ache in my heart that I want to explore. The love that has always existed in me, but that I became aware of in the two-sided journal with the sun and the moon, which was a gift in the immaculate Easter baskets made by my mother’s hands. This love is in my heart, facing forward, shining light before me and in me.
Even in placing this object, I begin to cry, because it is fragile like an egg, and yet continues to exist as though it is timeless.
REINFORCE
(a). Definition: The second response confirms number 1 and adds a personal perspective.
(b). Direction: And place yourself where you are in relation to what’s on the Post-it.
I sat at my desk on another day during COVID-times when I attended an online workshop focused on excavating my relationship with money. The facilitator asked a series of questions that led me into the great far-far reaches of the universe beyond the stars where money could not possibly reach and then, slowly, step-by-step, brought me back to our universe, our solar system, our earth, our continent, the city in which I live and my home when she asked us: what is your first memory of money?
I was surprised at how quickly I was transported to a moment when I was twelve and spent several weeks of the summer at my dad’s house. My parents divorced when I was two, so by this time, I didn’t feel much pain from having more than one household. In fact, I really loved it because I believed I got the best of every possible world: time with my mom and her attention to beauty and light. But then, at my dad’s house, his beautiful yard and seemingly endless gardens and tall trees gave me another experience of what existing alongside beauty and life can mean.
The summer I was twelve was a unique one, and a day or so after I’d arrived, my dad spent a solid afternoon teaching me how to create an Excel spreadsheet, because he wanted me to track my hours doing chores around the house and yard, and to submit an invoice to him weekly in order to be paid for my work. Up to that point in my life, I’d never earned or been given an “allowance” in either household, so this concept was new. Yet, I was fascinated by the way that time could become money, and the schemes I developed to do more in less time that inevitably led to disaster have, since, become family legend.
My biggest “fail” was leaving the potted plants on the front porch to water with the green garden hose held in place by a rock while I set the lawn mower on its fastest speed setting (probably around a 7:30 mile pace and I am not joking.) I drowned the potted plants and made the lawn look like it was mowed by a crazy person. Yet, after a stern talking-to, I set myself out to do honest work, and started earning a weekly salary that for twelve-year-old standards, wasn’t bad.
My dad worked for several years as a card dealer in the local casinos because it allowed him to live the life he wanted to lead. Outside of work, he had the freedom to garden, to ski, to play the accordion, to learn Nevada tax law, to read books on local, regional, and world history and to spoil a cat or two, his favorite domestic animals. Because Nevada –for several years–didn’t tax tips, he was also able to retire by the age of 50, and achieved something many people don’t: decades of spending his days doing exactly what he wanted to do, without explanation or worry.
The gambling, though, had a presence in the rec room in the form of a periwinkle-colored antique slot machine that took only nickels. For five cents, you could pull the large silver lever and try your luck that the three spinning dials would align. One day, I noticed that I had a few nickels in my wallet and played them in the old slot. I pulled the heavy old lever, and missed winning “big” by only one symbol (or more than one), so I asked my dad if he could pay me for my chores around the house in only nickels.
That was the summer I learned that I will never be a gambler, and how expecting a different result from the same action is the weakest form of hope. I gambled away my summer chore money five cents at a time, pulling that lever on a hot, windless afternoon for at least three hours on end. I imagine those nickels are probably still in that old machine in the rec room, collecting dust.
To be fair, these days I do many things with money, but gambling isn’t one of them. But, I also learned something about love and worth, and how those two ideas are always a tangle in our lives, and that they surface in times of heartache or great need. For me, love was something I was given, and that I couldn’t just give away.
And is there anything else about that?
Only two people in the Clean Space workshop I facilitate in the gallery have placed their Post-it notes in the space around them. I have no idea what my virtual participants are doing. I take a deep breath and continue the exercise anyway, which is one of the most difficult parts of facilitating Clean Space: holding the space for the participants to experience their process in real-time. I know from doing this in the past that I will feel uncomfortable, I will want to rush the time, I will want to end early out of sympathy for everyone, mainly myself. But, I do not do this.
And find a new space.
Silence fills the gallery and not a single one of the participants move. They have started avoiding eye contact with me. I do not (cannot) take any of this personally. One of the muralists, a twenty-something early old guy in a gray hoodie, looks up at me from his chair and asks me to repeat what I’d just said.
And find a new space.
I offer nothing else- no clues as to where this new space might be or what it might look like. I add nothing but the invitations that are a part of the Clean Space process. The muralist who asked the question considers his post-it for a moment, and pushes the metal chair back across the gallery’s concrete floors. The screeching sound is worse than nails on a chalkboard, and fills the awkward silence of the gallery.
I wait for two, three, four, and five minutes until even the memory of that awful screeching has faded. Then we continue to explore.
EXPAND
Definition: The response to the third question generalizes to a more global view, e.g.: that others would feel the same.
Ask: And what do you know here?
Deep into my twenties, I struggled to build a life of my own on the parameters of what I had decided was most important to me. I was a graduate student in a Master of Arts program studying foreign languages and literatures, paid for in part by my obligation to teach a handful of undergraduate courses of introductory French and Core Humanities every semester. I didn’t earn a lot, and so I lived in a studio apartment on the “wrong side of the tracks” just east of campus. I chose this lifestyle and this situation because I thought it would bring me closest to what I wanted most: to become a successful writer.
I realize now that a part of this decision had to do with the distance it created around me. My life was too filled with scholarship and study in much the same way that my studio apartment–and all the places I lived in graduate school–couldn’t really hold anybody else but me.
The interior of the apartment was neat and well-cared for. The couple I rented the space from were proactive landlords and quick to respond to anything I needed. The complex, though, was run down and inhabited by that unique mixture you often find near college campuses: poor students who can’t afford any better, and older people on fixed incomes or who’d had a rough time in life and (often) had no other options.
My mom called the apartment “a total shithole” and I can’t really say she was wrong in that. I did my best to make the interior cozy with a colorful comforter on my bed, a bright area rug, and many unique lamps; but on the day I waited six hours for the cable guy to stop by and connect my internet service, a new definition of lonely surfaced in the white-walled box. This was not a space that would ever, in anyone’s right state of mind, be beautiful. And when the dead pigeons lined up on my stoop every morning from the man who lived in the run-down house opposite my front door (he liked to shoot them from the roof) I decided that it was in fact a lonely, disgusting death-ridden shithole.
Sometime that fall, I came across a “pop up” display of the local humane society featuring cats and kittens up for adoption outside of a shopping center. Among the many balls of adorable fur was a tiny kitten, a Maine Coon, who needed a home. Smaller than the palm of my hand, I wondered why he’d been taken from his mother so young. I wasn’t sure I had the bandwidth for a cat, but I did the impulsive thing and bought him anyway along with a tiny litter box and a small bag of kitten chow.
I put him in my bathroom (which oddly enough took up half of the square footage of the shit hole studio) where, after about a minute, he jumped onto the toilet seat, miscalculated, and fell into the water, head-first. I fished him out, closed the lid, and decided “Jacques Cousteau” would be the name of my new best friend.
And that is what he turned out to be: glued to my side when I was home, he sat on my lap when I wrote essays or articles, studied or graded student work. He slept on my pillow, right next to my head. Throughout my days at home, he “trilled” to me, as though to find me through echo location and I would talk right back to him. (I wouldn’t find out until many years later that he was, effectively, blind.)
My parents fell in love with the fluff-ball who had become my best friend. My mom and my dad bought him gifts–toys that made squeaking noises, feathered “fishing poles”, special bowls with messages of love painted on the white ceramic sides. One day, my dad even brought him a tall cat tree that we assembled together, where Jacques could climb, embodying his tree-climbing cat-ancestors.
The kind of love Jacques offered me was something new: in the shithole studio, all we had was each other. Unconditional is probably putting it mildly, but Jacques was never one to hold back on his affection for me. After I completed two Master of Arts programs and gained admission to a Master of Fine Arts program in the bay area, I took him with me on my commutes over the Sierra Nevada range. He made the trip sitting calmly on my lap and staring out the passenger window where (I thought) he watched the landscape change from forest to foothill to city. For the entire trip, his purr was like the purr that came from the motor of my car: constant and loud.
And then when I moved to the bay area full time, he came with me: by this time a lanky, sizeable cat, he still insisted on sleeping on my pillow even though that meant most of it belonged to him. The wishes I’d written in my childhood journal–to be loved deeply–were more than answered by this Maine Coon cat who trilled, who followed me everywhere. Perhaps I didn’t recognize it as such at the time—cats’ love is wordless, after all– but I don’t know if I’d ever quite experienced a love like that before.
And what do know here?
Jacques lived with me in the shithole studio, saw me through a graduate program in the bay area and then back again to Tahoe, then Reno, as I struggled to figure out my life in my early 30s. He wasn’t bothered by driving; so much of his life had been spent with me in the car, going from temporary home to temporary home; the car was our bridge between shitholes. I never thought a cat would tolerate so much moving. As long as he was with me, though, he didn’t seem to mind it much.
In my mid-thirties, when I finally landed a salaried job writing grant proposals as responses to government-issued RFPs for a national corporation, and I was obligated to travel across the country –well beyond what I could do in my car. The first time I traveled across the country for work, the man who was my partner texted me roughly twenty minutes after I left: “Someone was so upset you’re gone that they pooped all over the bedroom rug. It wasn’t me.”
No matter how long I was gone, when I returned Jacques acted as though I’d never left: sleeping on my pillow, drooling when I pet him, following me around the house, trilling in his cat-language, speaking to me of all I had missed when I’d been away.
When COVID-19 forced us all to stay at home, Jacques once again found himself on my lap when I worked from home on the computer in addition to the nights he slept with me in the bed. By this time, I had a domestic partner who also loved Jacques, who fed him treats, who trained him to bat the pieces of kibble from a high stool, knocking them to the floor, and then later jumping on top of that stool and standing on his hind legs to earn his prize.
Yet, a few months into the lockdown, he texted me that “Jacques is having trouble breathing” and my heart fell. I rushed home to find my little buddy under the dining room table, crouched like an egg and smaller than I remembered him. The following morning, his condition hadn’t gotten any better. I pulled Jacques into the sheets with me, where he lay out long, just like he used to, purring. I decided to take him to the vet to see if there was something we could do to improve his health.
That morning, my partner lifted Jacques in the cat carrier, and placed the carrier in the back seat of my car. We would try to be the first ones that morning to arrive at the vet office not far from the house. As soon as I started the car, I heard a sharp “meow”--not usually Jacques’ style, before I pulled out of the driveway and began the five-minute trip.
I listened to a song about love on repeat; about its interiority, about how love can transform us from the inside-out. When a light turned red and forced me to wait, I felt the overwhelming sense of a goodbye rush through my body, a release like a final embrace, and I half-thought to myself: well now, there he goes. That sweet boy was saying goodbye.
I wasn’t prepared when I lifted the carrier to take him into the vet’s office to find Jacques stiff and unmoving–already gone. I broke down in the parking lot, caving into my partner, crying hard and hot tears into his shirt. The vet assistant, who minutes later came out to take him in for his appointment, turned white when I told her he had died on the way.
All the love from my childhood, all that love from my parents, from me, from Jacques: where does that love go after its vessel has been emptied?
WOBBLE
Definition: The response begins as a support to the first three answers. Then, there is a pause, and the response wobbles and “falls off the graph.” The facilitator may need to wait for 10 seconds or so before the client produces a counter-example.
The gallery space is completely silent by now. I’ve invited participants to move to four spaces, and only one muralist has complied with the invitation by pushing his metal chair back, breaking the deathly silence with the ear-wrenching screech of metal on concrete that echoes across the gallery walls. This is what I knew would happen and what I feared all at once: participants wear expressions that say in no uncertain terms that they are being unwillingly taken to places they did not want to go.
No more, make it stop, their silent faces tell me. And how much I want to cave, to give in, so sigh like a parent who no longer wants to or can administer discipline. To comfort, to do what I think will make the participants like me more.
Yet, I know all of the reasons why I need to keep going–chief among them is I am here to teach them something they did not know they knew. I am not here to make friends. I am here to help artists see their work with new eyes, and to invite others into their inner worlds through authentic descriptions that only come to light with hard work like this–of seeing it from every possible angle. And seeing themselves in this way, too.
I feel their unease and distress in my body. It’s a hard apple core, right around my heart. Every shred of me wants to give up, to call it quits, to end the workshop early. I don’t, though. Instead, I hold the space I came here to hold, and proceed with the next step of facilitating a Clean Space session.
Despite all the eyes, the silence, the stillness, the pain–I say it again: And find another space.
WOBBLE, Continued
Develop attributes of this space: And what do you know here?
During COVID-times it seemed like I was quarantined from everybody, spending my days in my home office which offered a little light since the window was blocked on the outside by a large rosebush that bloomed pink in spring and early summer. I remember that year as one with barely any sunlight, when my hair, normally streaked with blonde, turned dark from my extended time indoors.
For three years, I didn’t see my mom, my dad; and, after I lost Jacques, the house turned a darker hue still, where the empty minutes and hours when I had a cat trilling to me, a cat who sat on my lap, who wanted love, had vanished into thin air.
We buried him wrapped in a red plaid blanket that had been mine as a child. For months, I stared at the flower bed, willing him to scratch himself free from the earth, to show me that we’d made a terrible mistake. And as soon as those thoughts would enter, the others would arrive: the accusations of all the ways I had led him to an early death. I never held him enough, spoiled him enough, let him roam enough. I never loved anything enough.
At a certain point, I told my partner that I had more than eclipsed the record for the number of times I applied my makeup before a Zoom meeting only to click the red “end” button before washing it all away in tears again. For weeks, I held myself, empty-handed and empty-hearted, having no one to turn to but my partner, who later told me it was as though I had shut down completely, becoming something like the living dead.
And what was this space? This space was emptiness. This is what the words in my journals had hoped to shield me from, the reality that life is finite and that nothing, no matter how much we hold onto it or want it or care for it, nothing lasts forever.
It was a Saturday months later when my partner pulled up a listing from the Carson City Humane Society–a smaller town than Reno roughly 20 minutes away–advertising an orange tabby kitten who was up for adoption. There was something in her expression that, despite the depression and the fog of loss, called to me.
I wrote the Carson Humane Society an email and followed it up with a phone call that went to the organization’s voicemail. Heartfallen, I agreed that it was best not to sit at home on this, so we went and stood in the long lines at the grocery store that stretched far out into the parking lot. It was hard not to feel sorry for myself; here I was, standing among masked strangers waiting for the opportunity to buy whatever was left on the shelves only to go back home to an empty house where love’s absence was a deafening silence to cook a meal comprised of other people’s leftovers.
Hours later– or enough time to have been admitted to the store, to have amassed ingredients for a kind of dinner, and to wait in the equally long lines to the checkout stand, my cell which I’d stuffed in my back pocket vibrated against my backside.
“Is this Rebecca?” a woman’s voice asked. “The kitten you’re interested in is still available. The family who wanted her decided not to adopt her. If you can be here in about twenty minutes, I can reserve her for you. Otherwise, I will open her adoption up to the public again.”
I wanted to drop the groceries and run to Carson City. My partner, the more rational one of us both, persuaded me that we had enough time to finish checking out so that we would have dinner that night before making the quick trip to the town directly to our West.
“Please put the kitten on hold. I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I told the woman on the other end of the line.
To his credit, he drove 80 mph in a 70 mph zone, passing one car after another. We arrived at the little building in the middle of a sagebrush field with only a minute to spare. The woman I’d spoken to on the phone led me into a room lined on one side with cages. A loud black and white male kitten clawed his way up the cage’s face to touch my leg, yowling loudly.
She explained he was already spoken for. Then, she opened a cage that I had assumed was empty and reached into the darkness, pulling out a small and scared orange tabby kitten, handing her to me. I wrapped my arms around the carrot-colored swirled coat, softer than a bunny, and felt her body curl into mine, purring ever so softly.
“The other family decided not to keep her because she hissed at them,” the woman said, explaining that the kitten was the last of her litter to remain at the shelter. Even the kitten’s mother had found a home. As I listened to what had happened to this little orange tabby cat, I held her closer to me, our hearts beating in tandem. I couldn’t imagine feeling as though you had no one in the world to love you. Or, I guess I could, but I wasn’t sure–given how guilty I felt over Jacques–that I could love a cat again in the way they deserve to be loved.
“Do you want to adopt the cat?” The Humane Society staff asked me point blank as I sat, petting and holding the kitten that had been introduced into my arms. I hadn’t expected to be asked so quickly to let go of her. “Because if not, I have to call other people who are interested in meeting her to see if it would be a good fit for them,” she said.
I was speechless. I didn’t feel worthy of this kind of love. I didn’t know what to say, but knew I had to say something. I held the kitten close to me, feeling her soft fur, her whisper-purr, and the warmth growing between our bodies. Yet, the words were stuck somewhere beneath my ability to form them. I feared I was going to lose her, and I wouldn’t have the strength to argue for her back. It was the same feeling I had, inserting nickel after nickel into that slot machine at my dad’s house the summer when I was twelve. All my worth–my ability to love– was slipping away and there was nothing I could do to gain it back. Perhaps, in this way, I was worthless. Deficient. Unworthy of love. Or, unable to “buy” it– the luck of the Universe, the three norns, the goddesses of fate, always ruling against me.
That was when my partner stepped in. “I don’t think we are going to be able to leave this kitten here,” he said. “You better grab us a carrier and lead us through the adoption process.” I still do not know the definition of love in all its intricacies, but perhaps I do know its cousin, compassion. That was the day I watched my partner complete the adoption forms, paying all the requisite fees for a cat that would, we both knew, become mine.
Yet, it wasn’t until the woman shuffled the papers into a neat stack and looked at us both with a final perfunctory question that I understood something new about what love actually means. “And, would you like to make an additional donation to the Humane Society?” she asked, already resigned that we would say no.
My partner said nothing but handed her a stack of neatly folded one-hundred-dollar bills. Then, he bent down and picked up the cardboard cat carrier with the orange tabby inside and led us all out the front doors into a new kind of space.
DECONSTRUCTION
Definition. In this response, there may be a psychological reaction- the client may get hot. The client sometimes gets amnesia for what they first said. They don’t have many words.
No one, not even the muralist moves the fifth time I invite the participants in the gallery and the others who have joined me on Zoom to find a new space. I’m not entirely surprised by this. By the fifth time through, this is the iteration of smoke signals, of dipping down beneath what the conscious mind can hold onto and know. This is the emotional reaction, the resistance, the rub. Anger, frustration, despair. I’ve seen it all.
The participants in the room do not even look at me. The expression on my face is still like stone, and might as well be a mask. Beneath the surface, I can feel the tension of the room rising and it takes everything I am not to give into the discomfort that comes from entering a new space.
And what do you know here?
In the early post-pandemic world, I somehow landed a director position at the only accredited art museum in my state. The position is public; and my life, which was largely spent in back offices, typing, has turned outward. I could list specific examples from the many and long shifts–especially at first– but by the time I return home after a full day in the Museum office, I feel there is very little love, or anything really, left in me to offer my orange tabby cat even though I make a point to pet, hold her and feed her treats again and again when I return home.
This is a new space where I struggle to exist as myself. Where I do not feel I can hold the capacity to love, much less to see it or understand it. This is the season in which Michael Heizer finishes the 50-year construction of his historic land art project just West of Area 51 in Garden Valley, hours north of Las Vegas. Titled City, the seemingly endless (more than a mile long) stretch of concrete, raked gravel and undulating installation is the largest contemporary artwork ever built.
The work reflects the space I see when I think of love: empty and vast, and I do not know my place within it. I do my best to ignore this feeling of scarcity or lack until, one day months into my new position, I realize I need to change the definitions I have of what I can do and why. This is the day I receive a text that someone has shot off fireworks at a large work of installation artwork that the Museum manages which also rests outside of Las Vegas and my anxiety about controlling a message around explosives and possible damage to not only the art, but human life, is beyond what I am prepared to bear. This is when I realize that it is something I not only have to bear, but respond to, to change, to make beautiful again.
I look around my home, my life that I have built - these interior spaces. In this case, they cannot offer me wisdom or even comfort. I text a friend, who does not respond.
Into the quiet and dark morning, I release a prayer, humbly asking and where is my next space?
PHONETICAL
Definition: (A play on “Phoenix”). Emergence begins, the phoenix rising from the ashes. Something new–a re-statement–comes from the client and it differs from the first statement, sometimes as its opposite. Clients will often find a new perspective and a new understanding of their topic.
Do we ever know the true nature of love, or even of ourselves? Buddhist monk and spiritual leader Jack Kornfield wrote that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who among us is willing to destroy their own heart?” This question resonates with me in the expansive “now” which is deceptive in the dimensions it presents to us. Seemingly large and overwhelming, “now” is actually a small space, hardly a space at all really. It holds so little, and often at the precise moment we notice that it is there, “now” has vanished, gone.
What is good in my heart, what is bad? Adara, the orange tabby, catches moths and flies in the wide windows before returning to run her body across my calves, claiming me as her own. Here and gone again; I wonder: where has the time gone? Flitted away like nickels in an antique slot machine I once played; the delicately wrapped chocolate foil candies my mom carefully placed so that I would find the creation she made for me–a demonstration of her love.
I no longer know which side of the journal I write: is it the sun or the moon, my light or my shadow, that longs for some unspeakable love I will never know? Friends come and go, but mostly go. The intensity with which I pursued my dreams lost its edges. I never created an Easter basket that any little girl has liked. I’d never set a lawn mower to sprint-speed nor do I believe there’s much waiting for me now, even if I did.
Yet, there are joys. My partner who bought me the orange tabby who loves me. We have a house, built in 1910, in which we live together. A garden we cultivate, which yields us vegetables throughout the spring and summer. A pond filled with koi. A big white fluffy dog. Hummingbirds and swallowtail butterflies that visit. Chickens of our own that cluck. It is not a great love story; but then, could any single story ever capture the grandeur of everyday life?
DARKNESS BEFORE THE LIGHT
1. Developing emergent knowledge: And what do you know here?
I invite participants to move to their sixth and final space. Even the muralist who had been screeching his chair across the gallery’s concrete floor does not move. Their eyes are downcast. The artist in her seventies wears an expression that suggests she is near tears.
There is nothing to do now but to hold the space. It doesn’t matter that the muralist will thank me later and say that the exercise changed his life. It is only now, only this space. The last leg of the journey happens right at dawn, the moment when the darkness turns light and the brilliance of the stars fade as the sun begins to rise.
NOW
The room in which I write my morning pages is decorated in gold and white, accented by rainbows. This was unintentional, especially at first; I was drawn to white simply because it reflected light, adding to the sunlight that filters through the big, wide windows. I am drawn to gold because of the phrase “golden light” I hear from many clients when they describe to me the attributes of their happiness. The rest, I suppose, I am drawn to simply because I associate rainbows with happiness: the character Rainbow Bright from my childhood Saturday morning cartoons, the symbol of the coming or recently departed rain. And then there is the simple truth: that if you buy something rainbow, it tends to go simultaneously with both everything and nothing you own.
I am writing the morning pages when I hear baby chicks from the neighbor’s chicken in the flower bed beneath my window. As the thought forms that I am thankful for them, a hawk swoops down diagonally and I hear the cries of panic from the mother hen. I rush to the front door and onto the front landing to find momma and her flock hiding in the lilac to my left. Then, I notice - one of the babies has been struck down.
The injured chick cries and convulses in my flower bed before going still. I fetch a dish towel and wrap her small body carefully, placing her in my lap, willing my body warmth to return her to life. She does not stir. For an hour we sit like this together, me and this baby chick, witnessing the world that continues on without us.
The love I have been searching for–that I thought I had lost– surfaces in me as compassion. I stroke her little head a few times before taking the baby to a quiet corner of my garden. I bury her, while offering words of gratitude for the happiness she brought me by rooting around my flowers and her cheery sounds that drifted in through the antique windows. I honor the life that I witnessed come into being, and that passed into that other realm we cannot know.
The experience brings to mind an anecdote I read from one of Jack Kornfield’s books. Love exists eternally in each of us. Its magic is that it is a gift we share–and when we do, it doesn’t diminish. Contrary to physical law, it grows. The story he recounts comes from a book titled Ishi in Two Worlds written by anthropologists Theodora and Lafred Kroeber who befriended the last remaining Yana tribesman of California.
Among all the teaching songs and exquisite knowledge of nature revealed by Ishi to the Kroebers, there was a sacred song that he had been sworn never to teach to anyone outside the tribe. It was the song sung to the dying, used to sing his people back to their families, to their ancestral lands after death. No one else was allowed to know how to go there. Yet, Ishi was alone at the end of his life, the last member of his tribe. It was then that he finally had to teach his last secret to the Kroebers, so they could sing him back to his people. In the end, no matter how isolated or embattled our lives, we need one another as family, we need each other's hearts and songs to help one another find the way.
Love is the light of the dawn, and the golden light we carry. And yet, too, love is our compass oriented by what we hold inside and around us, that can guide us home. We need to listen for it carefully, carried on the wind, on the leaves of the trees, in birdsong, in light, in hope, in each other. We insert a nickel and pull the lever, hoping for the best. And then, when we least expect it, jackpot.
Love is the gift we are given, that we give.