I opened the first three days of my artist retreat miserable, struggling not to go back to work, straining against the parts of me that have been dying to come out, the parts that have been neglected all year while I’ve been trying to “make something of myself” as a tattoo artist.
I assumed since I had a month off at the beginning of this working year, March 14-April 16th 2020, when The Great Quarantine of 2020 began, that I would be more capable of tackling those studio projects, I’ve been wanting to handle or discard. I was deeply wrong.
“What you resist, is what persists,” kept coming into my mind and I spent one of my first days off, holding my head and rocking back and forth, trying to cry, but not crying, feeling the storm, but doing nothing with the movement.
I cannot convey to you the level of storm I have lived through this year. I know you have had your own storms, and part of me feels selfish to even think about my storms, nevertheless write about them on my art blog.
I worry, you know? I worry about other young artist reading about my mental health struggles and saying damn- if she’s still suffering, with an actual job in the arts- how am I ever going to get anywhere. Mental health matters, and I have resisted deeply the status of “Crazy Artist.” I have dived deeply into “Fully functioning Elder Millennial with past Childhood Trauma.” This demand on my body, to ignore the healing still to do, by trying to reflect the healing we have done, weakens me.
I need my strength for the road ahead. I need to cultivate my energy. To move it through my body, and allow myself to be as healed as I actually am. To be healed, I have to allow myself to still need healing.
Somedays, it feels like a never ending cycle. “What you resist, persists.” The mantra echoes in my mind, as a I check Social Media for “inspiration”, searching for an easier hit of Serotonin than actually doing the work. Unfortunately, phones hurt my eyes, and I cannot imbibe social media for longer than an hour before feeling drained of everything.
So I began. Beginning is always the key for me.
Miserable amounts of feeling? Dance.
Still miserable amounts of feeling? Drink water, eat food, go for a walk.
The tears won’t pour down, paint.
Still stuck? Drink booze, and fall into the water of grieving.
There I was, at the end of week one, leaking tears over my white girl wine with Steph, while the fire poured flames up the chimney, really just feeling.
I could tell I was too drunk to handle my life, and I felt Marten Pretchal at my side whispering, “Grief and Praise. Grief and Praise. They’re the same thing.” I let myself leak and I told her the truth about how I was feeling, knowing full well how feelings TRUTH isn’t logical truth, and how my Steffi is a deeply logical human.
She tries very hard with me. She rubs her hands together and then rubs my shoulders, she does dishes that are not her own, she feeds the dogs, and she hands me water to wash down the salt of my tears… while I sit there FEELING and pour waterfalls down the slopes of my face.
Eventually, I threw up all the wine- about a full bottle according to Steph. There I was, past midnight, caressing the back of my throat, demanding the purge pour through me, wondering vaguely where my Irish Tolerance had gone, but thinking more of the Averatic concepts of nutrition and bodies.
There is a time for purging. Time to pull up the bile from our throats and cast it out into the filthy ivory throne in the bathroom. Four hours of purging, in my dog-hair covered bathroom, then two hours sleeping senseless, wrapped in the horse blanket I’ve had since I was twelve. This blanket feels the safest to throw up in, or wrap a sick dog in. Since I was both of those things, I was comforted.
I crawled into bed, less miserable for the purging, the hydration and the leaking.
"Our tears," according to Martein Pretchel, "are praise for the spirits.” I have been working within this concept for the last three or four years, convincing, begging, pleading my body to cry, instead of rage. To water the garden of the ancestral souls I have committed to helping heal.
I’m getting there.
The week before my Artist Retreat, I spent at an Air BnB, paid for by Steph’s best friend for her “Dirty Thirty” birthday, with a $100 adventure contribution by us. We were actually in the woods together, hot tub warm, king size bed spoiled, weed and beer abundant. I like Steph’s best friend, and I like the neurotic magic of her besties girlfriend. Their generosity of spirit appeals to my directness, and I like that I can read their emotions. I have learned to trust both of them to be themselves.
The first morning there, I woke up early, wandered out of our apartment, made coffee and ran into the girlfriend in the main house. We joined forces for river bed treasure hunting, and I left them there, on the shores of the river to play a shamanic offerings game.
I went to the water’s edge alone. Stuck between gnarls, and roots and conveluded stick puzzles, lay offerings to gather. I gathered them, river teeth, pitted stone, twisted horns, and built alter, after alter to the river, compelled to keep moving, keep searching, and to curate a cohesive natural arrangement, deeply engaged with the river spirit through the appropriate placement of the rocks and stones cast out onto it’s bed.
Do you remember the boy from Miazaki’s Spirited Away? His small transformed boy form, truly a dragon, trapped and longing for his name and river bed?
This river felt as he must have, in his prime.
The river sang, and I danced to her music- sticks and stones, creating river bed bones, magic born from heartwood washed clean.
My bloodwitch heart demands, "Where the roads cross the water, offerings must be laid.” I slept there, mid afternoon while my friends drove to the ocean, the river in my ears, and I took the time granted me alone, to call my heart back into my body. That deep conversation with my feelings organ, kept me solaced during my first, miserable, self induced week of respite.
I have never been someone who rests well.
I am addicted to the cult of busy-ness. The movement of production. My neurosis are easiest seen in the speed of my hands as I work. I have been teaching myself my entire artistic career and I am learning to listen to my young mentors saying, “Slow down. Work done quickly, doesn’t mean done well."
My oldest-young mentor, Sam Myers, has 10-12 years in the tattoo industry. At 30 years old- he tells me, “What would happen if you worked on one painting for a month?”
I am thinking of him as I whitewash my first oil canvas of my artist retreat, priming it to decay and crack, with my eventual layers of acrylic. I tell myself this is a test painting. Bold strokes, on a piece that will not stand the test of time. It is 48 inches tall, and I spend $300 on a new easel that Cleo, my Belgian Tervuren puppy, will not knock over, and three paint brushes for this specific piece. The shapes begins to take form.
I turn the music on in my studio and I let the light play across my face, a camera running in the background, low lit and hoping for inspiration from the paint strokes.
I think about his question again, on day two with the painting. The subject has taken form. It is a self portrait of myself. It’s day five of my Artist Retreat, and Darcy Neal, my roommate, has allowed me to borrow their headphone, and I can finally safely solace myself against the musical insulation of my 365 days playlist, Finn’s Feelings, and the wet strokes of the paint.
I see myself in this piece, and I have named it already. There is progress. My heart is here, in my chest, beating a melody and I listen to it- transfixed. Headphones, Darcy’s, make their way into the painting, and the shape of myself, wrapped in my tattered, soft cashmere woods sweater begins to gain texture.
I tell myself on, day 3 with my portrait, that I will paint for two hours, and I loose myself in the sizable shading and texturing of my own face. I am surprised at what I have learned in the last six months of not painting. There is progress here and I smile, as the sun weaves her way across the sky- keeping the earth spinning, turning towards the end of another day.
I complete week one of my Artist Retreat more settled- more firm in my beliefs about myself.
I list the things I’ve learned so I can commit them to short term memory:
1. I am at heart a studio artist. When the paint flows, my emotions are less catastrophic, and my heart remembers joy, instead of this intense grief which has been wrapped like plastic fruit netting, around the hole in the middle of my core.
2. I need time in my studio. I need the 20 hours a week I have been denying myself, trying to fit into the patterns of men come before me- even though their boots have never fit.
I run after their beliefs, trying to keep up, stuffing on extra socks, thigh deep in deep back woods snow drifts- on a hunting trip, when I don’t even like to eat turkey.
I long for their approval. That’s the abused, abandoned, discarded daughter in myself.
I place my hand on her cheek bones, pack her a lunch and fill her satchel with lightweight sketching supplies and I send her out into the woods, with a watch, warm socks, boots that fit, and a scarf for her neck. Her dog follows her- a constant companion, who she must manage and delight in.
I speak to her, softly but firmly. "Their shoes are not your path daughter. They are used to their own feet, to the way they walk through the world. You are sensitive. Your are empathetic. You are a dreamer, who wandering through sunlit patches, demanding awe, reverence and stillness. The faeries don’t speak to them."
“They speak to one of them, Momma.” My heart child looks up at me, her face blooming with truth and curiosity.
“Yes, darling, they do. However, the Wizard is your playmate. He is not your constant companion. Find solace in your own company, for he too- will disappoint you. It’s not your fault. You are not meant to wait on others to flow through the woods. Please, heart, don’t wait on anyone for the adventures you hear calling from your soul.”
She nods, takes a drink of water, struggles to get her pants down, pees, and then buttons herself back into her layers. I wave and watch her small, seven year old self disappear into the forest. She is a child, yes, and I have let her out, to wander alone, with a wolf at her side. However, she is a child like Niham is a child. A goddess, an intelligent child goddess in charge of the world, and I would not keep her here, at my side.
This respite, is actually for her.
She works so hard, everyday for me, and I am exhausted from demanding such stringent responsibilities from my heart child. She appreciates the work we do. She desires it, the same way I do- however, when I don’t let her play- she ends up throwing tantrums, and grabbing credit cards, fistfuls of cash from my hidden hordes and spends money we don’t have, on adventures we only go on in her mind.
She must have this time to play, to touch, to feel, to move. I know this. I’ve tattooed it on my body as a reminder. I’ve watched my life either stay together from the glue of her laughter, or watched myself fall apart, a dingy cast into the sea, at the whims of her storms.
She is not just my small internal self. She is not just my artist child. She is not just my abandoned, neglected and abused childhood. She is an actual identity. I have to have a budget for her needs. I have to give her physical time. I have to let her play, in the stories in my head, and I admit- I want to. She enriches my life experiences. She keeps me following my bliss.
I am learning how to rest, and I will keep practicing.
I hear her feet pitter pattering across the moss of the forest. Her laughter booms sunshine across my heart and I lay down, content in her happiness, knowing, yet again- here we are together- always coming home to ourselves.
