The Shadowbox Memoirs
Chapter 1: Set and Setting; the me who I was before (just before)
It all began when I left the man I loved for a blank canvas.
He couldn’t understand and I was too righteous to admit it, so I blamed it on this and I blamed it on that, but the simple truth was - I wanted to be free.
I was tethered and I needed to be untethered. I needed to follow the wind where it was leading and standing side by side in the same room, he never could feel that breeze beckoning me away from him, and into the dark and the midst.
Well, if untethered was what I wanted, untethered was what I got. I remember my craziest moment of hiding under a bush in Magnuson park counting my heart beats. I was counting my heart beats because I thought I was dying. I can’t remember why I was hiding except for the body-memory of a feeling that it was vitally important to stay out of sight.
Every night around dusk I would fill my lungs to the brink with cannabis smoke, put on my heavy trench coat, and walk into the falling light. My always plan was to get as lost as I possibly could and find my way back home on accidental instinct alone. I walked miles and miles of Seattle streets every night, for years on end.
And then there was blues dancing.
Dancing the blues kept me sane. If you're unfamiliar, it is what it sounds like; an improvised, smooth, and sexy af partner dance, and Seattle hosts a thriving scene. I would slip in after it started and out before it ended and I only ever took a dancer or two to my bed. I didn’t want to make friends. I didn’t want to get involved. I wanted to express and to sweat and to connect with no, absolutely no strings attached. You could dance like long lost lovers without speaking a single word, and walk away when the song ended, never to meet again.
During this time in my life, I hit my lowest low. I had no family, no roots, no money, no resources, no car for crying out loud, no goals, no pursuits and more than my fair share of unfocused, confused, high energy ambition.
I had friends but I kept them at arms length. I was dating a man who, for all his unruliness was truly a kind soul. One night we ate way too many mushrooms, and though he tried his damndest, he did not know how to call me back from where I went. I ended the relationship a week later and sat on the floor of my new aPodment crying, with my face in my hands. And there, on the carpet, I saw a little bug.
“Hello,” I said. And then I saw another one, just one life cycle stage bigger and before I could say “shit” my eyes focused and I saw them; hundreds and hundreds of bed bugs covering the carpets, crawling up the walls and all over my stacks of newly arrived packed boxes.
I stood up, called in a Uhaul and loaded everything I owned except my clothes and four books into the truck and drove it all to the dump. What books did I value highly enough to turn every single page, attention hyper focused on the slightest movement of a bed bug hitch hiker, you ask? Well, Dale Pendell’s Pharmako Poeia trilogy, of course. And, my friend Matthew’s book he published when he was only 19 years old called, Assembly Manifesto - on making art.
And if you’ve made it this far through the entertaining hardships that led me straight to my destiny, I am going to give you a reward. The same reward Matthew gave me all those years ago that I had yet to earn, though earn it I did, and with fucking bells on. He taught me the single most insightful tricks of the prolific artist, that I know. It goes like this;
when you have an idea for something you want to create, don’t tell anyone until after you have executed, at least a first draft. Because if you have an idea and you tell someone and they say, “oh that’s awesome, dude! You should totally do it!” you will get a massive dopamine hit as if you actually did the thing, and then you won’t ever do the thing.
I was to learn in time that it goes on from there. Ideas are alive. They have will and intention, personality and emotions and like the fae, if you look at them straight in the face ~ they will vanish.
This suggestion to quietly cherish the dark and sparkling creatures who come to me, was the beginning of a kind of friendship with “my” creations, that became the inspiriting force allowing me to ever make any art at all, and ultimately, to create into the thousands.
In the Summer of 2012, I traveled to Asheville and encountered an artist who would dramatically inform and transform the course of my life, named Eleanore Nefelibata. I walked into a little shop and saw one of her astrological paintings and the ancient, magickal wonder of it swept into my soul like finding home. I barely understood what I was seeing and yet, I was transfixed; thrilled, possessed. You could order a custom piece of her astrological artwork, but it was way out of my price range, so I eventually walked away with a little slip of paper and a url. I didn’t know it at the time, but that moment pierced an eternal thorn in my heart and by the following Spring, I had begun the exploration of learning how to create StarMaps myself.
