I am Finally Rounding the Corner of Coming into My Own!!

I feel surrounded by it more and more everyday, this coming into one's own. This process of 'something' that is becoming more me that I know I have been building since I was a small child. Building this coming into me since I can remember as a small child, learning to navigate the chaos that surrounded my entire world. Building by navigating and constantly adapting my steps and abilities. Adapting to stay focused regardless of the circumstances, or chaos once forever beyond my control. Building and eventually learning to walk my own path, by every step or misstep, into becoming a young adult. Walking the steps that have led me literally solo for years and years on the path of parenting and art-making when no one, absolutely no one seemed to care to ever notice. When no one ever tried to learn to even care, or come close.

Never-the-less mysteriously, wonderfully, just very lately, positive acknowledgments are slowly finding me! They are true heart-felt acknowledgments reflecting such nurturing and offer unknowingly, such soul-quenching depth of nourishment that I am moved to tears of absolute joy at their coming! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Sweet manna from heaven, the nourishment of love! The nature of unconditional love I have always chosen and always will choose over just making money for its own sake! Not that making money is repudiated for its own sake, by me. It has always been the chaos between choosing love or money that I have ALWAYS rejected.

In the struggle of clarifying these dynamics within; in the face of heroically struggling to band-aid together the ability to pay my own rent, with employment that hasn't quite sent me to work that I can be paid for. In the struggle of possibly continued mistiming more hopeful applications-in-waiting for the opportunity to be called to interview for other employment options, more fitting to my long hand-built skills and abilities. Called to share my experiences, reflecting life-long passions in the arts and culture for pay, I am waiting. Waiting for the seemingly endless bureaucratic sluggishness to roll out arbitrary decision-making that may include not just looking at me seriously, but also more aptly for a constructive, long-ever-due change, actually hire and pay me, as a valuable 'member of the team' this time.

In the face of all of these on-going and overwhelming, (needlessly obstacle-strewn) challenges, I have also discovered that some of my images are currently included on the website, homepage banner of an arts advocacy organization in NYC, called Fractured Atlas! The same organization with which I have my fiscally sponsored art project posted, so as to receive funding enough that I might create more unfettered, full-time for a creative, novel change from the everyday responsibilities like rent, bills, etc!

All of this struggling aside today, I then opened this blog to also find one of the most endearing acknowledgments written yet in the comments section of my art blog! A comment written from someone I really admire a lot and who is in my fb network. A comment from someone who I have not always found a natural for me to communicate with, even as I have committed to myself over and over to win this person over to me so, we might become not just women colleagues and allies in the arts, but also friends!!

*Wow! CM! YOU Wow me today!!

And so, from another resource on my path today, I post acknowledgments in the best ways I know how_ by including the fortuitous words of the 17th Annual U.S. Poet/activist- Laureate, William S. Merwin:

Thanks

by W.S Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is