December 18, 2015
It’s the 18th of December, one week before Christmas day. I’ve rehearsed and planned and delivered and engaged, I’ve painted and written and talked and sang and posted, I’ve cooked and sorted and laundered and cared-for and now all of a sudden on the eve of my first day off in what feels like centuries I’m hearing the call that maybe only dogs can hear, that no other human around me seems to acknowledge but nevertheless has got my full attention in this moment…
…. stop.
This feels correct to the moment just previous to the moment I turned off my Christmas engines.
Basil Johnson once said to me, “Simple, and good – that’s all you need.” We’d been talking about art, and what makes it resonate with human culture in the short, medium and long term. As I remember, I’d been talkative and keen then – about socioeconomic indicators of health and growth, artists in the workplace and some utopian ideas around the political value of the arts as a generator of individual authenticity. In 2004 I was Cultural Capitals Coordinator for my town of 22,000, doing my best to imagine and then somehow impossibly manifest a bridge between national and local, micrososm and macrocosm, embracing all issues visible and audible under the sun. I’d been given my rein, was impossibly curious, – a single artist-mom on the eve of a lifelong marriage that would only last a decade. I was provocative, insistent and intense, flailing.
“What kind of painting do you do?”, he asked, in a pause I’d left open.
My answer was long and exhausting. He listened and gave me two words in exchange.
I heard them enough through all that noise in my head to swallow them whole and keep them alive in my belly. They sing to me now.
I love these ladies with all my heart. This was a gig we played at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery six days ago.
The planet, the politics, the migrations of people and animals; conviction, passion, intensity, art and music; friendship, hurt, joy and the passage of time…. our response can be simple. And good.
It’s a choice, to live and work that way.
I choose therefore to fill my tomorrow with simple rituals. Instead of a phone, a computer, a list of errands, I will make a breakfast, a burning, a giving-away, a silence. I will listen to what lies under all the Christmas noise.
This is good. Thanks, Basil. I can feel you smiling.