A Study In Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle
It started with wanting more light in the fall of 2018. I began to collect mirrors to reflect the teasing sun my garden apartment gets. Then I found dozens of cheap sheets of 8x10 glass, and started reading Carl Jung. I spent a lot of time thinking about my shadow, my nearest neighbor. I talked about it with my friends. I told a man who didn’t love me about it, and he asked if I’d thought about therapy. I told a therapist from Wyoming about it and he asked if I had anywhere to put my shadow, to explore her and let her be free.
I received mirrors as gifts from strangers, and people off of Craigslist. Whenever I told them about what I was doing, to the extent that I understood how to explain myself, they encouraged me to keep going and wanted to see what happened to their discarded glass. An engineer rebuilding his house gave me several 6 foot long by 4 feet wide old windows for free. He even taught me how to score and cut glass, and what drill bits to use, when the time comes.
Mirror Studies became an investigation of the shadow, the unconscious, my perception of myself, and glass. All mirrors are made of glass. And glass is the beginning.
The first piece I made.
“Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid—supercooled or otherwise—nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid—a state somewhere between those two states of matter.”
“Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.”
Salt and paint.
Studio scenes /my tiny living room is a mess, and my roommate is gracious.
“If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.”
Jan 2020
The five love languages describe how you like to give and receive love. They are: quality time, words of affirmation, touch, acts of service, and giving gifts. Giving and receiving are matched up between people and, voilà, hi-dating-etc.
I like the taste these days.
“We’re not entitled to like everything
we eat.”
Sub-idea, dating search by Myers Briggs??
Like a phone booth with a punching bag. Maybe you put in a quarter and the money goes to meditation resources for the public. Meditation cubby?
An older woman told me about how back in her day, they used to wear brooches or pins in certain spots to signal their relationship status. The first definition of swipe isa “sweeping blow or stroke." Wearing a brooch is much more exciting and beautiful. And what are we going to do with all those brooches anyway?
Chances are something already exists that meets your needs, and maybe exceeds them. Clothing is one example of a huge creation of waste. I needed eyeglasses recently, and thought of all the beautiful ones I saw that people couldn’t love because how the hell do you buy glasses online. eBay had an income of $2.265 billion dollars in 2017, I’d say at the very least they could check in on it.
IDKY.
Once, I yawned and an archivist said there should be a "bless you" for a yawn, a solidarity and acknowledgement of our mortality. Samael was the angel of death—giving us the great sleep before the yawn. We’re all going to die. Why not give it a nod here and there. Besides, it seems polite to say something to someone when they make a silly face.
Being sad makes everything harder, especially making money, which is what we’ve chosen to go with for now. Here is a depressing article about how basic income is a mental health issue. I'm sure you know someone who experiences behavioral health issues. Imagine a world that allowed you to be sad, that even supported this.
Like people sponspor people in other countries, or micro loans, this is a way for A Sad (depressed, manic, mixed, psychotic, blue, black dog, etc) to get some resources to help with their time and needs. I don’t think the answer is to rely on the government, but of each other, because we are the ones who know what it is like. Maybe there is a chat app, or a pop up everyone in a while that asks how you’re doing. If you are doing well, then it asks you to give a buck or two. One of the hardest parts about being In It, is time. It is difficult enough to deal with those emotions, and it is another to be poor alongside it. Healing takes time, time takes money (ugh). A few bucks could give someone an afternoon in the sun, or a long bath, or sleeeeeeeep.
You’ve heard of wife beaters. They are called wife beaters, and everyone complains about the name, but what to do? New name: wife eaters. Let’s promote the right thing.
I live in a place where the population will double within 15ish years. My family has lived in this land since before it was America, and before it was New Spain. With the increase in prices of everything, it feels like I will never be able to afford to buy a home in my home, a longstanding dream of this Taurus. The bottom two levels of needs from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are rest, food, water, warmth. The next is shelter and safety. There is freedom in the steady.
Plot twist, the ___insert tribe name here___ American Indians are the owners of the company. This land was taken over and over again. What better way than to return control of it to the people who were here first.
Yours, Maya
-ACIM
“Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.”
short story
She began to tell me a story just as we were finishing lunch. I tried to keep her as long as I could knowing I rarely get to see a woman like her up close. She had someplace to be soon after.
She said a man of the streets and the Other came into the cafe where she worked, "Way back when I was 24." I've been 24, I thought. He was in his 40s and looked like he shaved with a knife. He smoked two hundred cigarettes out on the sidewalk. He kept his bags in a corner. He was polite and lonely.
She and Ruth closed early on that slow Monday night. The thought of sitting down by him was the only noise in her head. She felt obliged, so she did it. She thought about bringing a notebook with her but decided not to. When she told me this story she said she didn’t remember what they talked about in the beginning. “It was one of those ones that are so real you get amnesia because you’re meant to feel it, not think. After a moment of silence he said, 'Tell me something that weighs heavy on your heart.'"
"I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it so much I had no idea what to say,” she said.
“What did you say?” I said.
She complained to him, going on about how no one cares about your pedestrian problems when you’re in your twenties. “I hate this place and I want everything and it feels impossible to start because it seems meaningless before it even begins.” He listened to her in stillness. She felt like a jackass even though his eyes weren't judging her. He leaned back in the sofa and said, "Someone once told me that the only thing that matters is what you share with others when you’re uncool. It’s not about being cool, it’s about how cool you are with being uncool.” He sipped his coffee.
She didn’t remember the end of the conversation, which I was disappointed about but I liked what he said. I liked what he said and what he asked her considering he had no place to sleep that night. "It broke my heart and restored my faith in humanity at once," she said.
When he left she gave him more coffee and a leftover bagel. She went home and opened the drawer of all her supplies, her half-schemed ideas, all the pecked-at notebooks and unused pencils. Her camera, paints, cloth and clippings. "It had always been the problem of not knowing what to do next," she said. I knew exactly what she meant.
“That’s when I started. That’s when it all really changed.”
“What changed?” I said.
“ I kept going.”
I could hardly understand what she meant but knew that I wanted to feel that way too. I admired her so much and she had gone so far. I wanted what she had. As I stood up to leave she said, from her seat, “I hope you find it. I think you will.” I wasn’t so sure. She smiled and walked me to the door. I watched her walk down the street after she left me graciously with a kiss on the cheek. She did not turn back.
Later that night I walked into my apartment and saw my roommate rearranged everything. The first thing I saw was myself in a mirror across from the door. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe it was statistical inevitability, maybe it was everything or nothing or both. I stood there for a moment with myself. Then I went to my desk and did the next thing that came to my head.
Liberty Enlightening the World with child's crown
I ask the students to set themselves up in such a way that they'll learn as quickly as possible. I'm teaching spontaneity, and therefore I tell them that they mustn't try to control the future, or to 'win'; and that they're to have an empty head and just watch. When it's their turn to take part they're to come out and just do what they're asked to, and see what happens. It's this decision not to try and control the future which allows the students to be spontaneous. -Keith Johnstone, Impro
preface
I know that I want us to be free. I know that freedom is an action. I know that I know nothing.
The Free Corner is a mixture and mirror of what-is and what-could-be reaching for that-which-we-do-not-know. It's what knocks on my skull, asking to Be in the world which I do not understand. In that action, we time travel together forward-- closer to The End.
mirror | mixed | make | monthly
haiku
“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
