So the whole Patreon thing is exciting. I wish I’d done this year ago.
I promised that if I got a dozen followers I’d post a short piece on the Art of Aspiration & Resistance I’m working on, a manifesto of sorts, and I did and it’s up.
Here’s an excerpt:
Yet someone thought to take a time lapse of the way the light plays with the stained glass of DC’s National Cathedral. Who did that and why? Who built it and why? What happens to me when I watch, when you do? What happens in our brains, to our eyes? Do the tense lines in our faces relax, do our pets sigh nearby, do our breaths get a little deeper so we can take a minute to think or not to think, depending? What faith once did – provide beauty and aspiration and art and peace – seems to be missing from so many lives. So much faith seems to be about hate these days.
My intention, then, is to dig in, to go back to a time when I didn’t know what to do with this great desire for beauty, when I didn’t even know it was that, to dig into the other great yearnings I’ve learned how to name, for the erotic, for power, for peace, for friendship, for something I hesitate to call communion. Love, meaning, life. Once again I have no choice but to lean on Art, but Art in her most eternal form, the only real response there can ever be to despair.
Because I know how hard I’m fighting that beast and I assume others are too. How do you live with a big sensitive soul in a time when everything seems awash in ignorance and violence, with the one rolling into the other, joining forces and gaining speed? How do we build a culture that says no even as the rest is trying to kill us? And how do we stop it from killing us not just spiritually but actually?