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artist

Guest Posts

Big Sur, Henry Miller and the Book of the Dead.

December 23, 2014

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black1-300x88

By Jeff Finlin.

Some things you revisit only to find that the grandiosity of your youth has come back to slap you with a disappointment that you somehow remembered wrong. It’s like the white wash of mind itself has taken over to spite your perception of what’s really going on here. That old gerbil wheel between your ears remembers things in the unreality of comparison and what we’ve seen and heard; not in what’s happening now. The mind spits, moans, worries perceives and bewilders only based on what it’s captured before or is uncertain of.  It’s like a camera spitting out only what it’s seen or heard over and over again. Whether it’s that piece of ass you had or a glorious drunken night under the stars it mostly vomits back our experience more impeccably than it actually was.  It’s incapable, unless trained like a show dog, of just shutting up long enough to contemplate the miracle that lies before us.  The miracle is too terrifying. It’s written as our own book of the dead. The mind has to actually die in order to see that it’s the miracle itself. So in order to feel it we have to read and retain our own demise. We got to know it…realize it … love it… .  And that’s a hard thing to do. The denial of it is way easier. That Grateful Dead skull comes to mind. The day of the dead grins ear to ear in the lighthouse of itself. No …they weren’t kidding.

But then there are those times when the head shuts up long enough for us to experience the living and the dead all at once. Sometimes in a moment of God given clarity, the head, along with the heart, is able to recount the glorious cellular work of past experience in relation to what’s happening in front of your very eyes. It connects the present and past to the cellular chain link within and you are reminded in a phantasmagoric moment of explosiveness who you are, why you are here, and what you are supposed to do and be. You experience how you have become in relation to all your delusion, dreams, fear and psychosis. You come to see the path of mistake, truth and longing as a cosmic weave of grace and beauty, ugliness and pain, and in those fleeting enlightened moments it all somehow makes sense.

That happened on a drive today up Highway 1 in California into the wild and beautiful redwood spiked Big Sur where we had the pleasure of visiting The Henry Miller Memorial Library. The tears and times and heavens rolled like rain into my heart and mind amidst a beauty so big and bold that it made me aware that I was not separate from the river of universe that lay exploding within and out. I had been here before… but it was even bigger than I remembered. It was the personification of “remember to remember” as Miller so eloquently put it. I was somehow magically transported and connected to the first time; the original time of being. I was magically transported to the time I first experienced myself as a writer and human cell exploding into the many.  It was the future past and present all rolled into one Continue Reading…

beauty, Guest Posts

The Way of the Backer. By Eiren Caffall.

April 16, 2014

The Way of the Backer: Kickstarter and the Power of Artistic Failure

by Eiren Caffall

“You know,” I told my friend when I called her, “Kickstarter is kicking my ass. I have no idea how to talk about why I make art.”

I was trying to finish funding my new record, managing a Kickstarter campaign with a $4,000 goal, when the freakout kicked in and I started calling people until I found someone who would let me lose it on the phone.

I had just realized that the pitches I was making every day were pointing out a horrible truth: when it comes to justifying myself as an artist, I am incoherent. It had suddenly become clear to me that I had no idea how to tell family, friends and strangers that they should back my music or my writing when, by every cultural measure we use (grants, sales, press coverage, earnings) I have been a spectacular failure.

Away from Kickstarter I am proud of what I make, I remember that I have shared stages and bandmates and radio airwaves with some celebrated musicians, a few legit places have published my writing. I am part of a community of artists who work under the radar of a culture that may, once in a while, pick one of us out of the pack and move us higher up the ladder. I am email-friendly with people who have been picked like that, they return my calls sometimes.

But as far as mass culture is concerned, me, down here, below the radar, spending over a decade making work that few people see, I’m failing.

I am third-generation art Boho, and kind of used to seeing artists struggle. I am sometimes the whiniest one in the room about that failure, since I’ve seen the generational toll it takes. No one else bitches out loud if they can help it. The soup we all swim in sucks, we’re all frustrated, and we try to keep that to ourselves, if only to preserve our dignity.

“The music business is a toilet,” my drummer said to me this summer. Yup.

But he said this to me in a quiet room, and I was the only one who heard him. Because admitting how hard this is might, itself, look like failure. So we say that things are going fine, talk about good gigs and small successes and ignore the big picture and the fear that comes with it.

All that changed as soon as I pressed the “launch” button on my Kickstarter campaign and admitted that I couldn’t make it on my own anymore, that no label was coming to the aid of my career, that I couldn’t pay for the record I had just finished.

Kickstarter is huge these days, and it can be problematic for so many reasons. It is marketing disguised as grassroots grant-making, and backlashes towards artists that game the system are legendary. Issues of access and need come in at every door that Kickstarter opens. But it is also so ubiquitous in the arts community that people talk about it in an offhand manner: “Well, if no one wants to put the record out, we’ll just do a Kickstarter for it,” we say to each other.

Since grants and government programs for the arts (not to mention the revenue streams that used to come with putting out records) have dried up, we dive towards crowdfunding as if it is the last crumb on an empty table. And it kind of is. Last year Kickstarter famously gave more money to artists than the NEA.

And Kickstarter’s grey-market economy genius is that it lets people feel like, when they pledge, they are not only validating someone’s work, but supporting them person to person. The pledge makes one part of the work, you are a backer.

But that’s where my trouble started, because to be good at Kickstarter, I was finding, you had to be able to stand in front of what you’d made and invite people to back you, personally, as if what you make matters, as if you had never thought of failure for one moment, at any step of the process.

And I was not good at that.

With five days to go the campaign was only at 30%; it was failing.

“You never even said your name in the video,” my friend pointed out to me on that fateful day when I called.

And in my head I answered, “I know, I was ashamed.” My Kickstarter campaign launched me into a shame spiral so deep that for a while there, though I continued to spew cheerful boosterism at the internet, dripping with thinly-veiled panic, I could barely answer the phone when friends called, because I didn’t want to admit that all this hustle was making my confidence fall apart.

This year, I have been thinking about failure, a lot.

This year I lost my house to foreclosure. This year I finally worked again after a long time without work. This year my ex-husband moved in with his younger girlfriend, and my older boyfriend decided that, no, he would not like to move in with me.

At the beginning of that phone call, when she asked me how I was, I’d said, trying to sound offhand and light, “Enjoying my exercise in public failure.”

“You can’t talk about it like that. Confidence breeds confidence, success breeds success,” she’d said back. A veteran of the Kickstarter wars herself, my friend was not agreeing with the system per se, just doing her best to remind me of its limitations. “I mean,” she said, sensing she was losing me, “the process is about letting people experience how much you love the record, the system asks for that. And you love your record, let people see it.” I knew she was right, but I wanted to tell her that I might be a lost cause.

The whole time I was pitching and pitching, thanking backers and asking for more, teaching myself Mail Chimp and updating Twitter and posting new content and sending new videos out into the world I was also thinking about a last conversation I had with my father.

He had a genetic kidney disease, Polycystic Kidney Disease, PKD, and in my family it hits early and often, like those proverbial Chicago voting scams. Until my father had two kidney transplants, ten additional years of dialysis, and made it to the ripe old age of 64, every member of my family for generations beyond counting, was dead by 40.

At 22 I was diagnosed with the same thing.

And when I was 29, and had just finished a record, my father finally started to die. An infection gained from his first transplant had morphed over years in his system, and by the end he was riddled with a weirdo cancer that was invading his body cavities, eating up his lungs one day, bloating his stomach the next.

My parents had divorced seven years earlier and my father’s family was all dead and I have no siblings, so it was me in the hospital room with him, holding him steady when they took a twelve-inch-long needle and inserted it into his belly to get samples of the pale, eerie liquid that was filling him up. It was me sleeping next to his hospital bed on a cot when he hallucinated and tore off all his clothes in the middle of the night.

And it was me sitting next to him when he said to me one lucid afternoon, “I wish I hadn’t been such a failure.”

I argued with him, can’t remember what I said now, but I told him I’d always admired his life.

An autodidact and bohemian from his teens, he’d been at jazz clubs in the Village before he could legally drink, lived in a loft in Soho with a swing in the main room, dated waitresses at Max’s Kansas City. He’d married my pretty mother, worked with her on blue movies, and been a camera man on a Yoko Ono picture. He had hung out at the Factory, been friends with Alice Brock of Alice’s Restaurant fame, taught himself to make flawless Shaker furniture and fly-fish and track pheasants.

I’d always thought he’d been remarkable. I’d always thought he’d lived the life he’d meant to.

Sure, we were dirt poor, and we moved all the time, always at the mercy of landlords. Sure, my mother had left him, and he’d always undersold his work. Sure, at 64 he rented a shitty room from a creepy guy and worked as a museum guard and was about to die and leave his only child holding the bag.

But he’d seen things, he’d done things, and I thought he didn’t regret anything.

When I told him he’d had an amazing life he said, “Thanks, Kid, but I never did know how to make anything out of that.”

I’ve had an amazing life, too. I’ve mothered a remarkable son, been well-loved, and I’ve made songs I feel so damn proud of I can’t believe they are mine sometimes. This last year I’ve been writing a novel, and it hasn’t felt like writing, but like being held in someone’s hand and told a story that I get to take down. I spent my high school years with remarkably safe and kind and smart people, then stumbled into a music scene so devoid of negative competition that I have come out of my years of playing in Chicago with collaborators and colleagues that I both adore and trust, people who were, at the moment of my crisis, falling all over themselves to tweet and Facebook and shill my record, my little record, because, they believed in it, in me, and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t doing better.

But I could.

Somewhere in the heart of every ask I made was a core of shame so deep that I couldn’t get around it in the pitch.

I don’t know why I am here, and making things, and other people are not.

Kickstarter structures itself as if you, the artist, are talking to a potential backer. This person, the avatar for your audience, sits behind the imaginary shell of the crowdfunding forum, and according to the Kickstarter language, they are silently sitting out there asking, Why, why do you need the money, why do you make the stuff, tell me what is it for?

And if I am being honest I want to say this to the imaginary backer behind the shell:

It is because I am not dead yet. I am 42 and I am not dead yet, and I can’t think of anything else to do with myself to cope with that. I went through horrible things, and I do not trust the world, and I cannot pretend that I am confident in it, or myself, or you, or the possibility that we will make it, or that what I am doing matters. I would make this art if no one was watching at all, because I don’t know how else to survive, and if you want to be a part of it, fine, but I will do it either way.

Putting out your art is always a trick of walking on water, proclaiming your human frailty, using your body, your spirit, your talent to convince people that telling your own naked story matters, that it makes people more whole.

But in my heart, I remain dubious, worried that, though I know I have felt saved by art during dark hours, there are people, sometimes including myself, for whom art is not nearly enough.

All that beauty and joy he’d found in art didn’t matter to my father completely at the end. It didn’t make his last months much better. And although all that I can do with my own life is play music, write things down, try to make something beautiful and scary and true, I do not know how to do a dance that will convince you on the open stage of public opinion and competition that it matters.

I personally don’t like competition, it freaks me out, and I have grave doubts that it has any place in the creation of good work. Competition in its platonic ideal can make people work harder, sure, but in the real world, the failure that comes with it can do more than make artists tongue-tied, like me; it can cripple people so they stop producing at all.

For some of us, when we fail at art, even if that failure is only in the marketplace, we feel that failure as a deep failure of self. We all have a list of our art heros that seemed to crumble under the pressures of the marketplace. It is a trope as old as time, right? The Artist, Too Sensitive for This World.

Which I generally think is crap.

Artists are some of the most fucking tough people you will ever meet. The arts require an exceptionally high level of vulnerability if you want to do them well, and the emotionally sensitive people who are drawn to that – or compelled or called or forced by fate – have a better chance of coming with some other baggage that makes the vulnerability really tricky. Most of us get tougher through handling that dichotomy. Some of us can’t.

Kickstarter asks artists to subvert just that cultural assumption. It asks us to present ourselves not as different from the mainstream culture, not as subversive to it, but as part of something: a community of people who want us to succeed.

If you talk with Kickstarter alums, many will confess that their biggest backers were the families that still can’t quite understand why they make the art in the first place. They love them, so they help them, and Kickstarter facilitates that by showing these artists as successful, proud marketers of themselves. They are not subversive in their promotional online videos; they are confident. Kickstarter’s shiny website confers legitimacy and glow.

Kickstarter asked me to set my art up as separate from myself, to profess confidence in the project and store vulnerability away, as buried as I could make it behind the spin I was putting on the work itself. I couldn’t let anyone in on my fear of failure or I’d spook the herd.

My one random concession to trying to draw the herd closer was a mid-campaign video ramble I posted to my Kickstarter page as a remedy. This one about Ernest Shakleton, the slog of the epic quest, the importance of holding on to art in the face of great loss. Not particularly cheerful spin, and, as my friend later pointed out, it might have been a good idea if at least one of my video appeals hadn’t mentioned death.

Shame tugged at me when I sat down to write, and it came out through my fingers in the words I typed for every social media post and email. People could smell it, the herd spooked, the pledges dried up. I started to consider finding a straw backer, just to get me out of the whole thing.

Then, the Friday before the close of the campaign, a huge pledge came in from distant family friends that closed part of the gap. A total surprise. A deus ex machina. And, just like that, the campaign was 80% funded.

Suddenly, it had momentum.

People wanted in.

Within days, the rest of the money followed. Success bred success. Confidence bred confidence. People wanted to be a part of something that looked like it wasn’t failing. By the last day, nearly the last hour, me and my whole band and all my friends flogging Facebook like it was an NPR pledge drive, we made it to 101% of the goal.

“See,” my friend told me, “it worked. You just had to show people that the project was already a success.”

We had a great rock show, we thanked our backers from the stage, and people went home happy with the end of the story.

Then I stopped answering the phone again. Because telling people how happy I was that the campaign was funded was almost worse than asking them to pledge. Because in every conversation I managed not to avoid, I had to pretend that the funding let everybody participate in validating my work.

But, you know, it didn’t. Kickstarter didn’t validate a thing.

The hole in my heart, and the shame in my gut were still there.

Winning by those standards at first felt like another kind of failure. I couldn’t make my peace with a simple idea: for most of us that use Kickstarter, getting to a funding goal has nothing to do with the art, and everything to do with the community we are part of.

I can stand in the spotlight of Kickstarter, honestly invisible, maybe failing, as an artist, and still let it work its backer magic on me, validating what I do because, mostly, I am loved by a circle of human beings who know me well enough, and love me deep enough, to pony up money for my project, not because they love the work, though some do, but because, at bottom, they love me.

That’s what Kickstarter doesn’t tell you when you start. That for the majority of us asking for help to fund our work, the process becomes a referendum not on the work, but on us.

At first, that made me feel much more shame, the kind that comes with realizing you that your fan base is mostly made up of people who have bought you a drink at one time or another. But now, now I think I’m OK with learning what Kickstarter had to teach me—that being loved by people who will back you when you are invisible is probably better then being funded by adoring strangers who know you not at all.

Or, it may not be better for your art, but it probably is better for your soul.

Because the long game that making art requires is a highwire act of letting yourself be seen. Spin rarely belongs in that work, the work it takes to be messy and true and alive in front of people and allow them to judge you and what you have made. You must court shame every day to do that work well, always hoping to be backed just as you are.

When I told my dad on his deathbed that he hadn’t failed, I had believed it to the core of my being, and there wasn’t a hole in my heart when I said it or a lick of dishonesty.

I was immersed in love for him, love that was there to drive past his shame. He told me he was a failure, stood emotionally naked in front of me, showing me that he was afraid, and human and devastated, and I responded with love. I told him that he was enough, that I wanted him to keep going.

I was backing him, imperfect as he was. I was seeing him.

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Eiren Caffall is a musician and writer living in Chicago. The great-granddaughter of an Episcopal Bishop, she is the daughter of a geophysicist and a Beatnik Shaker Acolyte. She has always dwelled in the places where art, spirit, aesthetics and science meet. She writes songs, fiction, personal essays and meditations on spiritual life during global climate change, focusing on heartbreak and grace – the tricks of memory that help us survive and the wisdom that comes whether we like it or not.

You can purchase her latest record, Slipping the Holdfast, on bandcamp, and see examples of her writing on Tikkun Daily, on her blog The Civil Twilight Project and at her website www.eirencaffall.com. Her essay “And Now Witness the Ending, Beautiful and Terrible” was published in Doug Fogelson’s book The Time After alongside the work of Derrick Jensen. She is currently at work on her fourth album and first novel. She lives with her son Dexter, where they spend most of their time articulating skeletons and beach combing.

**

Jennifer Pastiloff is a writer living on an airplane. Her work has been featured on The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Jezebel, Modern Loss, xojane, among others. She’s the founder of The Manifest-Station. Jen’s leading a weekend retreat in May to Ojai, Calif as well as 4 day retreat over Labor Day in Ojai, Calif. All retreats are a combo of yoga/writing for all levels. She and bestselling author Emily Rapp will be leading another writing retreat to Vermont in October. Check out her site jenniferpastiloff.com for all retreat listings and workshops to attend one in a city near you. Next up is Seattle and London July 6. (London sells out fast so book soon if you plan on attending!)

courage, Guest Posts

Guest post by James Vincent Knowles: On Courage.

February 16, 2012

This guest post is so real, so beautiful, so honest. Makes my heart ache a bit. Love you Jim and thank you……

James Vincent Knowles

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

COURAGE BY JAMES KNOWLES

*Benjamin Franklin said courage had something to do with owning one’s faults & having the resolution to mend them. If that’s true, then maybe I have a little bit.

It’s rather difficult to determine if one has courage. It’s easier to see courage in others.

I can, however, tell a story and let others be the judge.

I’ll begin with my faults.

Not the superficial ones. The character faults. The deep faults. The faults which have hobbled me all my life in one way or another:

Niceness. That’s a big fault. I looked “nice” up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Originally meant, “ignorant.” Uh, oh. Yep. We still use it that way if you ask me. I mean, what does THIS mean: he’s a nice guy / she’s a nice girl?

Gullible. Easy. Clueless. Not hip. Not dirty. Innocent. Unpretentious. (You get the idea.) Being nice can cause a lot of pain. It certainly has for me.

Helpful. That’s another big fault. I like to help people. No, that’s not completely honest. I LOVE helping people. Especially if i’m able to do so without attaching expectations. Without expecting reciprocation. Altruistic help. This one has plagued me all my life. It’s really a combination of being nice with the additional problem of boundary awareness. I help people then they ask for more then I do it then they ask for more then I do it and then what happens? I go past where I ought to have done & / or don’t set proper boundaries and then what? Little bits of expectations seep in. Little bits of resentment squeak through. And before you know it, helpfulness has turned ugly. That’s a real fault. It’s a hard thing to learn for a nice guy.

Procrastination. Ugh. Who doesn’t know about this one? Well, maybe Clark Kent & Cliff Michaels. Maybe Jennifer Pastiloff. (haha… kidding~! I know Clark Kent procrastinates~!). That’s about it. Rest of us procrastinate. Some more than others. Thing about procrastination though … something even my nice, helpful, lazy self has noticed, when we’re really happy, doing what we love, living our dream, we do not procrastinate. We tackle the big, dirty jobs straight up & straight away, all the while knowing the enjoyable stuff is there waiting for us when we’re finished. You know it’s true. So why do we not live that way all the time? But okay. First we need find that flow. That thing we LOVE so much it makes us want to take out the trash before that first cup of coffee / kale juice in the morning.

Talking. Oh boy. I love to talk. Particularly with people i like. People who’ve got time to talk AND listen. People who are interested & interesting. Mind you, i’m talking about conversation, discussion, sharing. Balanced, animated, open, real, honest, non-judgmental, fun talk without meanness. Measured and blended it can be an elixir made of nirvana. As intimate as the best sex you’ve ever enjoyed and as noisy. Yeah, talking is definitely one of my faults. But okay, I’ve become a pretty good listener along the way as well. Listening isn’t a fault though so I’m not listing it as one here.

Thinking. Bwuahahaha~! If one more person tells me I think too much I’m going to walk to Antarctica. Effffffffffffff me~! Now this one is a real problem. Then again, maybe I just need to be around people who appreciate thinking?

I used to not think as much & i wasn’t any happier.

In fact, without thinking, what would we be? Animals? Alien life forms? And how would one person be any different than another if we couldn’t think for ourselves? Also, if thinking is so bad, why are we always asking others what they think? Gotcha there.

But okay. I’m listing it as a “fault” because so many people tell me i think too much. I think I know what these people mean when they tell me that. What they mean is, I’ve not explained myself concisely enough to pique their curiosity or they mean that they don’t care enough to hear what I’ve got to say or they mean they simply don’t like the stuff i think about.

It’s all too much to think about.

Resolution to mend them.

I think that word “resolution” means “a decision to do or not do something.” Sometimes not so easy, is it?

Niceness. Well, okay. I’m a curious guy. And I can read. So when something bad happens as a result of my being too nice I educate myself. It’s hard to not be nice. But it doesn’t mean ya gotta be mean. That’s not a complete resolution. I’m still nice.

But now i’m kinder, gentler & more patient. & curiouser. But most importantly, nicer to myself. Learning to nurture my self. Now THAT takes a lot of courage~!

Helpful. Well, this one is easy to fix. Be MORE helpful but help myself first. Sounds a lot like that love thing.

You know that one, “love yourself first in order to know / have / receive / give love.”? Well, okay, I’m still working on that one as well.

Aren’t we all? I am beginning to see a pattern in all these as I write this.

Procrastination. This is that “just do it” thing, right? Crap. This one can be really hard if one isn’t sure what to do I’ll have to come back to this one.

Talking. I’m screwed on this one. I thought I resolved it by moving 200 miles from LA … alone. Of course I did this because I’d completely self-destructed. Or at least I thought I had. I’d blame it on someone else but what good would that do? Besides, it wouldn’t be self-destruction if it was someone else’s fault! I will say this … running across Jennifer’s blog just might have shut me up a bit. That is, it shut up some of the negative conversations I was having with myself. Which of course, made me think. For instance, about how some of the things … no, all of the things Jen posts tend to inspire, enlighten, encourage & heal. It certainly does these things for me! Interesting. I’ve never met Jennifer. I’m not a real yoga dude. I’m a total beginner. A procrastinating, lazy one at times. I find myself far from where I belong (Santa Monica). But I had to leave town. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Take that back. It was THE hardest thing i’ve ever done. Not the move. I’ve moved 37+ times in my life. It was leaving in total shame. Wrung out. So entirely twisted, crushed, hurt, embarrassed, and, well, let’s just say pretty much completely distraught, dazed & confused. The worst~! Oh wait. How does this resolve the fault of talking? haha… I am just using it as a device to talk about myself. 🙂

Thinking: I’m not quite ready to admit this is a fault. Guess I’m still in denial. Either that or maybe by thinking a lot I’ve come to the conclusion that if one thinks about the right stuff, thinking a lot is good.

So what does any of my crap have to do with courage? Not sure. This is what flowed forth from me today. I have faults. I’m willing to admit them. I’m willing to mend them. I admit I will need help along the way. But most of all, this is about shame & how it takes courage to look at it. To be vulnerable.

I left town in shame. Obliterated by shame. Almost dead from shame. Beyond comprehension shame. Little did I know I was yet to be shamed enough. There was tons more shame coming and it boy oh boy has ever been heaped upon me. Throughout all this I’ve continued learning, reading, thinking and talking. And okay, even praying & meditating. I procrastinated on everything but that which I believed mattered most … love, understanding & empathy. Love. Understanding. Empathy. And oh boy did I learn some stuff about niceness. And helpfulness. And procrastination. And talking. And thinking. Oh boy. Oh man. Oh boy.

I got vulnerable with myself. (I’m not sure one can do that but i have been doing it). Jen’s blog posts have helped me a LOT. Helped me see the authentic me. Jen’s blog & two real friends. One new one friend & one old friend. The new friend encouraged me to be myself. The old friend gave me a little tiny bit of empathy & understanding. Lifesavers, all. Jen’s blog has been incredibly inspiring. I say that a lot. I feel inspired by all the stories on you blog, Jen. So refreshing. Real. Like coming home or something.

So okay, I’ve been looking at myself deeply. I was feeling so worthless I wondered if I was alive. In fact, as I look around my space it looks as if a total loser lives here. But at least now I know that’s because this isn’t home. This is just a place to sleep and think. This is a place I can be totally vulnerable with myself, let myself see my self. Bardot. Die before you die. Tranquility. Calm mind. Quietude.

Screw the decorating.

Two years ago I owned a paparazzi photo agency. Yes, I know. That makes me a “bad guy”. 

8 months ago I quit. Sold everything I own, car, cameras, furniture. I also decided I’m an artist. Maybe a writer. I’ve since realized I am a dam nice guy. That I enjoy helping people. That I need to be connected to others, preferably people who have empathy. I need to connect and feel that sense of belonging we all need. To be around people, doing things which get my juices flowing. Be a part of something which gives me energy so that I don’t procrastinate. Connect with others who think, maybe even others who enjoy talking, nice people, helpful people, doing things that matter.

When I left LA I was screwed up. I’m telling you right now. But deep down I knew, despite the crap, the shame, and the embarrassment, it would be worth it. Letting go of everything. Leaving town. Being alone. I had zero idea of what might happen next. Still don’t. Although I am postulating & imagining & envisioning & praying & writing & thinking & every once in a while, I can even SEE and FEEL what i want my life to be like. All I know is I quit everything and even though much of what caused my shame & confusion & disconnection & pain was still happening, I have continued to think (and think with more clarity), continued to be nice, learn, grow (I hope), and talk about it, even if only with myself.

And yes, somewhere along this journey, this story line, a door opened. I ran into a person I’ve never met. The Universe connected me with Jen’s blog & all the beautiful, authentic, empathic, compassionate, real, joyful, encouraging people with whom she is connected. Vicariously through this blog I’ve been inspired and enriched.

I’ve allowed myself to be vulnerable, to be my self and i’ve found myself gaining strength and feeling human again. Healing, if you will. And for that I’m so grateful~! So is that courageous? Doesn’t really feel like it. It just feels real.

Namaste.*