Sunday, November 30, 2008

Beginning

How to begin, why to begin, a blog? Good question. Mostly, just to get the damn thing going since I've been considering it for so long. I'm not really ready and I definitely don't have the time, but, as a woman I used to babysit for a million lifetimes ago once said to me, "There's never a good time to have a baby. But one day you just wake up and decide to do it anyway." She was in grad school on her way to becoming a psychotherapist and her husband was an intern at a hospital in NYC. I've thought about that a lot over the years, in  reference to just about everything. 

So, here it is, the first blog entry in Dune Shack Dharma, or how to make art out of almost anything and get healthy in the process. I know this is counter intuitive, that the various hallowed halls of art, music and literary history  runneth over with all those who have not gotten healthy at all in the process, in fact, they've pretty much ridden themselves into the ground. I know this, I understand this, but there's a time for everything, which is pretty much what Dune Shack Dharma is all about. There's really only one time ever, and it's always now. This is not news to many of you who may be reading this. However, we keep forgetting don't we? I know I do. So, this is the story, the saga of what it's like to be in a consistent, conscious dance with forgetting and remembering. It's the game of Hide and Seek, Peek-a-Boo, and every baby comes into the world knowing it.

This blog begins with the story of the time I spent out at the end of Cape Cod, in a Dune Shack at the end of the summer of 2008. There is a short piece coming up in this months Cape Healing Arts magazine, (see Dune Shack Dharma in the December issue) but the real story is way longer, not to mention funnier. The magazine editors suggested that I make all that stuff available on my website, but it's really not just that. People are always asking me, "so, what are you writing?" "Umm,..pause,...life. I'm writing about life", is what I usually say. I don't know, what else is there?
One of my favorite lines  ever, is from a movie I saw years ago that no one else I know has ever seen. Or, if they have, they're not confessing. Even my husband, who saw it with me, says he doesn't remember it. It was called I Heard the Mermaids Singing and featured a very quirky, misfit, twenty-something, photo collage artist doing a lot of  standing around in front of big plate glass restaurant windows in NYC staring at people, trying to figure out how they all look so normal yet gorgeous at the same time and carry on the way they do. Then there are various beautiful, surreal images of her flying over forests and the earth while we enter into the fabulous world of her collages. One night, after she has managed to get through an opening at the gallery where she works doing odd helpful things, without spilling anything on anyone, we see her drying wine glasses at the end of the night with her boss, the ever so sophisticated gallery owner. She is enthralled with the evening that she has just spent and says to her boss with breathless amazement, "Isn't life the most  amazing thing you've ever seen?" Exactly.