“The future has an ancient heart”, Carlo Levi says, and last week I boarded a plane to fly to Ohio. I never expected it but somehow I always saw it coming.
It’s not the first time I’ve travelled for art related purposes, but it is only the second. The first was in 2024 when I attended Kolaj Fest in New Orleans. It was one of the most creatively validating moments of my existence. Everything I have done since has been because of that moment. But it was not the only moment.
When I was fourteen a school friend gave me a a homemade cassette. On one side was The Black Album by Metallica, and on the other was Nirvana's Nevermind. It was that latter side that changed my life forever. Those brash and crass guitar chords, that opening drum fill, that bass line pounding in my ears, charted a whole new course in the planet's orbit. I came face to face with the violent elegance of what art could be, of what making things could mean. Every day since, I've been following that trajectory.
For the twenty-plus years after I desperately devoted myself to playing guitar and songwriting. To chasing the dragon of that un-nameable feeling. Determined to learn to make things that could conjure it out of nothing. I was never more certain of anything than of the fact that that was what I was most meant to do. I believed it with my everything. But it never happened. It was a dream that only ever taxied the runaway, and never lifted into the atmosphere
The next ten years were spent lost and searching. Wondering how I could have been so wrong about something that felt so true. Pacing circles in the wilderness without the promise of a land to come home to.
Somewhere in the process I started collaging. It felt good. It came easy. Not because it was, but because the effort felt like a beautiful welcoming. And that made it easy not to take seriously. To see it only as a needed distraction, a pastime, a hobby. Until I got on a plane and found myself in a festival of people devoted to the craft and the practice too. It was a community of sacred belonging. A temple built of the outcasts, the degenerates, the weirdos, the rebels and the obscure. They taught me how to believe again what I began believing when I was just a kid blaring the soundtrack to the beginning of a new way of being in the world.
Cheryl Strayed tells a story about one of the first book readings she did after the publication of her first novel. She had been a waitress in the years prior, and her former manager came to listen. He said to her “All those years ago, who would’ve guessed we’d be here celebrating the publication of your novel?” “I would have” was her reply to him. She never doubted it, even though she was scared to death it wouldn’t come to fruition.
She tells another story of an early reading. One of her mother’s college professors came this time and repeated the same question: “All those years ago, who would’ve guessed we’d be here celebrating the publication of your novel?” Except now all she could say was “Not me…Not me”.
We are always held and guided by these dualities. The terrible bullshit and the amazing ache of grace. The unshakable faith of our foundational moments and the catastrophe of doubt and breakage that accompany them.
“The future has an ancient heart” Carlo Levi says and last week I flew to Ohio to frame and hang collages for my first solo art show.
I wasn’t sure if the future would ever hold the possibility of anything like this, but in the ancient halls of my heart, the parts that still echo the sound of Kurt Cobain’s own unknowing-surety, I always knew that this is exactly where I’d be.
May you find the will to own all of it; the surprise, the disbelief, the wonder, and the certainty.
May you always be nurtured by the liminal embrace of contradictory truths.
May destiny always find you in the time-honored center of who and what you’ve always been.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all of my everything.
Congratulations!! Very exciting!
And well deserved.
Congratulations 🥳
Wonderful to see your work
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In the world- so v needed - thank you for persevering