I Slid The Light 03

I created this photo while out on a lovely walk.  I found a pile of leaves, and took several photos, most with the camera moving, and a couple with the camera still.  I'd done a previous photoshoot, in the same neighborhood, and taken a couple photos with the camera moving that turned into very nice manipulations.  This was taken with the camera moving, then i manipulated it on my Mac and with Image Tricks, and in fact, it's the exact same photo that i used to create I Slid The Light: Planet Fall, it's just a much earlier generation.  I Slid The Light 02 comes from that same photoshoot of the same pile of leaves, and i manipulated it on my Mac with just the Preview color tool.  Leaves Decomposing To Life is a different photo, of the same pile of leaves, only with the camera held still.  The first I Slid The Light is from a photo of a bush taken in the summer time.  

I SLID THE LIGHT 01         I SLID THE LIGHT 02        I SLID THE LIGHT 02.1
           

 I SLID THE LIGHT: PLANET FALL        I SLID THE LIGHT INTO A WORLD OF PAIN
                                 

I SLID THE LIGHT  is a series of abstracts i created that are all about captured motion, about how i feel like i am sliding thru rivers of energy in my life, and how sometimes i don’t exactly feel like i’m in control, like the choices i make are mostly about how i will slide the light, as opposed to what rivers of energy i might slide down.  I’m using “light” in it’s sense as a wave of energy.  I was sliding down currents of light when i created these pieces, discovering myself as a visual artist, re-inventing my sense of Self as an artist.  The first I Slid The Light 01 was one of my first visual artworks - i was experimenting using the camera in motion, as i’d read Man Ray did with his first movie camera.  I found myself  sliding down currents of light when i created these pieces, discovering myself as a visual artist, re-inventing my sense of Self as an artist.  

When i was young i decided to be an author, and studied Creative Writing at SF state, created my own zines to get my work out there, and was just learning the culture around submitting work to publishers, when suddenly i was a parent and had to focus on making money, and found myself sliding down totally different steams of light. I love, the parenting stream of light, it gives me light when i’m engulfed in darkness. My girlfriend - who eventually became my daughter’s birth mother - had a best friend with a toddler, and i used to take care of the little girl when we visited, to allow my gf and her bff to hang out - but i found i had a real talent for childcare and teaching, and that stream of light just opened up before me, and i slid the light into a job in daycare, and in order to get paid more, i had to slide the light back into college and take child development courses.  In college i somehow slid the light into physical theatre, which is an ensemble based, broad style of live original theatre that is all about being an actor-creator, creating original ensemble plays using improv in a big way.  Fairly soon I found myself literally engulfed in the theatre stream of light, it lit me up inside. I reveled in using my body to create broad characters; we often used masks which required an enormous amount of energy to make come alive. My talent for writing helped me immensely as an actor-creator. I became an actor, and a teacher, writing and directing plays, with children, teens and adults, and eventually became the youth programs director for an international theatre company. My career became everything, I slid down that stream of light almost exclusively, especially when my daughter left home for school.  I was doing an enormous amount of work…and then i got injured.  

At first i still worked with my brain injury.  But eventually i became exhausted, suffering blinding headaches almost all the time, it was more a stream of darkness than light.  I was so tired during the last teen ensemble show i directed, i couldn’t even clap when they got a standing ovation - someone afterward asked me if i was angry - no, i was just too tired to smile.  I had to stop working, which wrecked me coz being a theatre artist, administrator, and teacher had been my entire identity - and my brain injury literally took all that away from me.  And i found myself in a very lonely, rough, bumpy, dark stream of light, that i didn’t slide down, as much as i tumbled down.

I was used to working 60 hour weeks, surrounded by people, and then coming home to my quiet lil house, where i lived all by myself, coz my daughter was in college by then.  Theatre people are busy people, and once i left that stream of light energy, it went right on by me, and i didn’t have the energy to keep up.  I found myself in a stream of my Self, and my gender identity.  I’d been living as a female, at home, while going out in public as male, for several years by that time.  My public, male life, the male light stream, had been the larger one - and the female light stream was an itty bitty rivulet.  But then that situation reversed, and i found myself immersed in the female light stream, and   it felt like coming home.  I found the stream of light energy that was right there, but had been drowned by all the others.  All the thoughts, feelings, urges, desires I’d been fighting for so long because i was afraid and ashamed of the truth, engulfed me.  The female light stream filled all the empty spaces in my heart, it drowned the self-loathing stream, and i found the light of self love.  It made me feel tingly and alive.  And I realized I wasn’t crazy, i’m not  manically depressed, I’ve just been forced to be the wrong gender.

My brain injury took away nearly everything, so i’ve had to totally re-invent myself, as a person, and as an artist. Once you realize you’re a transgender female attracted to females, you enter another stream, the queer stream of light.  I love that stream very much, i love my people, because they are, indeed, a rainbow.  They aren’t perfect.  No one is.  And every group has it’s jerks - but i love the variation of gender identity and expression, the variation of sexual attraction and sexual orientation.  There is no binary in the rainbow world - which is why some strait people - and i stress “some” - are so threatened by it.  Because once you slide the queer light you realize there aren’t just two choices, there isn’t just one path - be born, go to school, get a job, find a spouse, procreate, get old have family over for holidays, die in a rest home.  There are a rainbow of choices, a rainbow of paths.  Legalizing gay marriage is one of the greatest things this country has ever done for personal freedom, the only downside to it, is that the arguments made for legalizing gay marriage centered on gay people being assimilated into strait society (we’re just like you - ugh, no we’re not, we’re different, and there’s nothing wrong with that) - rather than strait society honoring gay culture.  One of the giant freakouts for the Christian right, particularly the conservanazis, was that legalizing gay marriage would open the door for polygamy, and those people think polygamy will doom our society, because, despite the fact that Yahweh in the bible condones and even encourages polygamy, they’re stuck on this idea that monogamy is the only light stream that our culture can slide down, otherwise western civilization will fall apart, and we’ll all go to hell - apparently joining many of the prophets who are there because they were polygamists.  

I also discovered the kinky stream of light.  Not 50 shades of grey - how ironic that a strait, vanilla woman, would take the beauty of the kinky rainbow, and force it into a zone of grays.  The kinky rainbow is one of my fave lights to slide, because the kinky world is varied beyond the ability of the vanilla world to even imagine.  It taught me that whatever people were into sexually, was okay, that every person should have the freedom to express their sexuality in anyway that makes them feel good about themselves, and doesn’t psychologically damage another person.  Once again, not every kinky person has their head screwed on strait, and there are prejudiced, small minded jerks in the kinky community too.  But there is more light to slide in the kinky rainbow than any one person could slide in a single lifetime.  And most of the strait, vanilla world simply has no idea.  No idea.  Plus, that “one way” i was talking about, gets really fractured into rivulets and tributaries when you throw in polyamory.

The I SLID THE LIGHT series is about sliding thru streams of energy, and it’s about how a person is so occupied with their own streams they are sliding, that they can’t see other people’s.  But it’s also about the fact that, those of us who have either willfully, or been forced to explore another stream besides the main stream, can see a broader spectrum - not because we are inherently better than anyone else, but simply because we’ve experienced more spectrums, more varied streams of light.  Thus, we are enlightened in ways that even a celibate monk, stuck meditating in a monastery, who is streaming only very select streams of light, can never be enlightened.  Of course, their streams are also amazing, and not everyone can access them either.

My brain injury took away my artistic sense of Self, I  was too ill to slide the raucous, fast, complicated, swirling, seething, theatre stream of light.  But my brain was still churning, wanting, desperately needing to create.  I went from creating plays, teaching classes, writing grants, creating curriculum, teaching teachers, writing exercises and lesson plans, all day, everyday, to doing nothing whatsoever.  Mind you, when i stopped working, i was so exhausted, i could barely put a thought together.  For the first month i was in a daze - but everyday, i’d take a walk on the beach, to get exercises.  During these walks my mind would recklessly churn, and my thoughts would drive me mad. My mind was in some ways still in that hell-bent-for-leather creative stream of light, but the rest of me wasn’t.  To keep from driving myself insane, I decided to imagine creating a youth theatre program with the premise that money was no object, housed in a local movie theatre that was for sale. I imagined a teaching philosophy and pedagogy, turning the lobby into an afterschool teen hangout, afterschool and summer theatre programs, etc. 

At that time I still thought i’d get better, and that i might be able to turn that dream into a real stream of light.  But when the neurologist told me I’d never be the same, that dream died, and i nearly died - by my own hand - along with it when i realized i’d never be able to teach or do theatre again. My creative engine, for some reason, was untouched by my injury, but the capacity to create, the mind and body, were broken.  It was like putting the engine of a bullet train into a 19th century locomotive.  I turned back to writing, mostly essays about my transition, being kinky, all these self-discoveries.  I wanted to create a blog, only my engine just spewed out words at an alarming rate, and every time i went back to edit anything i’d written I’d find myself inspired to write more. I have been working keyboards since i was 12, and i’ve done a lot of typing in my life, so i can type as fast as i can think. One essay about one subject would have so many sidebars, and tangential commentaries, that it would be unpublishable even by internet standards.  The writing stream of light, to this day, becomes an uncontrollable, surging, swirling, bottomless whirlpool (and this essay is a testament to that).

Then i was struck down by a thyroid problem, and i couldn’t even write, so i turned to photography - well, specifically, photo editing art, coz i’d always conceived of doing avant-garde photos. I was very inspired by Man Ray and Lee Miller, i have several books of Man Ray photos, and read his autobiography.  I loved Dada and the avant-garde visual artists.  At first i took self-portraits with my computer to manipulate, and took scenic photos with my phone - usually with the camera moving.  Then a friend gave me a polaroid.  I’ve studied visual art all my life, and grew up with parents who loved and collected art. My parents took me to many galleries and museums.  In college i’d created my own BA program, based on three components, Human Development, Theatre Art, and Visual Art - i took art history and drawing classes, but the physical theatre light stream totally sucked me in artistically, and i dropped out of college to attend a conservatory theatre school.  

But even all those years i was writing and doing theatre, i still slid down the visual art stream, collecting art books and prints, talking about art with my parents, teaching my daughter about art, going to museums.  I loved drawing, and actually could draw really well after i was trained, but i couldn’t sit still at an easel all day, i was too physically active, which is why i jumped deep into the theatre stream.  As a working single parent, i didn’t have time to draw for fun, and at one point i decided to put aside all other artistic pursuits and just concentrate on theatre. Even after my injury I lost the type of focus and concentration I needed to draw.  But when i found myself lost, without a stream of creative light to slide, i started to go mad, to literally lose my mind because all this bound up creativity was exploding within me.  So i began to experiment with photo editing and i found i had a true talent for it, and all of a sudden this fascinating stream of light opened up to me.  For whatever reason, the type of focus and concentration you need for the computer is very alive for me, and in fact, i get sucked into the computer, and will tune out everything else. It is a very bright, glowing, fluidly flowing stream of light, with endlessly interesting and/or diverting tributaries and rivulets.  When i started doing photo editing art, I found myself just creating and creating, learning how to work photo editing programs - not with an eye toward fine tuning a photo - but with making a photo into a different art form entirely.  I did things with editing software no photographer would do, boosting colors, exposure, contrast, hightlights and shadows, until the photo fractured and was torn apart and became something else.   Kinda like what happened to me.