LISA CHUN

We Have What We Need

"Naturally, we are wise to be patient with this process and give ourselves unlimited time. It's as if we've been kicking a spinning wheel all our life and it has its own momentum. It's spinning rapidly, but now finally we're learning how to stop kicking the wheel. We can expect that the wheel is going to keep spinning for some time. It won't just abruptly stop. This is where many of us find ourselves: we've stopped kicking the wheel, we're not always strengthening the habit, but we're in this interesting middle state, somewhere between not always caught and not always able to resist biting the hook. This is called "the spiritual path." In fact, this path is all there is. How we relate moment by moment to what is happening on the spot is all there really is. We give up all hope of fruition and in the process we just keep learning what it means to appreciate being right here."

from Taking the Leap by Pema Chodron

 

The Real Task is Remembering

I was making collages yesterday with two kids in the ten year old range. One of the kids was my niece, the other was the daughter of my good friend. There was no hoopla, no ego parade, which is the benefit of art-making with ten year olds I suppose, we each just painted and pasted and arranged with no goal but to sit there in the doing of it. The TV was on, the sky was gray and cold air seeped in through the window behind us.  At one point my friend's other kid, college age, surveyed the chaos of papers and torn up pages of magazines and tiny pots of paint from the doorway. She's a math and science major. She said, "This just does not look like fun."

 

We're all built for different things, sure. It's stating the obvious to say that artists need to make art. I hope the ten year olds don't know this yet, that at some point it becomes way too easy to justify not making art - by worrying about money or other people and how to keep them happy and/or safe or keeping the house clean. Because this makes us more legitimate and useful to society, right? Justifies our right to be here? Uh, yes, if you're looking at it purely logically. So how to explain that while what we're doing, me and these two kids, doesn't look like a big deal, really it is. What we're doing, making small, small motions - a little glitter here, a little color there, spilling paint and glitter all over everything - connects to something so much bigger, something simultaneously mundane and transcendent. I told an artist friend later, it seems like if there are any answers (to our bad ass dilemmas as they occur in real time) they're somewhere in there, in this wordless place that gets accessed while the hands stay busy doing what they love to do. Adding a little glitter here, a little color there. 

For a little while on a gray day, three kids - one of them grown (me) and two of them yet to be - remembering who we are, who we really want to be.

 

On Writing Morning Pages

"In order to find our creativity - or, for that matter, our spirituality - we must begin with where we are. The Great Creator meets us exactly where we are standing - in "the Now" - but sometimes we do not know where that is. We may have moved through our lives unconsciously for a while, perhaps for a great while, and so we must find and take up a tool that tells us where we are and how we actually feel about that. This is the beginning of honesty, and honesty is the first step toward greater creativity."

Julia Cameron, Finding Water - The Art of Perserverance

(Julia Cameron wrote the book "The Artists Way" and here she is referring to morning pages - a practice of writing long hand 3 pages every day when you first wake up. In Finding Water she lays out the benefits and reasons for doing this. I highly recommend both the book and the practice of doing morning pages.)

Coastal Beauty

 
Yesterday's gathering of images along the coast on a gray day. 

On the way there and back, water droplets as they collected on leaves and petals and delicate spiderwebs.

 

 








An assortment of different kinds of seaweed.

New Mexico Stores and Galleries

Here is a partial list of retail stores and galleries where you can find my work for purchase and enjoyment, should you find  yourself in The Land of Enchantment (hyperlinks included):

Metallo Gallery - in Madrid (many collage originals available here.)

Spandarama - on Early Street in Santa Fe

The Range Cafe in Bernalillo

Transcendence Design - a gallery, by appointment on Upper Canyon Road in Santa Fe

Seven Sisters Candle Shop - on 2nd Street in Santa Fe

Ojo Caliente Spa and Resort - in Ojo Caliente north of Santa Fe

The Ark Bookstore - on Romero Street in Santa Fe

(To visit me in Los Angeles I will be at the Abbot Kinney flea market occasional Saturdays and first Fridays. Check my website for info on dates as they come up.)

 

 

The Fourth Thing

"The best advice I ever received was from my first boss at The Onion. He believed you needed three things to be successful in comedy, but I think it applies to almost everything. First, you need natural talent. Second, you need skill development. Third, you need ambition. Everyone's ratio is different, but the most successful people have all of them. It helps to have a fourth thing, too, but I don't know what that is."

- Ben Karlin, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report

(from a book called And Here's the Kicker - Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft by Mike Sacks)

On How Dreams Get Built

This blog entry is long, long overdue. I had wanted to say some things about the Tesuque Flea Market in Santa Fe as a way of closing that experience. I was there for about seven years. It's where I got my feet wet as a merchant and I came into myself as an artist. I got windburned and brow beaten, too. But I'm thankful for it all. Mainly I wanted to write a note about how I met so many amazing people through being there. Some will be life long friends. Some are customers that I will never forget, even if we never ever see each other again. The amount of synchronicity I had around this meeting up of customers was sometimes profound. Very often in these past few years I've been floundering - sometimes very obviously so! - and would just sit there and pray and someone or some group of people would walk in and say the most amazingly uplifting things and our hearts would open and especially through the phase when I was getting divorced but not openly talking about it there were tears as others shared their stories with me. Often their stories were so much more difficult than mine and I felt the privilege of our sharing the space of grieving together for a few moments, via the art that I made. Sometimes people showed up as miracles. Once when I was not sure how I was going to make it through my personal dilemmas I was in line for a taco or something and I thought - man EVERYBODY gets tips - except for me! I mean EVERYBODY has a tip jar out and you're just supposed to give them something, something extra. I said to myself, I want tips! And some time after that, no kidding, a woman with mascara running all down her face from crying after reading my work, bought a whole bunch of things and then TIPPED me a hundred dollars. No kidding. I hadn't even put my tip jar out there. She left and I started crying too. I was weeping behind my silk taffeta curtains. Because more than the money she gave me some very strong words about stepping up in the world and finding my place. I will never forget that. And I was having another complete downer moment a couple years later and was praying in my head, What am I doing here, god help me, I don't think I can go on, and this family stepped in and they were reading my work and gathered all around me and said some amazingly encouraging things. It felt like a spiritual intervention! They were urging me to keep going, to continue. I'm always in this head space of how poetry is hard and I'm grateful but sometimes really pissed off that poetry and art are what I'm called to, in a world that can be so unyielding at times. Perhaps you have to be one, an artist without a choice about being an artist, to know what I mean. Or perhaps you only have to want to be one. Sometimes it sucks. I say over and over again how I'm about where the poetry meets the practical but it is just not easy. It's incredible and it's gratifying but it's not easy.

 
Now that I've seemingly left Santa Fe (I mean nothing is fixed and you never know what life will bring next, but for the moment I find myself in Los Angeles) from comments friends have been making to me, I didn't realize how I'd hardly been happy in Santa Fe, was always waiting for the next steps to reveal themselves. But perhaps I didn't move on because I was afraid to close the circle. In July, towards the very end of my time at the flea market in Santa Fe I intersected with a woman from Chicago who later wrote about her experience of meeting me there. I had meant to post this on my blog then and we had even talked about it. But I got caught up in moving. Here is a slightly shortened version of what she wrote - which upon re-reading it I can see was all about important closures in her life. Which is right timing for me, as I'm living and speaking to important closures in my own life. I will greatly miss the customer-friends and the friend-friends I got to see repeatedly at the flea market. Please come and visit me in LA if you live here or are passing through here.

Let's continue to reach for what matters most and for our deepest dreams to unfold. May we each be supported in miraculous ways in this unfolding. Because already we are. With love and respect.

 
 

Day 3 Santa Fe
 
Very little in the flea market enticed me to touch, let alone pick up to consider for  purchase… until the very last stall next to the gate I entered.

The stall stood more similar to a tent at an art fair, than the other open-air flea market booths. Three-dimensional framed and shadow-box collages hung on one wall, with a chest high table beneath holding more collages along with a display of small gift enclosures and a few tiny pillows with yoga related graphics printed on them. The artist, Lisa Chun, now living in New Mexico, by way of California and DC, I learned, sat behind a lowertable in the back of the booth. A curtain protected her back from the beating sun. Next to her, a spinner displayed greeting cards and envelopes in clear sleeves, a further derivation of the collages.
 

Each collage consisted of a photo layered with vintage and found papers and objects from nature to create some level of abstraction affixed on a canvas or paper base by photo corners. Scraps from a printed page, other pictures comprised the rest, along with a poem or saying written by Lisa. She charged somewhere around a fifty dollars for the collages on canvas, twenty for the prints, and five dollars for the greeting cards. Though watching my money carefully this trip, I loved the original collages so much, I considered purchasing a print. When I realized I could have four smaller versions my mind was made up. The cards still held the impact even at nearly twenty-five percent of twenty percent of the cost.
 

A vacation in New Mexico was planned to nurture my increasing interest in writing. Last year I attended the Taos Writers Conference conducted through the University of New Mexico. Then, I didn’t consider myself a writer; but with regular attendance at writing groups in Chicago, feed back from readers and writers, I returned this year to hone my skills. Though I hoped to meet up with people I met the previous year, those I spent my time with then, chose not to return for one reason or another. As the trip approached, my excitement multiplied with the prospect of distancing myself from the work that drains me and time to think about what’s next for me.  Truth be told, I’m aware and embarrassed that my typical topic of conversation with nearly any friend or family member revolves around needing to change my life, mainly my work life. The docent at the Georgia O’Keefe museum described me when she  explained how to view the films. “It doesn’t matter when you enter; just stay till it starts over and gets to the part where you came in.” I’ve been repeating myself, and I am damned lucky my friends haven’t left where they came in. In a nutshell, so everyone is in the loop, and I don’t have to ever repeat myself, I can’t afford not to work and my soul can’t afford to continue working in the vapid environment I now participate. The vacation is in part to give me time to think and dream and shift into a new direction.

 
Six years ago, I closed a business that lasted seventeen years. While the last couple years were challenging and enervating, they never were boring and I remained in view of my dream until the end. In the years since, I held two other jobs, each clearly temporary from the start – they were placeholders until I got my bearings. I’ve held my current job for nearly four years. I work for an organization I transitioned from to start my business. Going back there, even after close to two decades, felt like home. And, I recognize now, that I have returned to feelings I felt when it was time to leave last time. This time however, I don’t have a vision -- a dream.

  
Which brings me to my time in Albuquerque and Santa Fe; I spent time each day writing then doing whatever I pleased. I visited with a class mate from last summer the first afternoon, explored downtown Santa Fe, drank a terrific tequila margarita at a roof top cantina, toured the Georgia O’Keefe museum and traversed the Tesuque Pueblo Flea Market where I happened upon Lisa Chun and her collages.
I stood at the high table along the open wall, pawing through the prints, putting a couple aside. Lisa asked me where I was from and I told her Chicago. She said she had a friend who studied at the Art Institute and she visited, though not really liking the contrast of homeless in the neighborhoods and minks downtown. She must have seen that I couldn’t decide between the prints and mentioned the cost difference with the greeting cards. I moved over to the table whereshe was sitting to look through them.

I reread the poetry, some more than once. Usually, I don’t really get other people’s verses and pass it by. The first one I pulled out said in ransom-note-cutouts, “This must be the way dreams are built: First  a glimmer, something shaken down from the stars, something made of thelight and air and hope. Then comes all the days of quiet activity in support of it.”

 
I shivered. Lisa’s collage was the theme of my vacation. I’d come to New Mexico, craving time alone, away from the work that drains me, for quiet activity, to build a dream. I pictured the card on my desk or perhaps taped to my bathroom mirror reminding me to continue the quiet activity in support of my dreams.

 
The wording already hooked me; I took time to dissect the graphics. Mostly in sepia tones, the left side with a scrap of handwriting – with only the word love readable, copper verdigris smudges and shadows blending to the right into a side walk along side a row of parked cars. “The shadows,” Lisa said with a bit of a question in her voice to focus my attention, appeared at first as a long dark old-fashioned wood clothes pins, “are my friend from Chicago and me taking the photo. We were in an area called Andersonville.”

 
My mouth went dry. Andersonville, it’s the neighborhood where I lived with my husband and baby when I originally built my last dream, my last big dream -- my company.  In the ensuing years, the marriage ended, the baby grew up and the business closed. The dream evaporated.

 
Today, I closed the circle, the last booth at the Tesuque Pueblo Flea Market, where I received a glimmer … something shaken down from the stars, something made of light and air and hope. And, all the days of quiet activity in support of it.
Hudson McCann

 

The Hallway

I went to a poetry reading in Venice Saturday night. One of the poets was an Angelino formerly from Colorado. She was saying how Colorado is The West, as distinguished from The Southwest, and in The West everyone is two hands held low at the sides of the hips, in the shape of two six shooter pistols always at the ready, bang, bang. Because of course: this is how The West Was Won. Since I'd recently been in Denver, had even found "Easy Street" in a little gambling and saloon town called Center City, I felt like I could see what she was talking about. Totally. But this is an aside. Because then the two Los Angeles poets read poems about Hollywood, and hookers with poodles, and syringes strewn generously about the gritty streets, the romance of Black Dahlia, and more hookers.

Scaring me.

The two Albuquerque poets, in contrast, read poems about the night sky minus any light pollution, how this makes the Milky Way visible as fairy dust for the night trained eye grown accustomed to so much space and loneliness.

Yes, please.

I have mixed emotions, still, about both Santa Fe and Los Angeles. My friend Sumi said that's natural, I'm in The Hallway. The hallway of my current transition, that is. Not all the way in either place...yet. Mostly in Los Angeles, where my physical body and all my physical things are, but otherwise still living at the edges of it. Don't want to accidentally walk into the Los Angeles of street walkers and syringes! Still wanting to find Beauty where I am. Because that is my job, dammit!

Before I left Santa Fe I went to my last writer's group meeting. Kit said, bless her, in all my work I'm writing about and writing my way to a city...and this city of my inner world is called Beauty.

Or she said something almost and vaguely resembling this.

I was of course in my Santa Fe Hallway phase as I wrote her words down, which at the time struck me as brilliant and had landed right on the spot where my metaphorical heart lives. I wrote her words on the back of an envelope which of course now I can't find.

Nope, can't find it.

So, bringing my self, my life, my...as C said her teacher said the other night in Hollywood...dilemma into the present moment, the only good place to bring my self, my life and especially my dilemmas, which are numerous and mainly involving traffic and money, but thankfully outweighed by the number of my blessings.

And so it is.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Secret is in Not Doing

"The creative process offers many examples of the necessity to go down into the unconscious and remain there in weakness, perhaps in depression, boredom, or anxiety, in order to bring up the 'new being,' the creative attitude which can change one's life. The way to this is not a way of 'doing' - which is the Amazon's usual mode of action. In my experience 'not doing' is the secret."

from The Wounded Woman by Linda Leonard

Yes, this is how we roll: old school

As I said earlier, I have the fortune of moving here at the same time as another friend from Santa Fe, C. Fortunate because we share a very unusual perspective, having had a very similar experience while in Santa Fe - intense inner work over a sustained amount of time, a lack of interest in regular world things in favor of a spiritual path and thus early bed-time, a dedication to creative work, big doses of nature on a regular basis, sometimes a sense of isolation. Because of this we also have a similar experience of coming to L.A. - as if being re-born into a world of regular things. TV, traffic, young people, people who stay up past 8pm and out past midnight. I know people did this in Santa Fe but I wasn't one of those people. I was at the (symbolic, not literal) monastery, a monastery of my own making. Caroline Myss, teacher and author, refers to all this from the opposite angle, she calls people who were doing what we were doing, mystics without monasteries. 

I'm repeating myself but I'm going to do it anyway, I feel like I have been sprung from prison. The posh prison of my unraveling. Or like a kid who's never had candy suddenly landing in a candy store. Up past midnight! Young people on the brink of having sex - everywhere!

The other day C and I drove from Venice to Los Feliz. We wrote the directions out - by hand - onto a piece of paper, old school. Because this is how we roll, in the first one and two weeks of being sprung from prison. Because we don't know how to use the GPS in her rental Prius.

In Denver a couple weeks ago, I was taking a quickie nap in my friend M's car and was woken by a phone call she received via her Satellite radio. Who?What? Where am I? Incredulous, was I. Or retarded. It kind of wavers between the two. This feeling of incredulity and this feeling like I am retarded. And I know, I shouldn't even be using the word retarded. But you know what I mean.

A whole world of technology has been blooming while I lived in Santa Fe for the past 7.5 years, while I lived in an Airstream at the base of the mesa, while I lived in a regular (non-adobe) house in the windswept desert, even while I lived in town (in a 200 year old adobe in the historic Guadalupe district) and could walk to the Plaza. Without GPS. Without TV. Without an iPhone.

Who knew?

Here in L.A. boba tea is still fashionable. Boba is tea with milk or tea without milk or some other flavored drink served with big, black, gelatinous tapioca at the bottom of it that you drink through fat straws. It came from China (I think) some 10 years ago. New Mexico is not as out of it as I am and you could even find boba shops in Albquerque. Now you can get it with it bubbles of flavored liquid that pop in your mouth. To me they look like extra large fish eggs. They taste like Kool-Aid. I'm not sure how I feel about this. But it looks neat, right?

One constant here is the ocean. 1000 ways to see the ocean. I don't think I'll ever get tired of it. This in sharp contrast to the 1000 ways I got to see ice last winter, how I shivered my ass off and inundated you all with pictures of ice for an entire season. Trying to make the potentially boring and hazardous to my health into something miraculous. Trying to stay still with it.

Many ways to enter the present moment. What matters most, right here. Right now. Beauty in everything and everyone. Right now I love this.