Eclipse 2017

What does a crescent light yield when choosing stillness?  From expectations, we harvest restlessness...and myopia.

Meg is still alive in me

watch and read about here:  http://vimeo.com/91961386

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Samhain/All Soul's Day, 2013

The moment doesn't know what it wants to be. An intense and balmy Fall day, with notes of Spring and Summer both––holding symbols of possibility and renewal, yet on the day where darkness is present more than ever and the veils between here and there are at their thinnest. We are exactly halfway between the Fall equinox and Winter solistice. We are inbetween. Both literally and figuratively. It is noon, yet the color outside my window is closing on sunset. A funeral procession leaves the corner church. And the bell continues to ring. 

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'Ricochet'

'Ricochet' is a commissioned piece to accompany live music performance. Taking the form of a cinepoem, the work uses appropriated footage from the Prelinger archive to explore the haunting nature of our atomic legacy.

Watch 'Ricochet' here

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1000 Cranes

driving to and fro in silence these days, the familiar country landscape with its repetition moving by me in a peripheral blur.  the mounds, the radio tower, the hand-painted sign for honey, the terriers greeting the day.  i turned toward them to catch a glimpse at 60 miles per hour.  1000 cranes point the way, and the death card, while Latin guitar emanates from the room next door.

i float.  pluto enveloping me, saturn beneath, and uranus is the sky.

Between here and there...

...lies Fukushima

My piece for the Elon Faculty Biennial 'Art Kit' exhibition:

braille text, scrapbooking embellishments

Scrapbooking embellishments serve to adorn experiences “preserved” between the pages of ready-made scrapbooks: some moments from our past are made pretty, while others are implicitly erased.  In the piece “Between Here and There Lies Fukushima” these embellishments are poetically transformed into braille text on the gallery wall.

"Here" is vague, "there" is vague... where is Fukushima exactly?  The text metaphorically points to a kind of blindness and invisibility.

My work for the last year has examined the ongoing Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan, a result of the 2011 Tsunami.  I have sought to question and challenge the emotional distance and lack of awareness in the U.S. of this global tragedy, which has surpassed Chernobyl in gravity and scope.  The scrapbooking embellishments serve to ground the tragedy in the personal (we are interconnected after all).  Yet simultaneously, the foregrounded “sparkliness” and kitsch sentiment act also as a barrier, symbolically underscoring the challenge to emotional engagement with catastrophe.


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Japan Tsunami Anniversary

Japan Tsunami Anniversary (listen here)

“Japan Tsunami Anniversary” takes its name from the short commemorative article that appeared in my local newspaper, The News and Record, on March 11, 2012.  In this piece audio becomes a vessel for meditation on information, transmission, and emotional distance, specifically through the lens of the devastating earthquake that hit Japan just over 18 months ago. 

As a ritual of remembrance in the style of “Lectio Divina” (divine reading), on March 11, 2012, I contemplatively read the article “Japan Tsunami Anniversary,” yet could not transcend my distraction from the surrounding headlines, advertisements, images, navigation menus, animated gifs, etc.  To give form to the many layers of visual noise that continuously flood our vision (which arguably creates a barrier to empathetic connection), I recorded not only the reading of the article text itself, but also all of the text surrounding the article, in the same contemplative way.  The arguably more significant information––the content of the article itself––is overpowered: one may only pick up an occasional meaningful word such as “earthquake,” “Fukushima,” and “crisis”.  As the sound piece reveals, by the length of the resulting tracks, reading through the navigation menus and surrounding headlines of other articles took considerably more time than the reading of the article itself, suggesting a particular weight of importance.  In addition, my voice, when layered upon itself in the lectio divina style of reading, becomes almost mechanical, further suggestive of emotional distance and barriers to empathy.

The piece offers this question: how do we transcend complacency, short attention span, and emotional distance to feel genuine and lasting empathy in the face of mass stimulation and multi-layered information overload, particularly when global crises leave the media spotlight as quickly as they came into view?  

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Contiguity

A reflection of so many things......embodies everything....

hymn to the sacred body of the universe

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

for one instant
to dwell in the presence of the galaxies
for one instant
to live in the truth of the heart
the poet says this entire traveling cosmos is
“the secret One slowly growing a body”

two eagles are mating—
clasping each other’s claws
and turning cartwheels in the sky
grasses are blooming
grandfathers dying
consciousness blinking on and off
all of this is happening at once
all of this, vibrating into existence
out of nothingness

every particle
foaming into existence
transcribing the ineffable

arising and passing away
arising and passing away
23 trillion times per second—
when Buddha saw that,
he smiled

16 million tons of rain are falling every second
on the planet
an ocean
perpetually falling
and every drop
is your body
every motion, every feather, every thought
is your body
time
is your body,
and the infinite
curled inside like
invisible rainbows folded into light

every word of every tongue is love
telling a story to her own ears

let our lives be incense
burning
like a hymn to the sacred
body of the universe
my religion is rain
my religion is stone
my religion reveals itself to me in
sweaty epiphanies

every leaf, every river,
every animal,
your body
every creature trapped in the gears
of corporate nightmares
every species made extinct
was once
your body

10 million people are dreaming
that they’re flying
junipers and violets are blossoming
stars exploding and being born
god
is having
déjà vu
I am one
elaborate
crush
we cry petals
as the void
is singing

you are the dark
that holds the stars
in intimate
distance

that spun the whirling,
whirling,
world
into existence

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

--Drew Dellinger

Pinned under glass

The current state of the Elegies series:

A recollection

I watched the cast shadows of leaves rain down upon the knoll.  Appearing like butterflies in a hovering dance above the clearing, clumsy in flight.  An embodiment of the sacred pause.

The potential for seeing anew

The flowerhead of an onion

Sunday

the arrival home
greeted by a swarm of moths

The gruesome always accompanies the lovely

echoes of grey ghosts
scratching between walls
and scurrying

a reminder of Idaho
where the headless circled my farmhouse
where their bodies burned in my oven 
(the charred melancholy aroma still lingering in my nostrils)
and where they did win one battle with Frida, under the pine tree 

kindred spirits, they and I


This weekend, I feel lucky to have inhabited the lodge with the mice.

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Compassion and Forming One Body

“While intellectually we may know we’re all connected, how do we truly make the boundaries between inner and outer-–our skin–-literally and metaphorically, more porous? How do we embody what we understand intellectually? What are some ways in which we can practice forming one body?”
  
A talk at the Church of the Covenant sojourner service in Greensboro, NC, given by me on July 24, 2011.  Click here to listen:  http://vimeo.com/26865778 

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A plan of what's to come

the greenhouse: a space of light, experimentation, and open possibilities.  A collaboration between myself, architect Robert Charest, and students.  A vintage lord and burnham model, in a gazillion pieces... in its finished form the greenhouse will be an experimental engaged-learning space for interdisciplinary collaboration, helping to connect science/art disciplines and foster community.

MJ

a west wind moves
by way of the golden wheat
and dissolves in salt

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One year anniversary

August arrived carrying hope, potential.  August arrives again, and with it brings the advent of what is.  The creeping jenny continues to fill the gaps.  Even better this year.  And it points me to the missing limb that was inside my own body this whole time.


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Through the heart

QUIETNESS Rumi; Translated by Coleman Barks

Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side. Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now. You're covered with thick clouds. Slide out the side. Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you've died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now.

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sigh

a sharp tear, from which
an intuiting blood flows
toward wholeness

so much of us stuck in a state of waiting... only gazing at reflections.


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What does the wind mean?

I am wired to hear only whispers.


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