2022: A Year in Art, Life, and Reclamation

I have no idea how to get started, other than how I get started with everything else I’ve ever done: Just get started. Just set the mood, poor the coffee, play the music and start typing and see where the words go.

It’s the time of year for some deep, pointed reflection, which we all attempt to do in the hopes that we can improve on our lives and the world in the year to come. It’s the time to assess our progress, to ask ourselves if our decisions are making us happy, or sad, or frustrated or rejuvenated. Are we higher or lower on the success charts than we were 12 months ago, and how will we define our successes in the future? In what ways do our lives need to change or improve to get us to where we want to go?

Looking back, 2022 was a good year for me. It was the year I let go of trauma. It was the year I transformed grief. It was the year I settled into myself. I bought a house. I moved across the country. I finished writing and illustrating a book. I made a lot of art. I found ways to be happy, ways to hold on to peace, new tools and resolve for creation. I might not have achieved my goals, but I’ve kept dreaming. I’ve felt some magic. I think I’ve made some magic.

The year started off in absolute perfection: Light painting and playing music while camping out at a friend’s backyard campfire. Looking back, I can’t think of a better, more all-encompassing way to start a year off but it’s not repeatable (at least, not this year). It set the tone for what I wanted my life to be: Simple, magical, creative and peacefully joyful. And that’s really the most important aspect of the New Year: it’s a way to set the tone and a time to set intentions for the entire year to come. The year before had not been an easy one for me. I spent most of it in a severe depression, mostly caused by the trauma of my mom dying of stage IV lung cancer near the beginning of the pandemic and the guilt/grieving process that followed — but also just the state of the world. Inflation. The culture wars. 2021 had just felt like an incredibly … insecure … year. So getting 2022 off to the perfect start meant a lot to me.

For some reason, I spent a lot of time in January focused on whales. I started a mixed media collage painting of a humpback whale jumping out of the water, wrote a love letter to whales and worked on a few illustrations for The Book of Wonder, the first chapter of a collection of illustrations focused on portals, multiple universes and different states of Being. A lot of the things in my life have meaning or symbology, or I assign them meaning, and whales have just kind of always symbolized a kind of peaceful caretaking wisdom to me, which might have been what I needed at the time: I was planning a cross-country move to a city I’d only really been to once and trying to imagine the life I wanted to build here. What would I do with all the room?! I pictured my home 10 years in the future, filled to the brim with art and nature and a life’s work when that life starts almost completely over at 40 years old. I was saying my goodbyes to places and people that had been the centers of my life for the last 17 years. But I was also preparing to transform my life into something that consisted of more than crying in my room wondering what was wrong with me. I did a lot of crafting, a lot of abstract fabric painting to get the creative flow for the year moving.

FEBRUARY 2022

But all was not well. The trauma of depression and grief that followed the pandemic lingered everywhere in Austin for me, and I totaled my car one night during an emotional meltdown. I walked away with nothing but some bruises and a growing feeling that I just really, really, really had to start over if I was going to move forward. The bad news was, I’d lost thousands of dollars and the luxury of a self-starting vehicle. The good news was, my world had not ended and I’d gotten a kind of clarity from the crash that only comes from a concussion and a near death experience. I found the beauty in second chances while trying my best to have just one more experience, one more moment, one more memory, one more time with the friends and place I’d loved for so long, just in case I didn’t find those things for some time again. I bought a van and packed my belongings.

MARCH

In March, my friends bid me farewell with a wonderful going away party and some printed photos to remember them by and I hit the long road to Pittsburgh in my 2004 Toyota Sienna that my friend Anthony had helped me find. Along the way I saw cherry blossoms in Memphis, an amazing sunset along a rural road outside Nashville, and old friends and their families. The pictures were the first thing I unpacked when I got to Pittsburgh, where I gave them a place of honor on my fridge so that I could see them every day. The pictures made me smile even when it was snowing outside, on the days when I wondered whether I’d lost my mind and questioned my life’s choices. Why hadn’t I been able to “make it” in Austin?

But Pittsburgh quickly won me over. I discovered new favorite places to visit, and even though they didn’t yet hold the memories and timewarps and personal significance that my favorite places in Austin (Onion Creek, Mueller Lake, Laguna Gloria, the greenbelt, and on and on and on had), I felt comfortable knowing that some day they might. The city is full of abandoned churches, old architecture and a mighty but beautiful character that inspired me to begin a repurposing and upcycling hobby in earnest. It has cloudy sunsets, nice parks,