It’s October, 2020.

The world is in absolute chaos, so it seems - though it’s not quite chaos; it’s almost too orderly for that. Too planned. Too obvious with hindsight and with the foreshadowing of centuries of history which tell us all good things must come to an end. OF COURSE our democracy has crumbled, our voting rate was abysmal and people in power are corruptible and we always sweep our mess under the rug and there are no solutions we can agree on when we can’t even agree on basic facts. And everyone seems overwhelmed by the facts these days, and the lack of facts, and the disregard for facts and the consequences of facts. Fact: There is a pandemic that has changed our way of life — that has made us choose between family and friends, that has made us forgo the things we once did with near religious abandon - the football watch parties, the weddings and birthday celebrations and holiday parties, the happy hours and the fundraisers and the concerts …. we all know the list. It goes on and on and on. We’ve all sacrificed these joys in our life for the greater good, because our long-term health and the health of our loved ones is paramount, and our health care system is broken. Who can afford to get sick? Who wants to risk a life-threatening complication? Who wants to shoulder the burden of being a super-spreader?

But who are we without the things that bring us together? Who are we without the things that connect us to each other, that make humanity about community? Are these sacrifices we are making helping us to become better people? Are we digging deep and trying to find the beauty in the broken, and does seeing the beauty in the broken somehow make us kind of broken or is it what keeps us moving? Are we moving together, or are we moving apart? How can we move together when we are apart? Especially when it seems like we are all so…..far…..apart politically, socially, economically, morally. Especially when the President is calling on white supremacists to “stand by” at the polls in the hopes of suppressing voter turnout, when the President is calling on domestic terrorist groups to “liberate” Michigan from a governor who has done the best she can to protect her citizens from the threats we are all facing as people in today’s America. Especially when an absolute warrior of a woman who spent decades fighting for women’s rights and gender equality dies, and instead of mourning our losses as a nation, she is replaced by a woman who will undo it all.

Man the days are hard. The temptation of hibernation is very real for a lot of people, it seems. We are exhausted from our responsibilities, from our fears, from our thoughts, from the stories we have created about ourselves and our faults and our failures. Sometimes I wonder: Why do we wake up every morning? Why do decide to live each day when death is all around us? How do we keep the hopes and dreams driving us to tomorrow alive when every day those hopes enter a boxing ring and get absolutely crushed by a system manipulated to slowly beat us all into complacent servitude?

“…Hope is the thing with feathers…”

You know, I don’t know. But our hopes, they are not fragile, and our dreams are uncontainable. These are not things that easily break. These are things that withstand despite their very nature — despite not even being made of matter, or maybe because they aren’t made of matter. So often I’m reminded Emily Dickinson’s poem and just how perfect it is: ‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all….” A bird doesn’t fly without its feathers, but feathers long outlive the bird they are attached to. People cannot live without hope, but our hopes can long outlive us. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream and every day millions of people work toward it in their own little ways. We are the feathers that make us. We are the hopes that fly.

I’ve been spending a lot of time this last month or two thinking about starlings and the mesmerizing murmurations they create across the sky, when each starling so easily and so instinctively becomes part of something greater than itself, when it works in total harmony with its flock to fend of predators and survive. They’ve been the inspiration for a painting that I’m still not done with (sometimes art takes its own time, and I’ve got so many different projects going on, I’m like an octopus with my tentacles in all the cookie jars) and I just find them fascinating. They are beautiful, talkative songbirds (click for an appropriate soundscape) with iridescent feathers that sparkle with violet, turquoise and teal. Like many bird species, their population is declining, partially due to changing land use practices; in the United Kingdom, the starling population declined 80 percent between 1987and 2012. This is an absolute tragedy because their murmurations are one of the most beautiful natural sights a person can see, in my opinion. When they murmurate, it’s like music dancing across the sky. It’s like witnessing the moment when another living creature shifts between being an individual and a whole. It’s like watching the micro and the macro of everything all at once. It’s like knowing you’re a cell in your body, and you’re your body, and your body is part of a whole Body, which is itself part of a Whole Body that is just one tiny planet in a universe of billions of tiny planets. That’s what starlings remind me of. They are so appropriately named, like a living embodiment of all the stars in the sky reminding us all that are not an individual, that we are part of a Whole. We are one, and we are One.

I don’t get out to see the sun a lot these days because work and projects keep me busy and inside, glued to my computer like an addict, but I did go for a hike yesterday in one of my favorite places, a place that feels like home to me. And my mind wandered quite a bit during that hike, as it does: to all the other times I’d been on those trails, the memories they carry, the paths I’ve taken, how there is no one way through that space or any space, how the paths I’ve chosen intertwine and differ but always lead to the same outcome: I leave because I am but a visitor to this land. It owns me more than I own it, and it tells me when to leave and when to stay, speaks directly to my soul with the way it plays with the sun rays bouncing off its leaves and through its trees, the ever-changing soundscapes between nights and days — all of it a cosmic language most of us don’t take the time to hear, let alone understand. And there’s this thing that happens to favorite places and spaces over time, especially natural spaces: They change, and yet, they stay the same. They move forward with the seasons, and yet, they come back year after year. They grow, and yet, they die. They are new, and yet they are old. They are haunted by ghosts and memories. Step by step through my favorite woods can carry me through time as much as through space, as each step I place in the dirt reminds me other steps I’ve taken, companions I’ve had, accidents that happened, seeds of feelings and emotions that grow over time. Some steps are so familiar to me they could be a hundred timelines converging all at once, and some steps look so foreign that I’m not sure where I am or what direction I am heading

But you’ve got to stay present in the woods. There’s nothing like a good rattlesnake encounter to keep someone focused on the present moment, on the next step, on the natural beauty of the trail ahead, on nature’s chosen color pallets and gradients and textures and patterns and perfections and imperfections. And in those more present moments, I couldn’t help but notice, as I have time and time before but as is always good to be reminded of, of the amazing biodiversity necessary for a forest to exist in harmony, of how evolution fills every every tiny niche and purpose to create complete symbiosis. This little woods I am in has so many different plant and animal communities — natural neighborhoods that intersect and intertwine and relate to each other in a web of intricate connections with a consciousness that we just aren’t privy to, holding conversations too quiet for us to hear and too complex for us to grasp. The forest doesn’t thrive because of biodiversity - it survives because of it. Diversity in the natural world isn’t an afterthought, or a choice, or some kind of self-improvement. It is absolutely fundamental and foundational and necessary to its core, to its existence.

People can learn a lot from this tiny woods, from the forest, from the whole natural world. We try so hard to assimilate, to be the same, to belong, to feel connected, but it’s not our similarities that make us successful, necessary, valuable. It’s our differences. It’s our unique perspectives that we can offer to each other. It’s the different choices we’ve made, the varying challenges we’ve overcome, the solutions nobody else thought of. And it’s our unique characteristics that make us who we are, from the color of our skin to our physical abilities and our intelligence and whether the world tells us we are beautiful or not. Like the forest, humanity could not survive if we all had the same strengths and weaknesses, the same fears and desires, the same thoughts and solutions. And that’s so important to not just remember, but to celebrate - especially now, especially today, when diversity is a political hot topic and our differences are so demonized and controversial.

CREATIVITY EXERCISE

feather_patterns%2526brushes8.jpg — Fun with Photoshop Brushes

I love using a lot of texture in my digital work, and one of the best ways to create texture is by utilizing different photoshop brushes — or by making your own using Photoshop and Illustrator! I made several different feather brushes during the creation of “Murmurations,” first by building basic vector shapes in Illustrator and then importing those smart objects into Photoshop and shading them in using transparency options. Fortunately, making your own Photoshop brushes is **super simple** (basically, once you’ve got the design you want, go to Edit: Define Brush Preset and you’ve got yourself a usable brush!) Time spent making and playing with brushes is never wasted (or maybe I should say passes by ridiculously quickly?), as brushes are surprisingly multifunctional as either stamps or strokes by using Brush Presets and altering shape dynamics, scattering, and transparency options.

WORK IN PROGRESS: SNEAK PEAKS

COMING SOON | STAY TUNED:

3-D ILLUSTRATIONS! OCTUPUS SOULS! ROAD TRIP INFOGRAPHICS! ELECTIONS!