Adult-Adjacent Practices
tabling at a Duplex Group Show July 16th 3-9pm, then a little heart update
I am the kind of person that wants to do everything all the time.
Let’s learn to quilt! Let’s revive a deep love for ceramics! Let’s learn to be a spiritual medium! Oh wait, need a DIY exorcism? I’m your guy! Wanna find out the entire history of your studio building from 1909 to the present? Ok, sure! I’ll become a lay-researcher at the Vancouver Archives! Let’s sell a truck! Let’s try and swim every day! In the ocean! Ok, now go on at least 100 dates this year! Reclaim your sexuality! Go to therapy! Write! Be the studio vibes manager! Volunteer! Have a humungous deep spiritual and material transformation! Start a business! Pay your rent! Don’t be sad! Keep going! Read your emails! Cultivate connection and friendship! Write your newsletter!
Look, it’s a lot, I know.
I live like this. In this. With this.
This is how my brain works, you guys and for this same reason, today, there’s gonna be two sections of this ol’ newsletter. The first, an invitation to come to a group show at Duplex, the second, a bit of a heart update.
Come out to our show! I’ll be tabling on Friday July 16th from 3pm-9pm selling a few quilts and some new ceramic work, some snippets of which are pictured below. It’ll be a cash event and a wonderful group of folks will be exhibiting experimental work in the gallery. You can always email me—or text me if you have my digits ;)—if you get lost or need directions. It’s gonna be a blast and I hope you’ll come and see my studio and check out the lovely space I spend so much of my time in.
Here's a sneak peek at some things up for sale; lots of fun playing with light and shadow in functional forms :)
Hope to see you all there!
Today we’re going to talk about pain.
A few nights ago, and many of the nights before this week, I’ve felt something strangling my heart. A pressure and weight not too different from the one I felt as a kid, sitting alone in the dark humid of a one bedroom Toronto apartment soaking in fear. School holidays, Mamaie overseas. Like trying to break glass. Like smashing that vase I wrote about a few weeks back. Like the dry feeling of pain in the back of your throat when you’re cornered and alone—acrid and bilious, anaerobic and exhausting.
Today we’re going to talk about pain.
I fell in love with someone. At a party in the winter we danced across from each other, their eyes on my waist and the deep-cut v of my shirt the entire time. Later, face to face, inches away from their lips, the hallway mirror fell on my head, and they caught it out of reflex, despite their drunkenness. It made me laugh and made me wet all at the same time. Riding in the pick-up beside them, their steady wide left hand on the hard plastic wheel and their right on the shifter, they cracked endless joke after joke, and flirted with me in their steel toes. Later on the phone, they could barely admit their attraction, managing to squeak out something in the vein of “I don’t just have friend-feelings for you”, but could not articulate any more, could not be kind or gentle, and did not want my kindness or gentleness back. They did not love me back. There was pain.
I met someone and was swept off my feet. In a small cabin in the woods, I had a vision in the night of waking up beside them, but there was someone else’s face—someone else’s grinning leer—in the place where their face ought to have been. Spirit knew my name and was calling it in spirit’s hoarse and frightening voice all night. Later, they came to visit me and watched me in my sleep without permission and invitation. An unwelcome and unwanted objectification. They told me I was beautiful with alarming regularity. Those words meant nothing coming out of them, but I am beginning to believe they are true. I left them after they refused to apologize for an invasion of privacy and then refused to leave my home. I destroyed all that we made together with the awkwardly-weighted hammer that hangs on my studio wall. Then I was alone and there was pain.
I went on a mediocre date with someone for 45 minutes. Months later I moved into this studio with their help. I went to a children’s museum with them, high out of my tree, I stuck my tongue out to drink the clear water spurting furtively out of the artisanal water fountain when no one was looking, and later the smell of chocolate and cinnamon at the bakery near my studio made my knees weak. I was (and continue to be full) of mischief, up to no good. They touched me for the first time then, and told me that my confidence was electric. Once it took them two weeks to respond to a text asking to hang out, then, when I tried to talk to them about how that was hurtful, they told me they have something called rejection-sensitivity. A few months ago they left town and now they have returned to the studio and I am annoyed at my luck that they were not accidentally drowned in the crossing from Europe. We’ll be seeing each other often, and there might be pain.
I’ve been listening to a podcast on secular Buddhism and the host has much to say about life being pain, about BINGO cards and about not knowing what is good and what is bad.
The pain is hard but I’m grateful for the pain. It’s helped me to understand that I chose wide-hands and not-your-real-face and studio-ghost. I chose them all and I chose to keep investing energy and time. I chose my own disappointment. I chose to ascribe my feelings for them to them, rather than recognizing that they’re mine. I chose to think that they made me wet, instead of understanding my attraction as mine, related to them, but fundamentally about me and my body and my sexuality and my pleasure and my life. Mine.
mine. under my control. belonging to me. a function of my unfolding process, story and sovereignty.
I sometimes choose well, but mostly I have chosen poorly. There are good reasons for this, old reasons, but I am an adult and I’d like this pain to teach me to do better. It’s part of life anyways, might as well learn from it. I am trying to be kind to myself, to recognize this truth with a bit of equanimity, whenever possible. Life is pain, and I cannot do anything about that but continue to live—to point to life—to be full of life.