* * *

In The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a 3-year-old girl is crying. She’s sad beyond words and hurting beyond pain because earlier that same day a man broke into her house, killed her parents, kidnapped her brother and brutally raped her. She was left for dead on the dirt floor of her own home. Three-year-old rape victims exist. Do you?

* * *

It feels something like a leg.

Like a leg, bent for too long, slung over the edge of a bit too high chair so it doesn’t quite make contact with the ground and slowly falls asleep. It feels like that leg. Like that leg, its blood pinched at the knee, dysfunctional for fear it might topple the world and disappoint those watching. But then, just as the leg begins its insidious decent, a shift, and blood slams through veins and arteries and the entire chaotic awakening sets sail right into the midst of a squall, spinning out of control because it’s been asleep for three hours and all that life pouring back in like a bursting levy, tiny corn fields smashed by all that withheld water, overwhelms the leg till it screams like a river after a hard rain. Like that leg wants to escape itself so badly it explodes out of its own skin just to relieve the pressure, a living, atomic leg filled with a trillion tiny needles relieving itself as it wakes.

* * *

In Ethiopia there’s a woman. She’s blind, rather; she has no eyes. Ten years ago the Lord’s Resistance Army tied her to a tree and forced her to watch as they murdered her sons in front of her. And then they, as if to sear the memory in her mind and keep her from seeing beyond that moment, slid a military grade knife into her eye sockets. They cut the eyes from her head like scooping seeds from a squash while her hands and feet tore away bark on the neighborhood tree. This woman exists. Do you ever question anything?

* * *

And you’ve never had anyone tell you anything but a leg feels like a leg.

But sitting there with your laptop or reading this on your $600 phone, you realize you’ve never had many people tell you much of anything at all, have you? Maybe most people won’t tell you that your life is like a comatose leg dying of radioactive fallout. But maybe most of what you hear doesn’t sound all that great or strange anyhow, and maybe this advice is just as good as anything else streaming from reality TV. Because most conversations aren’t really conversations, are they? And most of life isn’t spent actually living, is it? So you sit, gazing at your glowing tool on your comfy couch in your warm, well-lit house and think this kid must be absolutely crazy or doped up or protesting something because he isn’t making any sense and even seems a little upset with the world.

And maybe you kind of like it.

* * *

There’s this girl. This girl feels like pieces of freckled, internal cloud anatomy. Dissect a cloud, you’ll find her there. Like one of those wispy, white, powerful clouds descended and surrounded your entire body and you can feel her on every hair. She feels like that first, perfect kiss; like a floating cloud orgasm. And this girl has a lot of great ideas, but she has no idea what the hell she’s doing here. But she’s trying to figure it out. She’s trying to figure it out, and I’m just trying to get to class, yet somehow our worlds collide. And all of a sudden, I’m in a cloud.

* * *

In Kenya there’s a teenage girl. The Lord’s Resistance Army approached her one afternoon while she was collecting wood. They tied her down and cut off her lips. They took a knife and peeled away the soft flesh of her mouth and then proceeded to cut off her right ear. This teenage girl is real, and she is living today. Are you angry yet?

* * *

How can one person try so diligently to understand life, love and God whilst simultaneously dealing with such frustration and irritation and the next person not try to understand anything yet simultaneously claim to know everything about life, love and God?

* * *

Because sometimes it feels like a hill. Like a grassy hill that feels different during the day than it does at night when no one else is around and the sky is black besides trillions of stars speckling the spectacular darkness. And we used to sit on that hill for hours talking about life, love and God and whether either one truly existed and if they did, whether or not they were friends. It feels like a hill sometimes, sloped just enough so our legs don’t have to hang off of anything. They simply lie there, extended, perfectly aligned with the rest of our bodies, not falling into a coma or dying slowly or any of that. It feels like a hill where two unique souls can tangle in the messiness of life, love and God and not have to worry about who is more right, whether pot is more sinful than alcohol or if politics is worth it. And we think about Africa, cry over her as we gaze at the stars. And it feels like figuring things out without figuring anything out at all.

I’m awake. And nothing in my leg explodes.

Inspiration for African stories

The aim is to eliminate the walk. By drilling clean water wells close to home, a comparably extraordinary large amount of time for education, job creation and other important, personally and socially beneficial activities is freed up for millions of young girls all across sub-Saharan Africa. We want to trade Jerry cans for text books, sweat for time and dirty water for clean.

Hopper said this about his art:

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the human intellect for a private imaginative conception.

And he also said this:

So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect

In one instance Hopper follows a hard line, one of nearly absolute borders, guidelines and natural vision. While in the next, he follows a softer line, one seemingly based on something other than conceptual cognition or vision, one more abstract and potentially flimsier in comparison to the firm portrayal of life in the first. And to these seemingly contradictory thought patterns, I relate. Not that I’m a world class artist in the making or that I even consider myself an artist, but that there is an innate tension between creating based upon our imaginative response to natural, physical sensations and creating based upon the movement of our subconscious minds and unidentifiable, inner sources of expression. There are the hard lines of nature and concrete, and then there are the ever-transforming, windy protrusions of abstract imaging. There is a constant pull between the two when it comes to creativity and, in general, life.

What I draw from Hopper’s Nighthawks and his take on art, is that an artist absolutely has to be something. It’s contemporary and controversial to hang a string of lights on a wall and call it art. The creator, however, understands why it is art, and even if he doesn’t, at the very least, knows that he doesn’t understand and thus believes in its capacity as art and knows that this is exactly why it must therefore be accomplished. You can’t just throw paint onto a canvas and call it art. You have to know that it’s art or know that it’s not art, and accept it as a creation regardless of whether or not it should or should not be. Art simply must be. It has to move in a direction, for if it does not, it ceases to exist or not exist for anything. And, of course, to exist for nothing is a choice. Yet once you acknowledge that you exist for nothing, you suddenly begin existing for existing-for-nothing. And therefore exist for something, indeed.

To my point, especially in growing older, know and understand deeply what it is that you exist for. Know it inside and out and chase after that which is what you are, wholeheartedly, and never look back. Choose a way, take an initial step, and choose not to choose a million other ways. Choose to be what it is that you were created to be. And go create in response to you having been someone’s creation. Be meaningful. Be ambiguous. Just be sure to be what it is you are claiming to be, because life is a gift. It’s a priviledge to grow older and to create as we move along.

Another great Mother’s Day…

Kendall got knocked in the eye. Temporary, makeshift bandage just in case.

{The above photo can be seen on my brother’s new blog, Espíritu Viajaro. He’s in Peru this Summer working at a medical clinic, and he’ll be sharing his insights from there.}

I love you Mom!