Madi > Recent Status Updates

It helps to realize that it’s better to follow the universe than those around you.

The person who makes something today
isn’t the same person
who returns to the work tomorrow.

There’s a reason we are drawn
to gazing at the ocean.
It is said the ocean provides
a closer reflection of who
we are than any mirror.

We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output.
The real work of the artist
is a way of being in the world.

Look for what you notice
but no one else sees.

The energy around you can be harnessed to elevate your work. You are part of something much larger than can be explained—a world of immense possibilities.
Harnessing this energy can be marvelously useful in your creative pursuits. The principle operates on faith. Believing and behaving as if it’s true. No proof is needed.

The ability to look deeply
is the root of creativity.
To see past the ordinary and mundane
and get to what might otherwise be invisible.

Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.

If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are. So I stretch out, close my eyes, and listen to the rain.

I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world.

But Nanabozho’s people know time as a circle. Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again.

We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.

We could start by listening to Wally. There are those who will try to sell the gifts, but, as Wally says of sweetgrass for sale, “Don’t buy it.” Refusal to participate is a moral choice. Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought and sold. Don’t buy it. When food has been wrenched from the earth, depleting the soil and poisoning our relatives in the name of higher yields, don’t buy it.

Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.

The little girl I spend twenty-one hours a week with is definitely starting to get it. Every day I watch her grip tighter and tighter onto the feeling of being ignored by the person she loves the most. And she’s this awesome, serious child who loves information and answers, and how could her own mother not appreciate the shit out of this?

Apparently converting my feelings into words is a pathway my neurons are unfamiliar with.

That one simple statement made me feel a lifetime closer to him. Sometimes, Declan simply being who he was felt like a character attack on everyone else. He just existed and in comparison, everyone paled.

Two weeks ago I got the call. If you've ever gotten "the call" in your life, you'll unfortunately know what I mean. The one that creates a before and after in your story, bookending each side. Whatever you had been doing prior to it becomes so hilariously insignificant in comparison to the words coming through the phone speaker.

The white shotgun house appeared, looking the same as she’d remembered, which seemed wrong since her grandmother would not be sitting on the porch to greet them. Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles.

You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.

Kennedy had insisted she couldn’t take time away from work and auditions to visit home, but really, she just wanted her mother to see her New York life. She took a perverse delight in it, like she was a child dragging her over to see the drawing she’d scribbled on the wall. Look at the mess I’ve made!

“But I could never tell my mother any of this,” she said. “She’d just say that she was right. She cares more about being right than being my mother. Sometimes I don’t even think she likes me very much. Isn’t that something? To think your own mother can’t even stand you.”

“I don’t know why you’re fighting it neither. What could be better than being eighteen and in love? Oh, you don’t even know. If I could go back, I’d do everything different.”
“Like what?” she said.
“Oh, everything.” He turned back to the mirror. “This big ol’ world and we only get to go through it once. The saddest thing there is, you ask me.”

This was his gift, a short memory. A long memory could drive a man crazy.

The idea hadn’t been Stella’s at all—during that final summer, it was Desiree who’d decided to run away after the picnic. Which should not have been surprising, perhaps. Hadn’t she, for years, told anyone who would listen that she couldn’t wait to leave Mallard? Mostly she’d told Stella, who indulged her with the patience of a girl long used to hearing delusions.

I was to guard Duke not in my uniform but as a plainclothes officer. It would appear to any outside observer that a black man was hanging out with the Klan. Again, I raised objectives to the chief at the ridiculousness of this order, but I loaded my gun with five bullets to kill five assholes if need be and set out for the day.

The fact that he [David Duke] won an election as a Republican after failing twice as a Democratic candidate says a lot about the mind-set of the electorate. The conservative right-wing Republican political agenda was then and still is much more in sync with white, hate-fueled racist extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Everything that follows was accomplished despite, and in spite of, the supremacists’ claim in some cases to being highly educated, having more intelligence, and being far superior in every way to blacks and Jews, and anyone else they deemed inferior.

If one black man, aided by a bevy of good, decent, dedicated, open-, and liberal-minded whites and Jews can succeed in prevailing over a group of white racists by making them look like the ignorant fools they truly are, then imagine what a nation of like-minded individuals can accomplish.

Everyone gets an ending. Whether or not it’s happy is up to them.

hE looked around at hiS white walls, not seeing that hE alone held a string. hE would never reach up and feel the thread on hiS eyes. hE would never feel the zipper on hiS mouth.
“You are free now,” the voice said.
But hE could not hear it. hE could only sit in hiS solitary confinement. Watching the town. Looking for the next child.