February 12 1997
Today I met a Native American healer who works with youth, a life passion he chose after an elder suggested he vision quest. His main message to me was to follow my instincts. He spoke of being aware of how there is a connection between people, nature, wildlife and the universe, as all beings are connected everywhere at the same time, and how it is important to listen to the needs of wildlife, as helping them will help mankind too. He spoke too of his reverence for women, and his respect on the strength of native women.
May 9, 2024
Thank you healer, you speak to me now as you did back in ’97.
This week I read through 5 years of diaries, tightly handwritten, thin, single spaced journals. These portals into the past, informing my future are deeply healing. Narratives of time written in timbres, and textures highlighting living as a women of independent means, balancing love of nature and higher consciousness.
The waterproof container, holding all of these journals are a chrysalis, and turning 60, “when in the autumn of my years” was always when I vowed to reread - repurpose, but only realize now that I need to present as collage. To continue to follow instinct, my love of collage, visual collage, collage of performance sounds, of dialog collage poems, which are all aspects of Autumn-mixup.
In my several decade long journals, I’ve written a verbal collage of my life as a women, the jolts of juncture between life changes, crisis, good times, dreams. The younger writer of the past perhaps was inviting her future self, when old enough to answer her questions, help her see her past self.
Many characters: time, nature, ad hoc moments are auditioned for sincerity, and stored as a honeysuckle song for those who choose to encounter, ephemeral beauty of the blossom.
I am writing Autumn-mix up as a modern long poem, an artist terrain blurring/combining mediums, genres, modes (literary, visual aesthetic, activist climate quest, narrative). Written not with a book focus but as practice.
Anything can enter this compositional field (Duncan) offered as a series having no beginning and no end, as its condition is scattered. Boundlessly moving now as a butterfly out of chrysalis, not worried whether the work will survive in the winter, but rather wanting it to stay open - hanging in an endless autumn.
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