the simple truth

On Saturday, Reya drove me to Baltimore to visit the American Visionary Art Museum. A friend of hers, after seeing one of my spirit bottles, had told her she needed to take me there. She was right. The name itself was a draw…the word visionary linked so comfortably to the word art. We drove through the storm, the winds howling and the rain pounding, and we arrived at the near empty museum. The moment I saw it, I knew it was a sacred site, a temple I could worship at, being banded in an exquisite mosaic, with a big eye affixed to the outside wall.

We walked in and it was like walking into the museum of our inner lives, like the artists knew our stories and had been commissioned to do works that addressed our dreams and visions. A museum that housed not only the Titanic and Elvis but addressed the power of charging up water, the magic of toasting, that had shrines and altars galore, and had printed up in large letters; “Many creative people observe that their best ideas come to them while taking a shower”, this was a museum that seemed to know us quite intimately. I had to wonder if the installations magically transformed to speak intimately to each group and individual who entered, such was the power of our experience.

“The simple truth known to the brokenhearted, the mystic, and the physicist: what we think solid is not.”

This was the first statement that announced the current installation; Holy H2O, Fluid Universe. With water pouring down from the sky, and our world in major flux due to the heartache of a friend’s choices, nothing could be more, as the Brits say, spot on.

Our journey to the American Visionary Art Museum has inspired me. I’ll be taking the visions I had there to my studio in San Francisco. Going through the museum, I could feel in my bones the wisdom of dumping out the toxic waters of the world that had been collecting for years in the spell my community was doing. Water has to keep breathing to live. It has to move, it has to flow. Like earth, I am mostly water. And I too, must stay fluid.

After the museum, Reya and I ran through the rain to the car, and then sought refreshment near the harbor. Sitting at a table, slightly damp from the storm, eating fresh seafood with the friend I love so dearly, I was overcome with gratitude. Nothing is solid, but oh, so much has been poured out for me in this lifetime.