Osprey Landing II Preliminary Painting For Osprey Landing III (Below)

We’ve met the enemy and he is us.
- Pogo

So much happens in the border territory
on the edges of human existence
Where things are unpredictable
Where things are interesting
Where the best and the worst things in life happen.
Death happens there. Happiness happens there too though. Failure happens there. A big life happens there.

Always willing to embark on the new adventure.
Always willing to abandon yesterday’s adventure.
My life has gone in circles.
It’s been a good life, a big life.
New adventures are always fun. Always exciting.
Friendship with deep-thinking, authentic people.
They are not common.
But still, sooner or later the circle turns in on itself.
Like a dog on a chain
Sooner or later it winds itself around the post

And there’s no chain left.
On some levels, my life has been an abject failure
On others an astonishing success
A big life, a life of ups and downs

I think of the people I’ve hurt
The people I’ve helped
Quick to anger
Never taking a break
Always harder, harder, harder.
Exhausted, giving up. Discouraged.
Despite the thousands of emails, letters
Telling me Heron Dance made a difference
A positive difference in people’s lives.

The fundament of investing, of business
Compound interest
Build today on what you accomplished yesterday
Accomplished last week, last month, last year.
That requires consistency. Discipline. Patience.
I’m still learning that.
Always willing to take a calculated risk
And some, in retrospect, not well-calculated

So I gave up whitewater kayaking
Lost trust in my ability to say no to situations at or just
beyond the limit of my skill.
Swam one too many rapids.
But still, still searching for a risk to take
That might add something new and interesting
To my life.

The thing about being an artist is
It’s not about talent
It’s about persistence, grit, determination
It’s about having something to say
It’s about believing in oneself.
It’s about faith in one’s song.
Maybe that’s the primary question of my life
Faith enough in my song to embark upon the adventure
But not faith enough to stick with it
To the bitter end.
I can’t let that be my legacy.
In many ways I’m not adequate to the demands
Of the life I’ve chosen,
But still, still, I can’t let a lack of faith in myself be my
legacy.

My many weaknesses are starting to show their heads. I simply
must get this thing out of my system. I’m not a writer. I’ve
been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were.
-John Steinbeck, written in his journal August 16, 1938,
when he was writing Grapes of Wrath. As quoted in his
memoir Working Days.

A life in the arts is about showing up
Day after day, year after year.
Art isn’t about freedom
Art is about limits. Hard work.

We have a very strict day that we have to adhere to. By doing that we have the freedom to improvise. Creativity is about limits not about freedom. Freedom, you don’t know what to do. But when you have a structure, you can improvise off of it and have confidence enough to come back to it.
- Jon Stewart interviewed on the radio show Fresh Air

Heron Dance has been such a strange trip
Probably because I’m a strange character.

“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods. See also my book, Thoreau And The Art Of Life

In the sense of outside the norm
I don’t recognize the rules as valid
The rules we’re supposed to live by
Even the valid ones.

I follow closely the work of half a dozen artists, and among
those I most respect is Barry Moser, best known perhaps for the dozens of children’s books he’s illustrated, both in watercolor and woodcut. Moser’s collection of essays entitled In the Face of Presumption discusses the role of talent in a creative life.

I taught school for twenty-five years. I have no record of
how many students I taught over all those years, but it has
to be in the tens of hundreds. Based on that experience I
can say honestly that I never met a student who was not
“creative,” nor did I ever meet one who was not “talented.”
I can count on one hand and still have fingers left over the
ones who manifest the necessary persistence, determination, drive, desire, patience, and indefatigable energy, and the willingness to fail to make it as an artist. Why them and not the others, if, as I say, all of them were creative and talented?

The answer is simple: some of my students persisted and
some did not. Those who did persist persisted because they
had energy, they had courage (or “sand” as my granddaddy
would have put it), and they developed a need to work.

Moser’s three rules for the so-called creative life, are, therefore,

Persistence
Indefatigable energy.
The habit of work.

Horace Traubel, biographer of Walt Whitman, once asked Whitman, “Suppose the whole damned thing went up in smoke,
Walt, would you consider your life a failure?”
Whitman’s response: “Not a bit of it.... No life is a
failure. I have done the work: I have thrown my life into
the work: my single simple life: putting it up for what it
was worth: into the book — pouring it into the book:
honestly, without stint, giving the book all, all, all: Why
should I call it a failure? Why? Why? I don’t think a man
can be so easily wrecked as that.”

One of the artists I’ve learned the most from is Tom Jay, who was
a sculptor in the Pacific Northwest, now deceased. He said to me
in an interview:

I sculpt salmon over and over. Because that needs to happen, for me and the place here. To create that tilth. You create that salmon over and over. You are bored beyond tears. You finally get it. You told the story 300 times, and you finally came to realize what the story was about. I don’t know what the story is half the time, but I keep trying. I made probably 20 salmon before I started to get anywhere.
And now, I think I can make 150 more before I really get it right, if ever. Maybe. No guarantees. If I pay attention and work on it, and listen, and watch, maybe someday I’ll make a salmon that honors the critter.

The art searches for the spirit The energy.
The struggle to survive
To triumph
The osprey, fish hawk
The power, beauty, athleticism
Needed to just survive, to reproduce
To celebrate life
For just a little while.

Always on the outside looking in.
Never really a part of the world around me
Never really a part of the garden parties, the people just trying
to get through life
Or the people who owned private planes, or wanted to.
Never really bought into the rules, assumed they either
Didn’t apply to me, or couldn’t if I was going to live the kind of life
I wanted to live.
I was kind of right, kind of wrong.

But still, time to plant the flag.
This is where I stand, where I am,
Right or wrong,
Time to decide, this is who I am
Honor that, serve that
Manifest who I am on the inside
In how I live my life.
The end will be whatever it will be.

I think the real artists are too busy with just being and
growing and acting (on canvas or however) like themselves to
worry about the end. The end will be what it will be. The
object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness
in creation.
- Robert Henri, from The Art Spirit

None of us knows what is really going on.
No matter what we say
None of us knows what is going on.
The objective is to live a big life
Life is precious.
That’s all we know.

We are all young pretenders
Looking for a sign
On a troubled journey through
The landscape of the mind
- Robin Laing, from his song The Summer Of '46

Osprey Landing III

Original