Flash floods of life
When change happens all of a sudden and all at once
I have learned since moving to New Mexico that there is a phenomenon of flash flooding in which an otherwise dry arroyo is blasted with water up to 6 hours after a rainfall, like the scene from Lord of The Rings where Liv Tyler calls in the horse water to take out the Ring Wraiths. These are dangerous and so it recommended to never linger in an arroyo, no matter how dry it is.
There are times when life’s challenges hit you like a gentle rain, and others when changes are so strong and so fast they pummel you like a wall of water. All you can do is be pulled by the current and hope you don’t drown. In the case of LOTR, sometimes that water clears out some demons, and you are left with openness and freedom.
I am in the process of moving out of not one, but four places, into not one, but three storage units in three different cities, plus a new apartment while I get my life reconfigured here in New Mexico. I was joking with my neighbor in Albuquerque about it and they said, rather than having a summer home, I have a summer storage unit. Come on in, I would say to visitors, waving my arms around mile pile of boxes marked “paintings” or “tarot, journals, art school stuff.” In San Francisco, my summer storage is a crazy-shaped, 10x2’ unit hosted at the worldly Shamrock Storage - a facility run by actual Irish people with names like Caitriona and Helen. Here in New Mexico, it is a corner in an unfinished warehouse next to a friend’s gallery.
The stakes of my moving were raised by my tight schedule over the past month, which was calendared and budgeted within an inch of my life. My odyssey started at the end of May when I left New Mexico, a day after I had finished working on Amy Ellingson’s massive painting. Woo hoo! To California where I did some cat-sitting. Meowsers!
It was in the city by the Bay that I officially moved out of my studio at Minnesota Street, and then went south to move out of my studio and apartment in Los Angeles. On Thursday, with hours to spare after lifting my last duct-taped box, sweating in the 90-degree LA heat, I left to the airport to fly back to New Mexico where I would be starting a new job in the morning. SITE Santa Fe was opening its new biennial, Once Within A Time, and my attendance would be much appreciated / required.
Unfortuantely, my finely-tuned machine was thrown off by less-finely-tuned machines. At Burbank I discovered the American Airlines planes were grounded all afternoon and evening on Thursday because of “maintenance.” Yikes.
I was then driven, courtesy of AA, by an Armenian Han Solo wearing mirroed aviator glasses to a hotel by LAX, proving that LA traffic is no match for a veteran taxi driver. Without looking at the map he knew the exact intersection of my hotel on Airport Blvd and 96th Street. We shaved off at least 30 minutes out of the predicted 90 speeding past standstill cars in the right lane, then zipping over to avoid the exit, then doing it all again. He was Neil Cassady reincarnate.
Soon I was peacefully sitting in my hotel room watching Tim Robinson videos. Turns out this change of plans was a godsend as I was completely zonked from the heat, and needed time to regroup before the next push.
On Friday morning, I woke up at 5 am and flew into Albuquerque with enough time to spend an exhausting, but fun 8 hours at the museum. As a guide my job was to stand around and network with visitors- a job custom made for my Capricorn moon. I knew very few of the 90 artists in the show. There were a handful I recognized from California, a few others were dead and famous, but mostly I just stood there ready to bullshit with passerbys, while protecting floor art from drunk people’s fingers and children’s feet.
Aside from my doing this weird job, the night proved to be a mini art world version of This Is Your Life, where people I knew from art worlds past emerged from the crowds to remind me of things I hadn’t thought about for a while: an artist I had met at the Vermont Studio Center in 2011, a couple of curators from out of town, and the most surprising, a friend from grad school who I had lived with for two months in Messejana, Portugal.
Not being on Instagram anymore made these encounters all the more refreshing. We could actually catch up, albeit briefly, and be genuinely surprised to see one another, rather than acknowledge we had been cyber-following one another all year, and wow, this or that looked cool.
It was interesting (a euphemism for I’m not sure what yet) to have these humans from my past emerge while also be processing 20-years of stored artwork that I had just finished sifting through in California. As my LA studio-mate said when she saw the not-small stack of boxes, that’s a lot but “congrats for having so much rad art!” Indeed.
In between catch-ups, I would take breathers to recollect my energy or chug water. I escaped into quiet rooms, sometimes with catered food where chicly dressed people were talking about things like how one of the off-site biennial venues is haunted. (Email me and I can tell you which one.) Or, as I lingered for a moment, someone told me how as a child they were picked up and thrown across an arroyo by their father just before a flash flood took them out- prompting the theme of this essay. He said, “One minute it’s a nice sunny day, and the next your life is in danger because a wall of water is coming at you.”
Like flash floods, change can happen all of a sudden and all at once, but it doesn’t change that there is still stillness to be found somewhere. You can be both swamped by emotion and up to your neck in the past, meanwhile the sun is out.
I have been holding on to small pleasures like natural beauty and kind gestures where I can like a lifeline. The birds this morning seem to be having a fine time. My kittens are happy and healthy. All the people I had to negotiate during my moves were ultimately kind and forthcoming - and that’s a lot of people. It made me believe just a little more that people can be good and generous, even if our government is trying to tell us otherwise.
On the other side of these moves even a sunset looks like a new beginning. I feel tenderized by the pummeling of so much purging and moving and letting go. Expansion into our true, bigger selves require some major heavy lifting which is why we resist. It is fucking hard. If it were easy then we just do it already. But also maybe it’s not as hard as we think. Loving ourselves and others as a premise is not for the faint of heart. But without love, where would we be now?
I can’t be positive but I think this is how DiDi’s version of a joke:
“Hello.”
DiDi looking very smug.
Dior is also cute, she wanted me to remind you
I’m so glad your moves went well! You managed a lot in a short time and your good organizational skills paid off! Good luck with apartment hunting!!! Xoxo