The Light Between Things

I am finishing up my Spring quarter class at Evergreen State College. The class is called: Radical Amazement–Interrogating the Everyday through Poetry and Video Essay. Our midterm was a collaborative video essay, and our final was a solo video essay. For both, it was preferred we use still photographs only, so I did. If your want to see them, they are posted here:  https://vimeo.com/42939757
Let me know what you think.

Here is my artist statement:

The Light Between Things

Our every day, as well as the everydayness of our experience, is under the influence of our perceptions and judgments of what reality is. As a young child I believed that waking reality was not real at all, but a dream to awaken from. This was a belief I could not easily shake as I grew older. The beliefs we cling to, effect the way we see the world, and distortions viewed from one person’s perspective are reality to another. Insomnia, dreaming, and the beliefs in-between them – are explored in this lyrical, meditative essay.

I took many photographs at night to practice with a new camera, and to my surprise these became the images I wanted for the video. I discovered that images shot with varying high resolutions could express the way realness is sometimes not very crisp, but rather dreamy. Sounds of nature are heard in the background, both grounding and meditative, they serve as representatives of portals to other ways of experiencing.

While writing the text, I had ideas about what ambient noise and images I wanted for the video, but they didn’t make meaning for me until I trusted my instinct and just starting weaving them together. As in a dream, I felt carried on a tide of nonsensical choices and happenings. The trust in my creative instinct was the greatest reward in the making of The Light Between Things.

La Push Poem

I remember nothing before this. I arrived here on some current I could not control. I tumbled and bounced. My roughness was smoothed away on the long journey till I no longer cared what I looked like.

I had begun to accept the drowning heavy weight that held me in blackness. And then, under a dark moon I was left here, drying to a dull gray.

I have begun to call her Mother, the one who pulls me in and washes me and then leaves me here again and goes away. (I have seen the mother seals do this with their pups on the far rocks.)

There is such a clamor with many of us rolling in and out of our Mother, though usually I am left alone when she is gone.

I have begun to call him Father who comes around with a slow warmth sometimes and sometimes a bright heat so I cannot look him in the eye. He does not come when the stars are near. I know these are other fathers travelling home, just as mine is.

There is talk from the legged ones that this one or that one is beautiful. They do not know I can hear them. Mother says I am part of a beautiful pattern that is spun out on the sand each time she goes away.

This beauty, she says, cannot be seen from where I am, but that Father and all the fathers can see it. Even the Mother Seals can see it, and any who fly or wander by. She says that Beauty is in what we are together and not in who we are alone.

photos and poem by Catherine Alice Michaelis

Mother, more Time

I am having so much fun playing with my stencils. Here, the 28 around checkerboard is overlaid with an Islamic style cosmic mandala of 12 around. Because they share a divisor for four, some interesting alignments happen.

Here's the checkerboard in silver, Islamic mandala in gold, and a star pattern, fives and sixes, on top in black. The stars and the mandala patterns meet up nicely in places due to their common divisor of six.

I am trying to work out a design for a thirty day month. I thought I could use sixes and fives, and bring in the twelve for the twelve months of the year, but I think the 28 grid may have to go. So I am working out other ideas and colors.

More in a few days, hopefully success!

Eternity

This is my ultimate favorite flower picture from our travels in June. It is a cactus flower and I just stuck my camera's nose into the middle and took this photo. It is totally unaltered.

Eternity - as in forever and ever and ever - has been on my mind a lot lately. I think flowers and plants inspire thoughts of the eternal, at least for me. I had a teacher who said that flowers symbolize fulfillment and seeds symbolize potential. While this is true, I also see the reverse: flowers are all about the potential fertilization of seeds in the ovary and their future dispersal, and seeds are all about the fulfillment of the flower in perpetuating its species. It's a chicken and egg kind of thing.

But besides that, flowers and plants cycle around seasonally, breaking up forever and ever into manageable circling chunks of time that we can take in without panicking. The seasonal changes assure that while time keeps going on, things stay the same, and plant cycles are part of that pattern.

Our recent travels took us to Arches National Park. It was an experience of stepping both backward and forward in time. As we drove near the park, via the lesser used highway, we drove along the Colorado River. Slowly we started a descent along red walls that got higher and higher. I thought it interesting that while what is at the bottom of the canyon walls would be the most recently revealed through erosion, it would also be the oldest layers thus far uncovered. In some odd way the present moment and the far past were connected and experiencing each other. And while the future kept unfolding forward, the past kept unraveling backward. For me this created a feeling of eternity. Like the ouroborous snake that circles around and swallows its tail. We were always at the beginning and ending of time.

In the actual boundary of Arches National Park it was different. Here it was just the past over and over and over. Grains of sand whipping around in 80 mph gusts scouring everything, including us. Water worn arches and formations now in dry desert wearing down so slow that I felt time would end when the world is flat.

Being at the coast also evokes timelessness. While the waves go in and out over and over a thousand times a day, the ocean beyond the white foam frills is steady and unchanging. It breathes like a sleeping giant so huge we can only see the heave of its chest going up and down. The changing tide is not marking time at all, just the result of the giant turning this way and that, pulling the covers away and then flinging them back. What would it mean if the giant wakes?

At the coast there are sand patterns whose geometries repeat over and over. To see how the wave patterns go up and down the beach carrying little pebbles that resist return can create such intricate patterning amazes me!

Patterns are all about eternity to me. Patterns have arbitrary boundaries created by humans or nature, but if they were not bounded, they would have no limit. They would just repeat on and on. Fractals are an example of eternity patterning as well.

I make efforts to step back as far as I can in hopes of seeing the larger pattern of which I am just a grain of sand.

The sand, sea, the plants and us are all made of the same stuff in different combinations. Today I am "me" but I may turn into all kinds of things after I die. Not in a reincarnated sort of way, but in the way that all matter decays and transforms as energy into something else. If you believe science, everything that exists has always existed.

I can believe science for now, but after I die and become something else or many something else's or just compost for a long long time, I may not believe in science anymore. I probably won't believe in anything. I think eternity has a way of eroding all beliefs, because if you observe long enough, I think all beliefs are proved false.