“Here lies my sweet spot: artists metabolize absurdity into elegiac beauty, creating work that doesn’t deny death but dwells in its presence.”
I just spent six days in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for my first residency in the doctoral program in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership (VPRL) at Southwestern College. The residency was titled Seeking, and that word couldn’t have been more fitting.
The time with peers and faculty was both enlightening and challenging. In many ways, it transported me back to my Goddard days, when I earned my M.F.A.I.A. degree. That experience was life-changing, and I chose Southwestern College because I sensed a similar depth in its pedagogy. These programs are rare. They carry an intimacy, a rigor, and a kind of searching that I haven’t found anywhere else. I believe these next three years will shape me just as profoundly.
“El Papacito,” the Chi Center dog. He was a little ball of love. He would come and hang out with my at meal times. A real little sweetheart.
That said, this first step wasn’t easy. While the environment felt familiar, it was also the first time I’ve stood in front of a group of thoughtful, intelligent, and deeply considerate people and presented my ideas about mortality, creativity, and meaning. It wasn’t smooth. I stumbled. I second-guessed myself. Too much time in my own head made it harder to bring my thoughts clearly into the room.
At moments, I felt like Howard Hughes crawling out of a cave—disheveled, blinking at the light—shouting ideas about death that weren’t really about death at all. They were about life, meaning, and what it means to create in the face of the void. But that’s the point, isn’t it? You can’t do this work alone. You need community to test ideas, to sharpen them, to remind you that what feels like incoherence might just be the rough beginning of something worth saying.
I didn’t do a perfect job, but that’s okay. Seeking isn’t about having answers. It’s about showing up, risking failure, and trusting the process. And that’s exactly what I plan to keep doing.
This has got a UFO and alien vibes all over it!
600-800-year-old little man in the sky! I ended up doing a little watercolor painting of this one.
A 600-800-year-old bird petroglyph—these things made me wonder about humans and their activities to be remembered.
A Cholla Cactus walking cane leaning on a large granite stone.
We did this exercise on fractals—Earthflow & Fractal Pattern Explorations and Scales of Action, Scales of Influence, a micro-to-macro experiential art project. I saw fractals everywhere after that—I do love the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci numbers.
