It's done! Most of my paintings from Brasil this winter (um, summer?) are hereby cleaned up and posted on my website. I'm thinking of making more prints to add to the small series I made of Salvador, Carnaval (third below) ...standby on that! If you'd like to buy a print, email me!
http://www.melanieidachopko.com/work/#/brasil-waterpost-2015/
hello@melanieidachopko.com
Hating to be heartbroken again, listening to the news from Baltimore, thankful that my heart is still soft enough to get knocked over to what is happening now, what has been happening for 400 years in my country. Tanks in response to that?! Thugs? I got so mad today when someone told me "It's too bad about that kid, but what's atrocious is the property damage." Frankly, it's embarrassing when someone close to me sees windows and buildings as more valuable that a human life that will never fully bloom into its full contribution. That is, if it miraculously found enough water and support to survive and bloom past the concrete of underfunded schools, a pipeline to prison, and a media that reflects over and over to him he is disposable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-QWI-Iy1ns
So maybe the song I'm writing on government will rewrite itself to include this, and I'll go back to painting portraits of these men. In the meantime, I keep listening to the phenomenal range of responses in this song, Don't Shoot, (and this one, Glory ), enjoying that my fiddle/finger-picking/piano self also feels at home with my brothers in poetry - their stories, their truth-telling, their anger. I'm reminded of my mentors Isaak Brown and Joanna Macy, how anger is a deep call for justice. It is the emotion of clarity.
And I want to listen.
Last night I went to listen to Anaïs Mitchell at the Freight in Berkeley, and filled up my well again. I'm trying to make space for the unmapped, incoherent process that always eventually coalesces/congeals into a song. But this is pretty uncomfortable, and it sometimes feels like I'm scrapping the bottom of a well that is dry for good. Luckily I have drawing to distract myself!
And last night I remembered Julia Cameron's notion from the Artist Way that this is the moment to "fill the well" - to go back to what we most love, to the people and pieces that called us into this commitment in the first place. And I hear that call so clearly through Anaïs' songs - to sew together my personal story and the deep story of my time, the personal and the political. To make the familiar mystical, to use poetry and melody to soften borders and turn faces back to look at one another.
And I remembered how that call is so much more important, sacred, than my anxiety, the imperfect song written so much more contributing than the unwritten perfect song in my mind.
So I'm off to walk around the lake with the dog and make another draft.
anaismitchell.com