||scylla + charybdis||

Finding your way back to yourself feels like drowning and being skinned alive simultaneously.

Over the course of the last decade, in all the iterations of myself: getting sober, going through menopause while in a yoga cult, showing up as a wife all while searching for my soul work, I had no idea it would feel like being torn in half between two monsters, and that I’d have to choose which one got to eat me.

That’s Scylla and Charybdis. That’s the whole fucking myth, except for the part that actually matters: both of those monsters used to be women.

Scylla was a nymph before Circe turned her into six howling dog-mouths, out of jealousy over a man neither of them wanted. Charybdis was a nymph too, before Zeus decided she was too much and made her into a whirlpool that swallows the sea itself twice a day. Too much hunger, too much woman: whirlpool. And Circe, the one who actually knew how to navigate the passage and told Odysseus how to survive it, gets remembered as a witch instead of the only one who knows the way.

So when Odysseus sails through, he’s not being tested by monsters. He’s sailing between two women turned into hazards by people more powerful than them, steered by a third woman flattened into “sorceress.” So typical. He doesn’t get a clean passage home. He has to sail close enough to one to lose something to her, just to avoid being swallowed whole by the other. The only choice he has is what he’s willing to sacrifice, and whether he can do it without shitting his pants.

I woke up the morning after finishing this piece singing Break On Through. Didn’t choose it. It was just there, already in my mouth before I was fully conscious. It took me a minute to realize my body had already made the connection my brain was still circling. Morrison wasn’t writing about Hollywood self-improvement, some better version of himself from a self-help book or from a guru. He was writing about rupture. Blood. Skin. Bone. Tearing a hole through the wall between the self you’re allowed to be in public and the one that’s actually alive underneath it. That’s not a metaphor for growth. That’s a metaphor for violence against your own containment. (I mean, what?)

Break on through to the other side.

Not around it.

Not with a gentle knock.

But with a goddamn sledgehammer.

That’s what it’s felt like, stepping into my art practice, calling myself an artist without shrinking it down into something safer for other people to swallow. It’s not a straight line home. It’s a strait. Narrow, violent, close on both sides, lined with every woman turned into a hazard for wanting something, or being wanted by the wrong someone, or having too much appetite for the room she was standing in. And it’s a door that doesn’t open unless you’re willing to break it. You get through by choosing your monster, paying whatever she demands, and putting your shoulder through whatever’s still standing between you and the raw, wild thing you actually are.

This piece isn’t a painting of Scylla or Charybdis. I’m not interested in painting monsters, especially not monsters who used to just be women standing in the wrong water. I’m interested in the churn between them: the wreckage, the paint bleeding and pooling and refusing to stay where I put it, because that’s what the passage actually feels like from inside it. Out of control. Bodily. Something torn open down the middle while you’re still trying to break through to whatever’s waiting there without an apology in its mouth.

When my husband saw it stapled to the wall this morning, he said it looked like an animal hide. He’s not wrong. Maybe that’s exactly what it is. Not the monster. Not the hero. Just the skin that got shed, or poured over, or taken from someone, so the rest of me could keep moving.

I didn’t make this to be pretty. I made it because I’m in the strait right now, I’m still at the door, and I wanted something that told the truth about what that costs, and who usually pays it.

As Jerika always said, “You gotta pay to play.”

||dance of the sacred bull||

There is an old memory in this canvas: the bull rising out of the sea foam, the myth of a god who became an animal to cross the water and change the course of a whole civilization. Europa on his back. Crete waiting on the other side. The moment before transformation, when the story hasn’t decided yet what it’s going to become.

I let the raw canvas breathe the way myth does, unbordered, soaking in from the edges. The blues are the Aegean before it has a name for itself. The sienna is the bull’s own heat, still warm-blooded, not yet a god. The red moon whispering that every great crossing costs something.

I feel this new moon deeply. We are planting, seeds underwater, in the dark, in the place feeling lives before it becomes decision. Cancer knows the soft lapping of the waves and the disorienting storms that leave you shipwrecked. So does this painting.

I was  thinking about what it means to be carried somewhere you didn’t choose and to dance anyway.

||porto rafti #1||

This is our sacred spot.

We arrive to be cleansed.

We depart reborn.

John and I have been swimming in Porto Rafti once or twice a week all summer. It has a humble, quiet beauty that defies the many over instagrammed/touristed spots in Greece. Twenty five kilometers away, and somehow it always feels like a million.

This painting came out of that water. The indigo is the deep part where you stop touching bottom. The magically sea grass circles teeming with fish, sparkling in the filtered sun rays. The gold and green are the rugged shoreline, the place you come back to when you're done being underwater with yourself.

I didn't do it justice when I first posted this in July, so here it is again, closer up this time. Swipe through for the parts you can't see from across the room. There are so many sacred spots that we swim to each week to give reverence and receive blessings.