Experience, in Its Perfection, Presents an Infinity of Faces.

08.11.09

The most amazing part of this work is that it's still growing! I've endured another night of near sleeplessness as my head was filled with more ideas. I have a long punchlist now and I'm absolutely ecstatic. I really understand now how I thrive on sprawling, complicated endeavors like this. The moving parts are numerous and the overview almost beyond comprehension, but I will attest to the fact that this is closer to knowing without seeing details than anything else I've ever done.

I'm awed by my own capacity to embrace larger & larger volumes of information and interconnected meanings. There's a portion of my brain that is precisely designed for this gestalt perception and it feels like a homecoming. There's a knowing in me when the elements I arrange within the site work together gracefully and smoothly to create an experience for visitors that lingers and continues to steep as they depart, returning to other concerns.

I've been saying since my teens that I would "hit my stride" as an artist in my mid-forties. As it happens, at 45 I began, literally, to lose my stride. It started with "drop foot" after hiking a couple of miles on trails in the woods, progressing to stiffened knees and eventually to an all-out locking up of the legs. I was given a cane to get around.

The following year I sought help from naturopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic manipulations, physical therapy and finally settled on working with my diet & a trainer at a gym. This helped me to dig my heels in for about 3 years and dramatically slow the downward spiral, but I always seemed at best to make only limited progress restoring my gait & the strength in my legs.

About a year ago, becoming willing to cast a wider net looking for answers, I was referred to a Russian naturopath who determined that I was carrying a burden of toxins and heavy metals (in agreemment with my suspicions). His prescription was for very small amounts of what he called "infoceuticals," but even when I kept the dosage down to 1/2 drop in 12 ounces of water, it still resulted in a dramatically toxic reaction from my body. I spent 3 days unable to keep anything, even water, down & had those close to me convinced I was dying. Needless to say, I discontinued the drops and never went back to "Doctor Java."

Since that time, after first recovering some of my lost stamina, I've been seeing a man, formerly an acupuncturist, who practices NRT (Nutrition Response Testing), which amounts to a highly focused form of kinesiology. He studied under Freddie Ulan, who pioneered the field, and has again brought the focus back to diet. His name is Paul Rosen and he is an accomplished practitioner in the art of NRT. We have actually stopped the progression of my difficulties and are actually reversing course, albeit very slowly. There's much more to this story, on the level of communicating directly with the body and also on that of plumbing the mind for self-destructive memes and habitual negative self-talk.

But the bottom line is...I am resolving this.

Perhaps this peculiar malady has been a means of slowing down to take stock of things. I'm strongly suspicious that my self-doubt has played a dramatic role in keeping me in the grip of this difficulty. I've been deeply afraid for years that I wasn't good enough, that I didn't "have the guts" to be an artist, and that is something I truly want to feel in myself, to see in myself. My recent adjustment in my way of thinking has had the effect of a thunderbolt.

These are some circumstances I'm now visualizing for myself and for the site/practice as it unfolds. I see this as a venue that keeps me regularly engaged in imaging, ideation and writing. I see my skillset as more than adequate to the commercial tasks to which it may be set - my work will always operate on a dual track, with a higher octave present in the harmony. I also look forward to attracting work of worthiness, of real substance, concerned with a higher order of meaning. And I look forward to attracting opportunities to show and to teach and to display the best of my being, for I'm now refocused on where I've always been headed.

I'm busily editing & re-purposing much old work to find a home in this new environment. It feels so wonderful to gather up the evidence of my learning and review it with fresh eyes. There will be much more in the way of photo-editing, and 3-D work and sheer artmaking in my future. But it's enough for now to know the promise exists and that I'm seeing the short path opened up immediately ahead.

In adding on to the structure of the site, I'm beginning to appreciate a more free-form, less rigid template for maintaining coherence. Content can be added where it fits, not fit to a tightly programmed schema. Cul-de-sacs are allowed, but always with escape links at the bottom of the page. A visitor might follow a thread for a long while only to be relieved at finding the release valve within easy reach.

Another web feature more available to me now than earlier is "search engine optimization." I know I'll have more to say on this subject in the future. For now, I've absorbed enough information on SEO to make use of what I'm given to understand about how search results are compiled. This site will rise in rank, given my careful attention to the many factors which come into play, and my work will have its day before a larger audience. It'll take time, but I've got more than half my life ahead of me. Content is currently king, and fresh content, changing content, is what the spiders & robots like best. I'm all for providing them that.

The "science" of SEO is always evolving. So will this site continue to grow & change, free to adapt as might a natural organism, here in its native habitat. With its growth will come my own advancing grasp of, not only, what I can do within this forum, but, more deeply, what I can BE.