My journey to connect with purpose and passion.
Lake Annecy in Southern France
I recently had the joyous opportunity to travel to southern France to spend a week and record the wedding ceremonies of a beloved friend.
While there, I would write a series of three articles about my journey to connect with my art practice on Medium. They are linked below.
Getting Lost in Annecy, France
Une Photo Parfaite
Au Revoir, Annecy.
I am standing in St. James Town, the most densely populated neighbourhood in all of Canada. An area recognized as one of the most diverse and economically troubled in Toronto.
I am drawn here by the sheer number of large towers, the diversity of its residents and the raw beauty of crumbling infrastructure.
I am an outsider and easily overwhelmed. So many people live stacked up to the sky. From the ground, the towers are giant aliens. A symbiotic experiment with the humans that reside inside. Majestic in their scale, they thrum with the electricity and water in their veins as the trash pours from their backsides in rolling metal bins.
I become lost among the narrow valleys and shadowed streets formed by the towers stacked upon towers.
There is so much to take in. Kids chat and laugh behind the dumpsters. A swimming pool that has seen better days. People mill in every nook and cranny. Others sell wares on the sidewalk. Cops arrest two men while a crowd gathers and watches in silence.
It is at one of the older towers that I spy a pigeon against dirt and crumbling concrete. I raise my camera, praying the bird won’t fly away.
“You can’t do that.”
I try to ignore the voice and take the shot, but the voice is insistent.
“Do you have permission?”
A few people sit in rusty chairs just a few feet away. An older woman lifts her chin at me. One of the doors to the building is propped open behind her.
“I don’t need permission.”
She is surprised or perhaps saddened. “You need permission. It’s housing.”
I shake my head, “No, I don’t.”
“It’s housing!” she demands, eyes flashing.
I turn my back with a derisive scoff, “Learn the laws, lady.”
It was not my most shining moment. It was entitlement mixed with anger and an outright lie. I didn’t have permission and I was standing on private property. She was well within her rights to challenge me.
Nor was it one of my best shots.
I feel shame and wish I could go back and apologize for my behaviour.
I fully recognize that my life is built on blessings on top of blessings on top of white guy entitlement. But compensating for this with hostility seems strange and most certainly uncalled for.
I yearn to connect with the people I meet and instead I am attacking them. There is no compassion or empathy. Just anger and frustration and maybe a little fear.
I’ve thought about this moment a lot. I could have approached her and nodded. I could have made a joke. “Are even the pigeons protected?”
I could have struck up a conversation about how long she had lived here, who owned the building, etc.
I could have been kind.
But I wasn’t. I just reacted with a hot flash of annoyance and anger mixed with a dangerous cocktail of bravado and adrenaline.
I’ve always had a short fuse, but it’s been noticeably worse since I decided to start opening my eyes to the disparities of income, equality and justice in our city. I want to meet and connect with the people that are so easy to ignore and sweep aside in our society – those who work against the odds to support their families and build a better life. I want to hear their stories.
But people fucking scare me. Social situations are the seven levels of hell with nuclear poisoning and cancer thrown in for seasoning. And that’s with the people I know. Trespassing as an outsider is a thousand times scarier.
Perhaps it is that simple. The work I yearn to do scares the fuck out of me. It’s no excuse, but it might help to explain what is going on in my messed up head.
I was drawn to this neighborhood because, despite concerns from residents and reputable researchers alike, new towers are being erected. The density is being increased and no new services are being provided. Around me are crumbling walls, people crowded into tiny spaces, a lack of supermarkets and a closed pool.
“St. James Town suffers from overcrowding, lack of green and public spaces, poor building and neighbourhood maintenance, and a general lack of resources for serving the large and diverse population. These neighbourhood factors are well known to impact health and well-being.” — Wellesley Institute
What further concerns me is that much of this community is marked private property. People cannot gather. There is little or no public space and most everything is in various states of disrepair. Hell, more space is given to garbage collection than to the public.
A sad state of affairs for a development that began as an optimistic experiment in the future of city living. Corbusier was the king of his day and this was going to be the hottest neighborhood in Toronto. Streets in the sky.
2011 Census - City of Toronto by Ward
This shit doesn’t appear to be working and yet the density is still climbing. There are new privately owned towers going up even as I write these words. Even though so many people fought to stop them.
Maybe they will include public spaces, amenities and community space like The Corner. I doubt it, but we shall see.
There are some amazing people living here. I hope to do a better job at meeting them and learning their stories. And perhaps I will figure out my role. I can’t change my circumstances but I can certainly act in kindness and compassion.
More to come.
I just got back from a week in Jamaica and it was a pivotal turning point in my life and career.
I’m in Jamaica. To shoot a series of styled pieces.
But I promised my Medium tribe a postcard, and while I only have an hour of Internet a day, I am spending that time working on this post. Because I miss you and I also want to gloat a little.
My business partner and I were introduced to a lovely young man. We will call him D so he doesn’t get in trouble for taking us off the premises.
D couldn’t help but laugh whenever I gesticulated about how resort life was killing me. I wanted to see the people, eat real Jamaican food and get past the security guards and twenty foot high walls. D agreed to take us. “No problem.”
By its very nature, work sucks.
If work was easy, my life would be a medieval painting of smiling and sensual artisans, living the life of leisure as we create masterpieces with the deft bending of nothing but our glorious will. When we weren’t frolicking in the fields and rolling in the hay, that is.
Sadly, or thankfully, I don’t live in a utopia.
Let’s call a spade the dirty, blister-creating, piece-of-shit implement that it is.
My life is a mess of procrastination, avoidance, stress, and panic. I blunder from disaster to failure searching for those forgotten moments where something happens and my numbing efforts “pay off.”
Over ninety percent of what I do is preparation: endless days wandering with my camera producing crap, sketching, writing, vomiting my soul messily onto paper and cleaning up the mess.
So why is there such a stigma to spending our time in this manner?
I’m not alone in feeling this way.
Michelle Stafford got me thinking about this when she responded to my last article about avoidance.
“I’ve already thrown lots of work [at my current art project] and yet I’m gonna have to throw lots more at it. Which I should have done yesterday. What did I do instead? Rearrange my art area.”
I don’t mean to pick on Michelle. I adore her work and her writing. She simply identifies what all of us creators feel on a daily basis.
She shines a light on the evil serpent whispering in our mind. He is a slippery bastard with powerful allies.
We are taught to worship the outcomes of our labor and not the dirty, blood-soaked, and muddy efforts from which they are truly born.
Callum of Halo Brewery cleaning.
My friends Eric Portelance and Callum Hay decided to launch a brewery. They raised the money, perfected their recipes and have been jumping over technical and bureaucratic hurdles ever since.
Only to become glorified cleaners – twenty hours of scrubbing, sanitizing and scraping for every hour of brewing beer.
Callum and Eric from Halo Brewery in a brief respite between cleaning tasks.
If they treated the cleaning as unrelated to the brewing, I doubt they would have the motivation to keep going. And the world would be a sadder place for it as they are creating some of the finest beers I have ever tasted.
I don’t think the cleaning is fun, but it is integral to their craft.
Douglas in his studio.
My friend Douglas just spent two months organizing his workshop. He emailed me because he was struggling with this investment of his time.
“I wondered about the tension I feel between creating and organizing. I wondered whether organizing was in fact a form of creating, and then thought you might know something about this, or could write about it in case you’re looking for ideas.”
I think he may have stumbled on the crux of the issue: that organizing, cleaning and preparation are not separate from creation. They are the craft.
I need to repeat that. They are the work, not the cost of the work.
It’s time to embrace the dirty work of preparation – to be mindful and present as we clean, scrape, prepare and struggle.
For that is where creation lies.
So welcome to the dirty. Grab a shovel and then join me for a beer at the end of the day, with nothing to show but our grit covered hands and a slightly less disorganized workspace.
This one goes out to the delightfully disobedient and wise David duChemin. He kicked my ass about part 1 and demanded the rest.
I have a confession. There is a voice in my head of a bitter, shallow gay man and I’m addicted to it.
He is devious and demanding of my attention, always whining about what we lack. He whispers seductively of those with slender builds, bubble butts, six pack abs, overflowing bank accounts, nice houses, rich friends and fame.
He hates that I am broadly built, a kind way of saying I’ve always struggled a bit with my weight. And that my thighs are the size of a baby elephant in leotards.
If only you would eat less carbs.
I know that the shallow and whispering gay man just wants to be loved. He needs to be wanted. And I also know that this is me. I yearn to be wanted, loved and desired.
You need different genes!
Or at the very least, some jeans that hide those thighs!
I know that none of these superficial things truly matter, and yet I want them. Shit, I covet them.
But wait. Before you jump on the jealous gay man voice, you should know it is far from the only voice in here. It’s a fucking party!
A grumbling beast slides in the depths. He is of blood, magic and the sword.He avoids the angry, shallow gay man at all costs for he hates small talk and screams and melts like a dying witch when forced to converse with people who can’t handle being called out on real issues. The gay man avoids him right back.
The beast is large and ponderous, yet strikes with alarming speed at the heart of the matter, our purpose, and the heart’s calling. He generally surfaces in my drunken rants and late night conversations with fellow travelers.
With him in my blood, I want the hard answers. No, the impossible questions. I become drunk on the dreams of others and yearn to explore the obstacles, limiting beliefs and delusions that plague us all.
He gives me the strength I require to rend the whispering shallow man to pieces, devour his insecurities and salt the earth where he was born.
And then I catch sight of myself in the mirror.
Can you not go to the gym just once a month?
You’re going out wearing THAT?
The beast retreats. He will not attack. He knows we are one and the same. Instead, he returns to the depths to search for what has been locked away.
For before the gay man and the beast was a child.
A child who stared with loving fascination at the world. A child who did not care that one day he would see the world through thick glasses and wrinkled folds of skin.
He listened to his heart and lived to give love and acceptance to those around him. And to run and jump into every body of water, screaming with joyous abandon.
This boy cherished being alive and didn’t worry himself with lesser things.
Only I’ve lost track of where I locked him away. I had no choice! He lived by the heart and this hurt too much to bear.
So the beast searches and I catch the shallow part of me watching, hopeful.
