end of the week obsessions 10

a list of ideas, prompts, art & artists, poetry, and miscellany intended to shout out some inspirational resources and create conversations

(credit: Tom Phillips)

this week’s obsessions:

1. this image of the artist, Georgia O’Keeffe hitching a ride to Ghost Ranch in Abiquiú, New Mexico (US). i’ve had a teeny copy of next to my desk for years. the photographer was O’Keeffe’s dear friend, the activist/educator/artist Marie Chabot. O’Keeffe was about 57 when this photo was taken, and her expression makes me think she was wholly consumed by her authentic relationship with life. i damn well hope so.

i had the pleasure of seeing the image when i unexpectedly got the chance to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Sante Fe, NM in the early-2000s. the museum serves as the largest repository of O’Keeffe’s work and archives and it was, frankly, unforgettable. i was married to an artist at the time and remember her saying something to the effect that she had thrown away work similar to the sketchbook scenes on display among O’Keeffe’s more famous work – absolute proof that you should get rid of NOTHING when you work creatively, even when it’s rough. maybe especially then. you never know who’ll you’ll inspire, even with an idea you chose not to pursue.

a part of Georgia O’Keeffe’s life we don’t hear much about is the fact that she slowly lost her eyesight but continued to produce work. O’Keeffe was diagnosed with macular degeneration, a condition that causes one’s vision to gradually become grey and obstructed when looking straight on and leaves only peripheral vision intact. when she could no longer manage oil paint, she kept drawing. when she could no longer draw, she turned to sculpture. some of her final works were abstract watercolors on large canvases which she produced by memory, with an assistant to help place her brush where instructed.

2. on my playlist this week is the poetic work of Killer Mike and the killer album I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind, with these killer lines from God In The Building:

…But you can never walk on water if you still fear the sea
If Jesus came back, Mother, where you think he’d be?
Probably in these streets with me, peace

Came out the valley of the shadow of death
Judas still got the knife in my back
Devil’s tryin’ to get with G like a crab
Haters mad ‘cause I baptized my laugh
Keep a Jesus piece to protect myself
If heaven got a ghetto you can bet, I’ll be there…

To get to heaven I will raise hell
But before I be a servant in white heaven, I will rule in a black hell…”

i have a special love for Killer Mike (a story for another day) but this line –

you can never walk on water if you still fear the sea – always leaves me with goosebumps. first, it’s excrutiatingly poetic. i mean…come on! this week i drafted a poem and a prose piece based on that line alone! does anyone else walk away from music with a bjillion ideas? second, i always find myself thinking, “i hope you’re wrong, Mike” when i hear that line. maybe it’s because i’m a woman and we’re often incubated to live in fear? maybe it’s because fear has been the driving force in my life? i don’t know. i’d like to have the conversation though. anyone have Mike’s number?

were i musical (i’m not…what i am can best be described as “enthusiastic”) i’d write a mash-up of Mike’s line and this quote attributed to Georgia O’Keeffe (hey! a connection between obsessions! now you can play ADHD leapfrog too!) and my personal motto of the last 2 years: i will not let fear stop me from being seen trying. now there’s a song/poem/essay/play someone should take on. (not me, refusing eye contact so that the teacher doesn’t pick me)

to his admirable CV you can add Killer Social Activist and also check out this killer side article that serves up some meaningful reading.

3. if altered books and erasure poetry had a baby, it would be A Humument by Tom Phillips. nothing i say will come close to adequately describing this absolute treasure of a book. short version: Phillips took a book called The Human Document, by W. H. Mallock and altered it by covering its pages in original artwork while leaving some of the words to show through. the original was completed/published in 1970 but – get this – he continued to work on the book up to 2016, changing previously altered pages to include references to current events! throw down some imagination about how many versions of this book there are! please, please go down this rabbit hole, friends. it is absolutely the coolest. and if you know any young people, take them with you. here’s why:

erasure poetry was my poetry gateway drug as a 7-year old kid. it started out with a “secret code” game my father and i used to play using copies of Stars & Stripes he was going to throw away (fyi: i wanted to grow up to be a spy). later, in my tweens, i got two copies of The Collected Works of Robert Frost – one from my dad and one from a teacher. guess who combined the love of secret codes and poetry in that second copy? fast forward a few million years and here’s me, in love with language and poetry, sorting out an idea to repeat the Robert Frost experiment of my youth when i come across Tom Phillips’ work. i’m telling you, i danced around like 7-year old me, only slower. since we need more happiness in the world if we are to survive living long enough to learn important things, people need to be mentored to find unique (and cheap) creative outlets. i promise you that there’s a lot to be found in a few Sharpies, some scrap paper, a pencil, a ruler, and a used book. if you can’t afford any of that, drop me a note with your postal address and i’ll send you a starter kit. yes, i’m serious. it’s that important to me and i forgot to have kids.

need further inspiration? have these from Mary Ruefle, The Dickinson, Trish Hopkinson, The Write Life, Edge Effects, and of course, my favorite redactapoet, Austin Kleon. (redactapoet is my new made-up word and i think it’s swell...because it is.)

4. the deep, deep reality of taking one’s mental health seriously. having lost 9 people (2 family members included) to the disease of suicide, and been on the fence, myself, about living from time to time, perhaps i feel attuned to despair. perhaps you do too. so please, friend, allow me to share Hanif Abdurraqib (whose amazingness cannot be over-estimated) from the New Yorker (May 16, 2025):

“What is keeping you alive today? This [question] allows us to revel in the sometimes small motions that get us to the Next Thing. Yes, I did not want to get out of bed this morning, but there was one single long shard of sunlight that stumbled in through a tear in my curtains, and the warmth of it hitting my arm got me to that first hour of living. There was my dog, who, on the mornings I do not want to get out of bed, will rest silently at my feet and wait for me to slowly emerge from under the covers, and seeing her reminds me that I do, in fact, have only one lifetime in which I can love this animal. As far as I know, we will love each other only here, for a while, and that is worth seeing what I can make out of a few hours, even when I’m wrecked with despair.”

you are not alone. you will never be alone. we are all here, witnessing you, just as you witness in return. please, stay another day.

5. Julian of Norwich, for reasons too labor intensive to list, is kind of fascinating. not much is known about her but that she wrote a book of mystical devotions that’s survived 6 or 7 centuries and is valued as either one of the oldest or actually the oldest book to have been written in English, by a woman.

because i can’t do anything without backstory: apparently, during a bout of ill health (it was plague-y all over Europe that day), Julian had some über-intense fever dreams in which she experienced the Divine. she woke up possessed of detailed memories for each vision, wrote them all down and, bada bing, bada boom, she’s the local, cherished mystic. Julian went on to write an even longer form of her manuscript (aptly called “The Short Text” and “The Long Text” by those in the know) elaborating on her interaction with a sacred Trinity, this time elaborating that there were many things she was told in a language she did not speak, but could understand due to the holy nature of the encounters. in one of her last visions, Julian (the medieval form of Jillian, btw) hammers home the fact that Christ harbored no desire to smite sinners (despite enduring popular opinion) and that any ideas about punishment, anger, wrath, or general crankiness in the relationship between humans and heaven was solely manufactured by mankind. Julian goes on to write that Christ was merely waiting for humanity to “mature past the need for sin” and, in fact, that, “sin is behovely” (necessary) to that end. he ended his TED Talk with the assurance, “…but all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

since i’m not a Christian, why is this an obsession? first, i’m a philosophy buff and one of the boxes in my brain is filled with bits & bobs from all kinds of spiritual teachings. second, i think it’s enough of an explanation to say, “because i live in the US” and short of powering the country off and then back on again, we may need some mysticism to save us from destroying the Constitution/democracy/the nation and causing catastrophic damage to the rest of the world, especially since it’s clear that logic and science have been abandoned. then i recalled the story about our pal Julian and the message that provides a small balm to my feelings of desperation and (not low-level) anxiety and i haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

6. and finally, from the supernova that is Toni Morrison:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

i sure as hell hope so, Toni. i sure as hell hope so.

what are you obsessed with right now? leave a message in the chat and, as always, remember that the Gay Agenda is real. we’re organized and we’re the reason everyone knows that seersucker is an abomination.