The river runs and it always will. Let life be simple.
by time
a granted time of seed I have been place of place.
it bedcomes a new duty to e embrace my endurance.
grafitti covers wall and I was tasked to be person at time needed. I put my head in good faith and I came back to a lot of my things sprawelled out turned out
What is lost can never be lost.
los angles burn
imagination of dream
a place I am my fathers legacy
a black moon fror my friend Andred
I draw my sword with purpose, cut place be bitter the toll taken
Like Fourth of July
a black flag
a dark memory, a heart like no white snake can take place a lion of fire
my integrity of collection, my great grandmother shakes a a stick in absensce of a powerful soul
hiked a moentain, never gone to Salish lodge
you are the time you were meant to be.
Bamboo
A feared dream, where all a being I was a raccoon on her installation.
I knew nothing of panda and red sign. I went away because I knew religion is not the way it was in my youth. I found my cross.
Relocation
The Fire
As fires burn in LA my father and I have some sense of communication after he’s survived cancer. We don’t speak much or engage in conversation. I’m aware the influence Los Angeles has had on his growing up. In his illness I watch the news and see his reactions perhaps like Batman in the movies To see a city burn where he was relocating out of place not of his decision.
We returned to the place we were Indian relocation act at times. Despite his complicated history and those who might have been hurtful to him. He has a severance for the place he was a young man. So to look at him and see him be held in some way without words.
I understand I am just a monitor at times. I was wild once far beyond his reach and had to become the person I come home to. Studies of many mentors, the person of return.
Coast Salish people and our region have no clans that I have understood by my time. That does not mean it is without a sense of organization. A natural state of being is like anything. A wound is made, it is healed and if too deep nature will rush to it.
The fire will go out and people who can change that will do their part.
These are one of the studios that help me get thru the days of a digital grind planning and making plans for the future.
New year
this year I will live up to a promise
let vengeance go, understand time should be it’s own place of value.
I will learn as I go
one of my heroes fell into dementia and in despite all the wounds I would be to find his effort. He told me he would kill me with a sniper rifle to release me to god. The wound is there but it grows over with tough skin. Perhaps part of him wanted me to be part of a house I could not be in his time. I would never dare to think he would force me to a religious belief.
for the first time taking a moment when someone asked me to smoke a cigarette with them at turn of the year. I recalled a memory of humanity when I did smoke. Partly because the man needed someone to be social. He said he moved from Atlanta and his family was in debt. I had no words.
his panic met the shoulder of me. For the first time in a long time I felt myself a security to be a found. Share the experience of life and security to someone. Someone, I can see who wants open and a point where Bill Ried would call edge of a knife.
I could go on and on about the wars of tribes. but the moment we shivered as men, standing outside of a door as human beings.
Thoughts within me, the forge of my iron keep.
There are men who are so fear driven to speak to women and I was that place once.
I earned my way to the heart of keep by enduring. I was nothing more than an open door at time we are known.
I hope he made it back. I stood at the door another hour because I was grieving a memory of my own where I waited four hours in cold.
that time passed and I have the wear with all to let it go now.
Shaped into transformation
I was told I was a black dog and I will be forever that wrath
I force no one idea on anyone. The horrific and heroic, exists in my my eyes.
a time that was before my time, where the feathers of white bird are the arms around me even if gone.
an earth with me, knows me not foreign and reject what is not this place.
a time comes where one must take on a mask
this place knows its own knowing
if you dare to to look at the eyes or tell my kin we are slaves
I will be the black dog you would not want to know. This trade is not for sale.
I am devoted to idea and love with wounds of keep.
Some where in you life find an Atticus, my heroes are my heroes and bonds do not break, I am a zero and one. no escape.
good grief
there is a story of a bird, that had completion an eagle vs a blue jay
in that place a time was written a cloud of darkness existed
before me world known, I can let go of this bond and know Holm sees me for what I am worth.
the life I am is nothing without you
all cuts of trees, I worry within the bones men do not know how much it takes from who we are inside and out.
to see my hero slowly go into a place, I watched a log come ashore with a raccoon and I can walk away, know time is nothing broken.
no one sings like you anymore
into the clouds and trees
A moment took me where my dog had to do what we all do. Pent up in the car for five hours on long drive. My love asked me if the land I was on was mine. I said no, this is my family property. Some part of of it bothered me. He ran back and got in the car.
We didn’t speak for the next hour and I let it out. Why do you ask about property?!
in my mind because my tribe derives funds in a system, I thought she might be aiming at something of value of who we are.
I hit my hand hard against the wheel. Full of emotion as if I was betrayed.
She said to me, I just wanted to know he was safe, he’s 16 and he’s a dog, coyotes could have been out there and this is a time of season of that desperation. I felt so ashamed for a thought of jealousy that had monetary value of the value of my ideal design of a woman who can know me for what I am worth without drive. I looked back to my dog that is a place holder for us of life, him shaking. I pulled at the first stop so she could hold him like a baby.
I let the darker side of my mind get ahead of me. It became a small lesson where I thought I could not be better for the lesser.
I’d driven so long, her hand at wheel, she nudged me to tell me, this is where your grandma grew up.
I looked back to the seat in the rental car and see the babe, folded in her sweater.
the stem of this argument started about lead singer of Keane sounding like Freddie Mercury and I stand by it.
a story of birds challenging each other where all came down to blue jay and eagle.
in my mind I always wanted to make it into a print beyond a story. Height of planes where I look at clouds I imagine them somewhere top of mountains. I am taken by an idea I stand by, even if I shiver at a gas station by Oso. Her playlist comes on and
the concept of the bird and whale is part, in my idea a bond. When I was a boy thunderbird was said to be a powerful being that had lightning snakes at the edges of its wings. I have not seen demonstration of that. The challenge that posed me reading mythology where the Thunderbird to you people was the size of a hawk.
where the shiver trades place, ask why I am out at 4am leaning on a rented house.
I saw the coyotes work with the raccoons, somewhere the a thing my great uncle told me. Nature works in the night and she is mother of thoughts. my great void to see three that came to see me and because I was travel, I didn’t have anything to throw to them.
I n desperation I ran to my pocket of jacket on the bed, I motioned as a wait. I handed down a bar and they shared it. one of the three came up on the perch and pushed the hand down, not to say, I want more but as if to say see my appreciation, I place my hand and she crawled over my head and pushed her nose at my cheek.
if I were to write it with romantic notions she would have called me, but in all honesty, there is part of me knowing my place and bonds that cannot break.
I am back at a place I start.
Legion
long before destiny or roles we play. my heart has been earned by the days I spend in the forest knowing what is my place. Those of us now few and far between, eight men managing forest now reduced to one. My great uncles now to me the last faller.
The last whale back saw in my hand, that shapes from start to finish.
To know how to shape silver in a wooden donut tied by strings
to cut film separate colors in ruby and emberlith.
learn and devote 13yrs to change with no guide into the new world of digital.
I was a boy once, I am still that person but understanding of story that is bigger. Thru art I can make difference where a story that is written is of greater good by vessel of my being. The many hearts broken and healed, no death falls my hand but time of thought that I can reflect memory of the people who chose to ask me to speak for memory of place.
but what is memory without an ocean that comes back.
thru the eyes of a black dog, I give what I give to someone who can hold onto value an idea that can not be bought but traded by time as the one who gave it to me. To me I held this for Arthur until Loren White passed, where I felt the world would end if I cut my hand not by accident but a thing that was told to me like passage of betrayal.
a swirling keep of the current that will always be the challenge of men. A log that went as a perfect thing, that I would see with my son. A long I wanted to bring to all my mentors, a washed up log forgotten and somehow not secured by money. I tried to go back to get it once by a hook, the only hook I inherited from Don Jastad in my youth. I had not plan but idea this would be something I could being back with pride to my tribe.
I slipped part way and I swept into current it took me far into keep. I grasped all life to be where I am today and at the beach of Tillamook, wet where I could shake myself off.
Recalling what anti Vi told me and I should have known, not to chase what you can not own. Be the person not the thing that you chase. Embrace the passage not the thing.
Without love there is no life.
before we were domesticated, the world was a different place, and I am bond to that idea.
my name is part of that place, with the whales and the cedar I carve and protect forever with my life. a value few will ever understand.
it was only knowing this when I walked over the narrows to feel the wind forwards and back.
forever whole
no part of me taken from time, all times I’ve carved many things for those who need it to be place. At time any hour I needed to have a place, the place I carved is a closed door now.
this post goes unconventional in midweek, time falls and calls us at time we need it to be. The wound found me in place of my being. A dream of a man who did not whale but his spirit is place of whaler that will not die, it sheltered me not from rain but sun. My life is all but dark hours, lines drawn on anything we can draw upon. We are many things and we are not dead.
We live within a different light. Knights of hour watch.
no death can finds dying of design of mind that wrestle itself. I pulled my shoulder out, and in memory, ending the cedar chips under my feet, I rest for moment. Lean on the work. I lay on them and make a snow angel for a moment to know the only person who would appreciate it know, smiles down where work continues eternal.
I don’t fish or hunt, I make work for ancestry of time. not whaler but there are parts of me that go deep into depth where I loose myself.
Air in judgment
my heroes are who they are, many men and women. In my younger days I had a judgment agains crows, ravens and wolves. In time I learned to appreciate even a coyote or raccoon.
no place I can fly or design I can make to bring back some of those gone before me, but with sentiment of mystery. I can appreciate the nuance of their decisions.
A fault line
if you can’t catch up, let us make simple. if you don’t live this, you can not write about it.
a new day dawns a corner from the block
work is to be made, it will be made. This place that is called by my peers a bat cave. It is where work happens. When the fallen have gone to other place, I know a horizon is a different place.
There was a time when Tacoma, seemed nothing and now with language of our people now speaking again. The place I had many nightmares I have resolve because I know the map and why it cursed me at a time. a village called where small water meets the ocean.
I open the door in a new light.
as James Bond might open doors with a porcelain dog, I see what work it left for me to accomplish.
now that i’ve let go what is taught me, I can now be self. my head always in gracious bow for what I am by time beside me. To walk a dog with a woman who recovers from pills because her dog looks like mine and have a ginger beer with with and be sunset over year and let her known be go. no attachments in the world but so this place is as much as the high end. we watch people engage with money and turn heads. we watch many come in flooding at times pretend to be friends. As I grow older I feel like I become a known within sea of visitors. I can see faces of place I respect when I need to talk to someone or get food.
my duty is not about socializing unless its work. or one hour
they know and understand my life is art and creating, nothing else.
unless a design captures my eye I have no interest, fashion I see is minimal.
in this bore we are this
i’m old so this is gone.
that has no sense that I have no capacity to teach what is not known.
What is not new is unknown.
Pushing Forward Back
When asked what it is to make monumental work, I didn’t ever see myself making this in scale perhaps the way painters make huge work as Chuck Close. I recall several interviews where in his early works how it was shut down his aim to do what he was doing. My aim was never to make monumental works. It may have come from necessity for survival of the art itself. This is a challenging time in my life where mentors like Close and Loren White are no longer with us.
When people pass, emotions run high temperament. Sensitivity within myself I can at my best of endurance I can not contain. Those of us who do this work, duty within my hands, there are days I can not find it in myself to do anything but sharpen my knives and adzes. Two days mixing a green that I know I know how to do can challenge me and I would turn the pallet upside down after 5hrs that went nowhere.
Wondering what is next for me to do as these pillars thin, if not for my love of my land and words of my father, go to your name. Walking among the towering giants of buildings as a ‘staycation’ imagine myself a visitor in Summer night to be part of something and hear and experience what I would normally not be part of.
How I had forgotten what it is to part of unpredicable things and appreciate nuances of living. The work in my mind will always be where it is. At this moment in life knowing I need to appreciate the time of what is granted to me with random conversations of places I had explored enough to feel welcome to. I have friends that would joke about this kind of thing, but it is rare to let rest a mind so focused on something infinite, it’s fury becomes a finite.
Walking with a knowing of what is gone, my love beside me, hands in my pockets watching people who visit this place taking pictures of a sunset from 5th avenue, married or single. A need to see this day a reset within me.
Dying in such heat like a dried raisin, knowing a heat rising. October will be soon and in it my time to work hard. I look to that day as some dread as dreary, but in those times are where I am most productive. I drafted a long post about thanking George David based on his birthday that I didn’t judge correctly and I was corrected by his niece that I am in deep appreciation of.
I felt I should have made some grand gesture but all it had to be is be the city and take time and see the world with my love and my time in it. Look at the poles Duane Pasco made in pioneer square and see them in a different way from the time I was a young man. Place a feather from my pocket at the base of the Dzoonakwa and appreciate the time it to for it to be still standing.
Smile and not be angry, in this transformation. No ride can take place of what it is to be the journey I have been taken by ride. As she calls me away, I look back at what I’d saved and watch the breeze take it off in distance.
She tells me, let it be.
(Mister Blue Sky)
Reminded that work will be in my hands and as George David always pointed out time to stop and rest, be the time without tension. We spend all our days pushing and pulling with work a hard iron keep and we are not machines.
I was forest within the trees for a time. Deeply caught in a void until friends picked away parts of web to get me out of my own hurt. In balance of scale, admiration can be admiration for it’s own sake.
Holding hands in love where I can understand, the fingers of my own hands with grasp of my tools will always be my bind. I am those roots of known as she tells me, know you are not broken but root.
Monuments can be made but without substance they are nothing.
I have nothing left shaped by uncle George but a small piece of ivory. An idea I had in my mind that one day I would buy back a painting made by Art Thompson in some sense of resolve.
That uncharted piece of ivory that means nothing to anyone will become something as meaningful when the time is called for me to do so. Carving at such large scale as toll it takes my body, I long for moments to sketch and know over days passing, enduring to make purpose of small object that only belongs to me.
it’s by grace, this word has page to know it belongs.
The stars where you are interstellar, I have my hand in my pocket with harbilary batteries no nft
the ivory in my keep is substance.
As Loren said, not wood or glass, wood withers, glass breaks but ivory is keep.
no apologies
what I know from the ground up few endure
known place. All lives I gift to my known, enduring love for George David
this day that is his birthday.
I keep within my heat a promise to defend place and vision chained forever unbroken.
word is bond and I would not be name if not time with him and Loren White. With them I am a place of endurance and chain, if killed you would lose all knowledge of what is granted to me.
there is a bond that can not break, I am few of any knowing things within my keep.
gravity and megnetism
this place I know you are gone forever a realization, I can not ever see what was on your mind behind your thoughts, the time within your hands. I remain curious of what is within my teachings of my own heart and the many you have taken time out to share a world of imagination. A hero of the fall, is not fallen but exists in a place that is transformed by legacy, a world without pain and suffering. I touch the surface of a blank sheet of paper knowing fiber of it’s small nuance where I place a pencil never the same thing, without purpose there is no reason.
my regret is not that I could not show you what I am capable of in language you speak. In that place many have grown into their own voices and it is not my place to put words into mouth. That connection was made and ancestry ensured it, the time you were here, you carried a great deal of weight to make a world that makes sure, this world knows you.
No world can pull me away from an idea where you are not magneto. a being where the steel called you to move a world within your hands and shape many things in the time that was need to be.
professing and confessing my admiration
whatever tree that fell before you, you are far beyond the driven now. In a forest of trees that welcome you to a world of passage, time and place where you are called to. A new journey begins and I am grateful for the glimpse of what you could show me in absence of my ancestors and share methods that are timeless.
No mountain I can climb, no distance I can travel, to know the impression left on me you are a wait I could not wish over my worst enemy. As told the cedar rope now from Holm, a weight that carries more gravity with it’s abalone on it. When worn it holds more gravity than anyone can understand. When I ware it out, I feel all its fibre and its purpose. From the inside out. Methods of its lessons to be a left hand to the Right hand. This goes on.
a world is erased but reborn
as duty challenges honor, I imbue anyone who was at place of Holm’s birthday to challenge me the jacket that was place on him with honor for his years of service. I would not be service to demonstrate such thing, if you question my work. Question that with maker.
Defeat is not end, the end is the beginning is the end.
this promise is upheld and will turn to my work and do what work calls me to do a different person shaped by time of mentorship of my teachings of those who taught me. I granted what I can say in my words of world of reflection.
I will teach this guardian to learn all things you asked me to teach knowing.
the thing about us, yeah, there are things that don’t die. There is a deep that can only be known by the known.
in space like Ironmans mask no imitation I can be, if I would be able to reach it. my impatience demonstrates need for want to go. But I am ground. he dared me to run the mind in trials and sing. imitate others and in all my ways I have done that.
Honoring Our Connection
I recall a quote that I am moved by that was from Bill Gates that said in sentiment “You will be disappointed by what you have achieved in a year but be amazed by what happens in 10”.
I say this because for my project for Seattle Sister City relationship to Kobe, Japan was a seven year task. The inception of this project began following the war and city relations in 1959 where Seattle commissioned Joseph Hillaire of Lummi Nation to carve a pole and live there for three months and make a monument to represent our region.
All things age and following the earthquake disaster where there is a museum to honor the tragic loss for the people who survive it, the pole itself was standing as long as it could before it had to be taken down and put in the forest.
Dan Friday, great grandson of Joseph Hillaire looking over the pole in its’ resting place
I’ve met a lot of people and I am happy to say my connection with Dan came from working at Pilchuck Glass school, carving on the pole that stands there in Standwood, WA. Some times the things that are meant to be come together. From all my years when few people understood the nuances of tribal arts I had followed the work of Joseph Hillaire and Chief William Shelton.
I made four trips over the coarse of seven years. I met some amazing people along the way and learned small parts of Kobe with what time I had to appreciate it. As people would ask at home what it would be compatible to I said it is a lot like this to me, if you took Seattle, Everett, Tacoma and Los Angeles and mixed it up, it’s a port city with a rich history and culture that is very forward and fascinating.
The unveiling
A special thanks to all those involved on this long project seen through to completion. It is an experience I would never have imagined being part of my career to put to use what I know of my culture and respect even more that of Japan by experiencing the shrines and people.
Gift pole revealed photo by Brian Chu
Thanks to Brian Chu Photography for stills with City of Seattle and to all team members involved regional to Pacific Northwest and the teams in Osaka and Kobe.
Transitional and Transformative
no void can be place of Juneteenth, there are many who are working away day by day to do work.
I give all I can into this world until it bleeds me dry. My hand in the river at time I have a great appreciation for where I am home. I still regard times that raccoons came to be next to me over time carving next to property of my ancestry. A night when a raccoon guided me to the water as if I were known and see a seal in the river. A sense of urgency. To place her hand four times on the ground hard and scratch her head. As to say come see this.
My admiration and envy for my uncles who were called the trees who have a relationship to the trees. A time now in my work is a deep decision very hard, that I know and have known many years, we are just dinosaurs in this world. I understand we have a duty to our ancestral value.
A value that never escaped me, from Georg David and Greg Colfax,
“Draw and draw until you find yourself and who self is”
in days of our ancestry to scout timber and be hammered down by rain. I never thought I would be in the place I am in place of my great uncles who taught me how to move such things. To hear a falling giant break rain or shine. My hike to Ketchikan and be with fallers I know is probable my last because the land cannot grow faster than an appetite for its value is known.
returning from Japan looking over my tools hand made, knives and adzes.
I sit with contemplation of what was something so far bigger than myself. A void I can not fill but shape as best I can with what is in my hands.
peace
where there is purpose far beyond driven. I am haunted by humility and endurance. I was told by a mentor how someone thru water in his face for his accomplishments. At this time and place I feel that.
A crane came to the pier and sat next to me in Japan. It needed to be recognized in some form.
no one can grow such claws or fly, until you dream bigger ideas.
Drummer
The day I felt achieved in yoga and feel moved, returning from a an achievement of my life
I went to another gym to run off steam when I am not carving I need the energy to let go. I ran out to get lunch for my parents and my friend Casey called me over. I heard he was in bad times and I can not lie, initially I told him I had urgency to see my parents even tho he told me he just needed a ride three miles.
it was a difficult moment to recall what I was told about wrestlers and spectacle
how we had grown up as young men admiring things and branch off to be different.
he mentioned Beatles and Pete best and I told him I was absolutely not that. I heard where he was going and I put on song to remember time we were young and rode the distance for the time I can take him.
it sears me to my bones to know nothing I can not change money in his hands.
when a man stole my car and we were broke he went on alert like no other and when cops would not do work, the network he found and put him in front of me, for me to be a decision of beating.
drummer
holder of lion
in the void something must come back to power
a dream where
Casey can be these drums
to lift my drummer of my hero dream.
for family know I still sing Blue Sunday.