October 13, 2009:

As my apartment empties and the bare hardwood floors and walls with no art reveal themselves for the first time in 16 years, I'm understanding more about what caused me to create the apartment and where its vitality came from. When I moved in, perhaps a quarter of the art had already been gathered. The new pieces were found since I started living on Fulton St. across from the park. One immediate influence from the beginning was wanting to bring the green of the park into the front room. Green and landscape were brought indoors via objects that worked with green and one large painting which mirrored the outdoor hill and trees. The bay window's reach toward the park bridged the outdoors and the inside.

There was no conscious plan about any of the apartment's creation. I didn't buy things to support a larger piece. No single piece had clear dominance. The guideline was color: lots of well-defined color. Most of the time I lived there, I would have said that the apartment's task was to contain many types of beautiful objects: glass, rugs, paintings, textiles. Most of the finds, as I brought them home, fit beautifully from the beginning. Very few pieces were taken back or passed on quickly.

This morning in conversation with my friend Betsy, we rightly concluded that the common denominator for all the pieces was that they possessed a vivid amount of energy. These energies reached forth into the room and mixed with energies from their neighbors. Even though you couldn't see the energy, you could feel it. The large red glass plate that Nancy Becker created to more fully understand Georgia O'Keefe's Red Poppy painting came to life at night when the pole lamp underneath was turned on. The lamp shade funneled light up underneath the oval glass and Wow!, it shone. Similarly with the Leon Applebaum bowl that lived on my desk toward the back of the living room. It also slept by day, but at night a track light angled directly into the hollow of the piece so that the colors and the multiple glass bumps and shapes would come to life and be the most exciting activity in that part of the room.

I'm sure that the objects altered their energy in response to support from other pieces. There was also the shifting of the vibe in the apartment because of what happened there. It was a peaceful place. There wasn't lingering ozone from arguments and contention. If there would have been, I would have dealt with that, but from the beginning, the rooms had a serenity that endured. That safety was enhanced by reading astrological charts in the living room. It was a good place to talk, a very good place to talk. Typically, a visit from someone meant that we'd sit in the large chairs at the bay window for a while. An hour or two. Drinking tea. Usually not listening to opera or any other music. Talk was honored as the most important event and distractions were discouraged. But, when I was alone there were many hundreds of hours of listening to music. Astrology readings, the cultivation of relationship, music playing for long stretches when I listened to it and did not talk with someone else. Those were vibes that my friends and I created and gave back to the art that had been assembled to encourage warmth, curiosity, joy.

It all worked. All the parts, living and mineral contributed. Clearly, the apartment and it's dispersion strikes a deep cord with my need to explain what's also going on with my body. Of course my apartment is not dying of cancer. Still, it is being radically transformed, unwrapped and given back to the energy pool. And that's what will happen to me as well. Or, that's part of what will happen.

I find myself wanting to express some of what I think will happen during and after the dying process. In some ways, this is the part of the blog that I thought I'd most enjoy writing about. Those feelings were pretty strong during the first entries of the blog over a year ago. All of those expectations vanished quickly as I began to enjoy talking about what was happening in my current life, not speculating months in advance. However, I still have many of those ideas and I'd like to share them now and again in the time that remains.