breathing lessons

    Breathing Lessons #56. View of Beulah Lane, driver’s side window

2013

iphone chromographic print

I started this blog on the suggestion of a book that I'm reading called "Show Your Work!" because often fear is exactly what stops me from sharing.
I fear being judged.
I fear making something terrible.
I fear making something great.
I fear making only unfinished things.
I fear not making anything.
I fear my own limitations AND my own abilities.
I fear not being good enough.
I fear not living up to my potential.
I fear I misjudge that I have potential.
I fear.
I fear.
I fear.
Sometimes I fear breathing.

And so this is how my journey into a spiritual life started.  With fear.  Fear God. Fear dying. Fear sin. Fear your own body. Fear, and fear well, or you will go to hell.

But it hasn't stayed that way. My spiritual path has started to mesh with my artistic one. My studio has become my place of energetic renewal and rest. My work has traveled from a space of angry feet stomping to be heard and understood, to a place where understanding can just be explored, where wholeness in the midst of fragmentation can exist, and where a transfella can just be a transfella.

This began with breathing lessons. Literal ones. Becoming a member of a 12-step group 4.5 years ago.  And then going to the Tucson Meditation Center and being guided about how to breathe and acknowledge that I'm doing it. I was taught that it is okay and actually necessary to be present to breath, to pain, to joy, to judgement, to freaking run away freight train thoughts and flights of fancy. I learned in a whole new way what it means to just be. And I learned a little more about how to suffer loss and to walk through it.

My dad died in 2013, and it changed everything somehow.
It made my photographic practice so real and so necessary in a way that I didn't understand that it had always been. I made a body of work for him that I'm truly proud of:   http://raestrozzo.com/section/367454_breathing_lessons.html 

 I went to school to be a photographer, but somehow only managed to claim to be a closet photographer. I think hid some of my best self from myself and others by not sharing the photos I was making in grad school with my grad school colleagues. But I shared so many other things with them that also needed to be shared, so I could grow enough out of my fear to share anything at all. I think this is what art community is for. I think that the idea of the artist toiling away alone in "his" studio is the thing that kills art making. It's too much pressure to be someone else's idea of great. And so I limit my own individual great.

I focus too much on product and what other people think, on galleries, on success = lots of people buying my work or seeing it or both, and on pretentious bullshit that doesn't matter when I'm actually MAKING!

Look at that. I just made another list of fears.  Because it's the making that matters. Its the connection to creative community, to the creative power of spirit, to my higher power, and to the process that makes me want to make art in the first place. I tell my students all the time that  the biggest battle is letting yourself just make - even if what you make you think is rotten. Because under the rot is learning. Under the rot is process and ideas that are NOT rot. Under the rot, something is growing.

I wish I could take my own advice.

And so I take a deep breath.  I think about Mark O'Brien's poem "Breathing" because it seems to me I can easily think about making work in the way that he thinks about air

Breathing

By Mark O'Brien

Grasping for straws is easier;

You can see the straws.

“This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,”

Presses down upon me

At fifteen pounds per square inch,

A dense, heavy, blue-glowing ocean,

Supporting the weight of condors

That swim its churning currents.

All I get is a thin stream of it,

A finger’s width of the rope that ties me to life

As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection.

Water wouldn’t be so circumspect;

Water would crash in like a drunken sailor,

But air is prissy and genteel,

Teasing me with its nearness and pervading immensity.

The vast, circumambient atmosphere

Allows me but ninety cubic centimeters

Of its billions of gallons and miles of sky.

I inhale it anyway,

Knowing that it will hurt

In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245460http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245460

Thanks, Mr. O'Brien. In some ways, his poetry saved my artistic life. Poetry is like that. Art saved me 9 years ago. And it keeps on saving me. It reminds me to breathe, even when it's hard.

This is a breath.
It's a showing.
It's also fear.
But good.

I want to explore my spiritual life and my art life. I want to share that exploration with people I love and with people I don't even know. I want to know what other people think about this topic. I want to know what other people read, make and do. 

I'm taking a deep breath now.
I'm glad you are reading this. I hope you will come back and share too.