God Was All Dry

School Yard Killer Before I joined the Circle of Angels I stewed for years in alienation and depression. I know a little about what drives school yard killers to commit desperate bloody acts such as the shooting rampage at Columbine. Perhaps I also know a little about what drives people to choose religious extremism. I went through a long process of alienation before realizing my own a radical solution. In hindsight, the groundwork had been laid as methodically as the construction of a road. Though I lived adequately and had some job satisfaction, my nerves bathed in self loathing. In my mid 30’s, I saw no way out. Like many passive intellectuals or perhaps like those schoolyard killers, I lived quietly, unnoticed, and seething inside like a pressure cooker. I felt I would implode or explode and I took a leap away from society, where I never read a newspaper, watched the news or paid taxes for 8 years. The 4th Way language helped to explain my divorce from society. “The Work” language consisted of tools. One of the tools of “The Work” was a simple poker deck with each suit and number describing a level and a trait. These traits represented what the work called “centers of being”. Everyone had a major center from which they operated. The diamonds represented the intellectual center, the hearts the emotional, the clubs the instinctual, and the spades the moving center. The numbers on the cards corresponded to how you used that center. There was also a hierarchy of importance and thus face cards held more power. I was told I was “in the queen” or I had too much “queen” energy. The queen in all suits was a high card given to madness. As an example, they cited the queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” who shouted “off with their heads!” The queen had a positive attribute. When you needed the energy to try something new, the queen provided that valuable spark for jumping into new activities, sort of like a spark plug. However, the group concluded that I too often lived in the queen, especially the queen of diamonds, as if I had a faulty voltage regulator to my intellect. They said they couldn’t trust me in certain situations. Given my past, this seemed true. In the work language, the “queen” provided many sparks long before the Circle of Angels when I ventured far from Seattle Washington, where my parents and siblings remained. I Hitchhiked to New York City at the age of 23 and marched forth with rebellious bohemian attitudes thought typical for an artist. Spiritual question marks suit art, as any artist can tell you, and the “queen” in my paintings, blurted out from either spiritual boredom or desperation. I applied impulses frequently for the excitement and uncertain spontaneity and perpetuated my confusion outward. Art reflected my moments wrenched as they often seemed. Art, in my opinion, often entertains the question of, “Do you know you are going to die?” It confronts mortality. I felt the need to freeze moments in art to preserve their impression in the face of death. Like many artists, whose ultimate dedication is abstract, I subsisted on marginal jobs to pay rent and eat. These jobs took little energy, so I could presumably use my main energy to paint or sculpt. As a young aspiring artist, I went from employer to employer who I held in various degrees of disregard. Blessed with cussed determination, I survived three and a half years in New York City and over ten years in Boston where I earned my Bachelors of Fine Arts and continued painting in a warehouse studio. Living for those art moments was not enough. My dedication to art began to erode. Fifteen years of low wages and my lack of effort to market myself left me sidelined well outside the mainstream. Exalted ideals of art turned sardonic and I began to lose touch with the whole process. My paintings stopped telling me what to do as if my very intuition became lost. “You can’t really be dead?” I asked them, but they remained mute. I felt my being slip into a personal darkness and rudderless existence.