Why I Don't Have A Driver's License.
I didn't know, when I showed up to an orchestra audition at USM in the summer of '94, that I'd just taken the first of a dozen major detours.  The music department at Forrest County Agricultural High School consisted of 2 dozen brokedown horns and a stack of Aggie Fight Songs in a tore up trailer back between the greenhouse and the cattle, halfway out to the ball field.  I was 15, and in some pretty inappropriate ways, I was exactly like I am now: chatty, bratty, and Self-Exempt From Adherence To Socio-Structural Boundaries.  Example: I wrote a lengthy complaint to the guidance counselor at said high school regarding the quality and breadth of class offerings for incoming sophomores, of whom I was one, and made suggestions for their improvement.  Rather than grant me the Intermediate Latin Study Hall and Orchestral Excerpts Preparation periods requested, Dr. Bellew hooked up an audition for me at the nearest college, planning (if only to be rid of me) that I'd do half days and then go up to Hattiesburg to play in the orchestra.  Running it by the conductor of the USM symphony on try-out day, we realized the commute alone was prohibitive, let alone the paperwork.  Following my selection of Baroque dances, we got into a somewhat buzzed chat which prompted him at some point to pick up the phone.  He put his hand over the receiver and said, "Have you taken the ACT?"  I shook my head.  "Super, thanks.  I'll send her over."  I was tested that afternoon, and went to college two months later, not yet old enough to get a learner's permit, a job, or a bank card.

Because Classical Musicians Spend Their Formative Years In A Practice Room, They Can Become Over-Sensitive To Stimulants.
In 1998, 8 semesters, 7 recitals, 6 auditions, 5 addresses, 4 passport stamps, 3 fiances, 2 acid trips and one church membership later, I moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan with my viola teacher, and 5 other musicians.  We all transferred to Western Michigan University in order to finish our performance degrees, and the lot of us did.  In my case, I found out about John Cage (then George Saunders, Krishnamacharya and the Beatles, in that order), and would never be contained by a practice room again.  It's still the most delicious agony to me, realizing how limited my own experience has been.  But at 19, unable to catch up fast enough with the world outside of Mozart and the Southern Baptist Convention, I was insatiable.  That year I took up yoga, painting, sewing, writing, glass etching, and Drinking For Its Own Sake.  Raw Foodism, Eastern Mysticism, and Post-Modernism came shortly thereafter.  Over the better part of the next decade, I went to Trinidad once as a missionary, Costa Rica twice as a lesbian, and Stone Institute of Psychiatry three times as an At-will Inpatient Not Otherwise Specified.  Something of a flash flood took place, and the task of containing it almost wasted me.  A lot could be said on this, but suffice to say that in 2005, the breakthrough year I found out that <CONTROL> C then <CONTROL> V was what folks actually meant when they said "copy and paste," I found myself in Chicago with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute in Daydreaming, having begun a few years ahead of schedule and finished twice as many behind.  It was as if the first 15 years of my life were spent as Kaspar Hauser, and the next 15 as everyone else.

The Good Part Of This Story.
Unemployed and lost as a goose, I detoured once again when The Divine Something Or Other (in conjunction with a faerie godmama named Hezzie Phillips) flew in to assist.  I won an art contest and the prize was one month's stay at the Contemporary Artists' Center in North Adams, Massachusetts.  The CAC was a large communal living space in an enormous old textile mill.  Artists came there to exit their daily routines and distill ideas, focus on new work, recharge and collaborate.  My performance work back then harbored an intention to create vernacular community rituals.  The first piece I made was for the people of North Adams, and the second for the people of New Orleans.  They were witchy and artsy and candles were involved.  I danced around and played my fiddle and said prayers like any artwitch would do, until I stopped wanting to be in front of people, and tried getting underneath them.  (Think flooring.)  I bloodied my knees on a large scale floor mosaic in town, made several pairs of shoes from someone's discarded art project, and got really into being a yoga prop.  It was there in the old Beaver Mill that I bought my first unlimited yoga pass.  Frog Lotus shared a roof with the CAC, and when they offered a teacher training, I hornswaggled my way into taking it in exchange for sweeping the studio floor thrice a day.  Hezzie was for it.  She didn't tell me I was off-task, using my art residency to mess around at a yoga studio.  She may have known even better than I did how important my yoga practice would become to my art practice.  What neither of us knew was that when I got back to Chicago, they would become the same thing.

My Infinite Lightbody Can't Do The Dishes, Pay The Rent, or Brush My Damn Teeth.
Yoga was a game changer for me.  I was still, in 2005, a mess in the brain.  Frequently panicked, riddled with nightmares, trauma-prone, existentially perplexed, and perpetually It's Complicated, I was on 3 psych meds, in therapy, AA, journalling, praying, chanting, doing the yoga AND going to group.  I couldn't have squeezed 2 minutes more of self-reflexive obsession into my days even with my sister's help.  (Girl is a minutes vicegrip.  Hi Katie!  Let me guess.  Reading this on your phone?   In an elevator?  Between Cubscouts and the YMCA?  While listening to voicenotes from lunch meeting #3, updating your Netflix queue, texting your man re:dinner and changing your outerwear?  Just skip to the last paragraph.  It's cool.)  The deal is that I felt like damaged goods, and struggled with making "art" because I so needed to "get well."  Yoga practice introduced the idea that there is in fact a part of me that has never been rattled, tangled or even blurry (the Atman, or essential self), and this idea - simply that this self existed - became the core principle of all my practices.  It was not just heartening, it was arguably life-saving.  Even so, back in Chicago there were things which needed taking care of, and the Atman couldn't do shit to help me.  I had nowhere to live, no job, and few mastered skills outside Extreme Connecting, the high-impact version of meeting and getting along with people that typically interests those of us who dig around in our inners.  I needed a custom blend of orphanage, ICU, ashram, rehab, psych ward, monastery, halfway house, incubator and studio workshop.  Guess where I went.

This Story Is Not Actually About Yoga.
In the last 5 years, I've ridden the night train back to the CAC for guidance, practice and community over and over again.  They have since moved into a magnificent old church in Troy, NY.  I spent 6 weeks there last summer staring into stained glass, chanting and praying and doing the yoga in a bell tower, in between Ice Cream Intermission, Waterfall Intermission and Second Opinion Intermission.  Mala For Bells, the 27 day practice/piece that I performed there, marked a turning point for me, gave me footing and propelled almost all of the last year's Really Good Stuff.  I have lots of people to thank for that.  Hezzie, Leah, Tony, John, Jim, Meg, Hye Soon, Masako, Laura, Rosie, Christy, Sara and Ali made up my backbone creatively, spiritually, and at one point even physically.  [see: Projectile Architect Incident]  I say all the time that the important work we do has to be done alone, but even a monk needs a cave, and sometimes our community is that cave.  And sometimes the cave's cave need's renovations due to being weather-worn and previously neglected in spite of its status as a historical landmark.  [<- Foreshadowing.]  At the Woodside church in Troy, the CAC is still supporting artists and dreamers and workers and makers of all things in an increasingly sustainableway.  The whole thing runs on grants, homegrown vegetables and Hezzie's smile.  The CAC made it possible for me to reconcile my art practice with my spiritual practice, integrate my scattered parts and create a life I like very much.  The quantity of doctors, therapists, teachers, mentors and sponsors in my wake are proof enough that this took some doing, and while I'm grateful, stable, and usually helpful, I'm nowhere near finished.  I'm heading back to Troy in a few weeks for this year's reunion show, and will present the debut of my new practice/performance Dream Yoga Sleepover, a lucid dreaming slumber party coming soon to a sleeping-bag-covered-floor near you.

Taking One Minute To Enter An Email Address And Clicking A Vote Button Doesn't Cost Anything Unless You Are My Sister, And Even She Finds The Time.
CAC at Woodside is up for a $50,000 Pepsi Refresh Grant, and I implore you to go to the link on the sidebar (or right here) and vote every day for the month of April for us to get it.  Winners are determined by votes alone, so this is truly within our grasp.  We need to reach way out into our community caves, do some Extreme Connecting, and build a critical mass of voters to win this thing.    Is this an ingenious marketing strategy to get Pepsi's brand image polished, endorsed and distributed by each one of us to our personal networks?  Yes, dear friends.  Of course it is.  And I have two things to say about that.  1) That doesn't make their money any less helpful to CAC Woodside, and 2) There is, at this time, zero evidence of Pepsi using anyone's registered email for advertising purposes, but if you feel really paranoid about it, you should have a secondary email address that you only give to people you do not want to hear from.  Hezzie is offering a $500 incentive grant to the artist who is able to get the most votes, which is very nice of her.  I don't have any of your emails (I am not allowed to view my subscribers emails, by the way) so I can't give Hezzie my list to cross-reference her vote list, which means I'm officially not personally doing it for the money.  You can pat me on the back by clicking this link right here.  IMPORTANT: IF YOU DON'T HIT THE VOTE BUTTON AFTER YOU SIGN IN, IT DOESN'T COUNT.

Thanks, friends. 

Love,

Karen