transitions

this weekend, i graduate from seminary. i am growing up and moving on, in many ways, by staying where i am. i am not changing addresses. i am not finding new job (yet). i even still have to take classes until the end of 2009.

the biggest change: realizing i want to be an artist.

to the rest of the world, this may not come as a shock. i was an art major in college. i have a BFA. i enjoy painting with kids. i carry colored pencils in my purse more often than i carry lip gloss. but, i always just thought it was who i was--not something i did, especially not to make a living.

but as i grow, one of the major things i have learned in seminary is that i want to make a living doing things that i believe in, and love. and if that is the case, art will always be a part of making a living.

i keep running into emotions around the changes that are happening that i do not expect. fear is the biggest. i am afraid i cannot make money making art. i am afraid i will fail before i even try. this fear is so palpable, i am fighting to keep it from tying me down, paralyzing me, and restricting me from even trying.

and so i will try. this is step one. i am moving my blog over to abbykk.com, which will also include an online portfolio, and links to an etsy.com shop that is under construction.

this is an experiment in a life of minstry, service and art. can I integrate the parts of myself into a creative life that serves the world? simple as it sounds, this is the sincere question that will drive this experiement in my life. the least i can do is try.

and fyi... abbykk.com is still underconstruction. by the end of the week, i hope to have the kinks worked out and an etsy.com shop up and running. we shall see.

intimate moments in public

this morning while frantically filing my gas tank, late as usual, two cop cars pull into the gas station behind an innocuous looking four door. in the short time that it took my car to suck down a few gallons of gas, the two cops had two young men out of the car, cuffed and were patting them down.

i felt like a peeping tom. here were these young men, probably not more that a handful of years younger than me, being restrained. in a exceptionally basic way, their freedom to move was being denied. and once cuffed, an authority was touching and feeling them. touches that in another context would be considered intimate, but because of uniforms, restraints, hardware and context, are extremely public.

my read on this is scene is colored by too many lenses to name. my own context. i have only been in a car that was pulled over once, and i was not the driver. i am white, and have lived in cities where that seriously drives down the likelihood that cops look twice at you. yet, i am the child of a lawyer who was sure to teach his children their rights at the hands of authority, and how to play the game if pulled over. and in oakland, not a few miles from where a traffic stop took a fatal turn in march, i cannot imagine being a cop in this city and not confronting that reality everyday. nor can i imagine being a young man cuffed in this city, knowing the history, and the fate of the shooter in that incident. these are only the beginnings of the forces at work as that cop rolled up the young man's sleeve and enclosed his wrists in steel.

what feels private is public, and so i turned away, tucked my chin down, replaced the gas pump and drove to holy hill.

huh.