More videos from Mimi

June 2, 2014
Mt Laguna to t Salton Sea

June 6, 204
100miles n waves of gold

June 11
in t mts @ last

June 12
114F here ystdy

Travel Log 1 for The Woman Who Planted Dreams

Mimi's bike ride

Mimi has been texting pieces of her journey on bicycle to the Mexico Boarder:
 April 18, 2014
Near Yakima now. Sunny. Beautiful world.

April 20, 2014
Goldndale headwind, rain ystrdy, clmbd SadisPass. Wild horses! Body@capcty. Maryhil 2day.

April 22, 2014
Tent blew off us ths am, n there an antelope 20ft away! In Shaniko OR. Headwind intense

A few days later: 

&

April 29.
paisley, OR

May 3rd:

CA at last, near Reno. 

May 5th,

All is well. Just arrvd in Reno. Windy!

May 11th

Mono Lake!  Bedroom on Walker Rvr.

May 20
aquaduct

drankfrom swamin sleptnear

May 24
In La Jolla. Pelicans. Seals. Surfers.

May 25
Sometimes brokn. Route troules sinc Rivrsd. Goin E again on 8. So close. In La Mesa

map route freways messy messy

The Dream Collective (last note before I go)

Vija Celmins (Latvian-American visual artist known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena.) 

This is my last message to you before I head off with my dream pouch to walk a great distance. Physically, I'm not ready, not in the least. Spiritually, I'm both balanced and hungry. I'll be fine. In a few weeks, I will be strong. I am two days back from a 6-week artist residency at Holden Village, a remote village and spiritual retreat center in the North Cascades above Lake Chelan. In these two days, I have tied up many loose ends  (boat, bike, rent, loans, mail, food boxes, insurance, tabs).

Vija Celmins

It would be improper now to head off on a dream journey without consulting Joseph Campbell. So let us do that. Excerpt from conversation with Michael Toms, Joseph Campbell is talking: "The rules of the past are restrictive of the life process. The moment the life process stops, it starts drying up; and the whole sense of myth is finding the courage to follow the process. In order to have something new, something old has to be broken; and if you’re too heavily fixed on the old, you’re going to get stuck. That’s what hell is: the place of people who could not yield their ego system to allow the grace of a transpersonal power to move them." So, are we ready to let go of the old? Almost, almost, and here we go.

When I was conceiving of this project, I took it to some friends for feedback. Sometimes this is helpful, sometimes it's damaging. I was put off when the biggest dreamer I know asked if my project wasn't self-indulgent. Hmmph! Maybe he's not a dreamer. I took him for a dreamer. Maybe he's just been quoting the dreamers. The world is full of quoters, reading off the famous words of famous people, as if they were hired to pull a certain truth forward, as if the past were whispering into the web through them. Maybe that's what we need, an onshore breeze of great thoughts from great thinkers? I don't know. I think we need a journey to Heart Lake where we can, in thirsty sips, rethink it. I think (all) our brains need to be on (all) our bodies.

Vija Celmins

Anyway it started to concern me, so I looked into it, self-indulgent. What does that mean, to indulge? Indulging is a kind of focus and perception, I think, with an after-frustration glow. Through this glow it says hullo, and yes, yes, we must follow our flow. Indulgence is the line between mature and immature, where the body and the mind come together, or come apart, in decisive ways, to make our little histories big.

How does the artist move through the timeline of her history? In waves, up and down, in and out, like a tide, shifting, turning. To quote Jørgen Leth from "The Perfect Human" (it must be 4 o'clock, here comes that onshore breeze), “How does such a number function? What kind of thing is it? How does he fall? How does she lie down?” So objective, our fascination with the artist, with the artistic process. The onlooker, detached, wants to know what it is and what it's like to be attached, and what it is to be alive and  to be creating. He leans in and wonders, is it happening now, is that the face it makes, are they the hand it uses? How can I do that? As if observing another body would tell his body how to feel and find it. "Look at her move," he thinks, "What is this thing? Has she agreed to this thing? Is she driving this thing? What are her fears now that it's begun? Are they warranted? Is she happy? Is she happy now? Are her bridges burning? Can I take that bridge? 

Dreaming is indulgent and we are allowed. Even in this capital capital Fine Arts world, with all its codified, purchasable forms, there must be room for internal stirring if we are to move from action to art, from specific event to collective consciousness.

Campbell says: "The best teaching from the East is the one given by the Dalai Lama. We also had it from Sri Ramakrishna, the great Indian Hindu teacher of the last century, namely that there is a common consciousness which is our own ground and so in consciousness we are one; insofar as you identify yourself with the consciousness that moves and lives in your body, you’ve identified with that which you share with me. And on the other hand, if you fix on yourself, and your tradition, and believe you’ve got It, then you’ve removed yourself from the rest of mankind." This is, what I think, The Woman Who Planted Dreams is about, connecting our deepest desires and dreams.

Vija Celmins

Perhaps in my loneliness, I had removed myself from mankind? The world is looking for martyrs. Sometimes they want an artist. Sometimes they want a rich man. They want to see their pain living out in the world, in us.

I believe we all know how to flow and that we were born flowing. I believe we were trained how to stop somewhere in the world, in school , at work, so we could feed the machine. The machine is about greed. It requires that we stop.

Now, even now—what am I, 40, 50, 70—I know how to flow, right now, to connect, though I am often disconnected. How do I stay in tune, in tact? Is there a way to stay present and awake? I have a system that works mostly, but every now and then it breaks. Thankfully, there are way stations for my lost train cars, in cafes, in parks, on beaches, on the bluff, under the moon, in the mountains.

A few weeks ago, I removed a splinter from this project as I struggled to defend it. I dare say the splinter touched a nerve and that helped define some things. I'm grateful for the operation. It told me what I feared. Judgment. Exactly what I long for—judgement, to be seen, judged, approved, loved. A witness comes in many colors.

I'm less afraid someone else will think my project is lacking and more afraid that I will. Is the work too simple? I have to admit that it is. Will it continue to be simple? Yes it will, until my audience breathes themselves into it. It was meant to be an empty vessel and an invitation. My worst fear (grief) is that I it will go unheeded. That I am alone (not lonely but alone with no body to turn to, no outfit to the fringe, no potential for community) with no one to create for.

Dreams began to arrive. The project grew beyond itself and beyond me. Now I'm beholden to so many, and the work has weight, the the weight of communion. Sometimes responsibility is a gift.

I put my arms around Tarkovsky and his daily ritual, his ritual of one thing  repeated, like pouring a glass of water down the toilet (from "The Sacrifice"), like anything, for instance, done everyday, at the same time, with intention. Because of this thing, this one thing, the world shifts, it must, because of this one thing done intentionally. That's where I am. That's where I've been these past two years, on the cusp of things. Changes. Sensing everything about to happen, but quiet and still—the moment before the moment.

Vija Celmins

I have vowed to form a ritual of walking and planting and dreaming this spring, summer and fall. Each night, before I go to sleep, I'll sit a meditation (maybe I'll move a meditation) and read one dream aloud and invite the world to change in me. Together, we'll create an intentional world, one in which we're not afraid to dream or say the word art or announce ourselves, because we're not serious, complex, clever enough. Simplicity will be our vehicle. Planting dreams will be my way of navigating limbo. Hell, am I rowing in hell?

How is holding on different than floating in? How exactly are the sensations different? I've been frustrated with this liminal living. I've been stuck in this static phase, possibly quietly morphing for over two years, floating in this what fluid, working through this who frustration, in every aspect of art and life—what who, what who. There's no difference now between me and you. We're one. Everything. One. But I have no way of understanding and am confused. I need another drink from Heart Lake.

I was wrong to say there was a divide between life and art. There's no such thing. No life without art, no art without life. It was a mirage to say it. This is the source of my art today, tomorrow, until I'm born into something—frustration. How can I manifest my frustration today, for I can manifest nothing else? Is this a gap? No. It is sawdust in the gap. It is a dry place? No. It is too wet even to grip. In lieu of direction, it is movement. In time, I think, a direction will manifest. I mean, it must. It must.

Vija Celmins

I know an artist who says she hasn't committed 100%. Only she knows what this means. The rest of us don't. We only know her as an artist. What is she hiding from? The fear of dreaming comes early, the question of self and art come later. Then the fear of losing what we've gained, because we fear the void or rather the fall into the void. We hold on. Tight. There are artists whose main medium is falling. Bas Jan Ader was one. He fell from rooftops and trees and even horizons. Certainty is not an ingredient for art. It is an ingredient for working or marrying or buying a house.

I was asked by a peer artist, "Does your path bypass your ego? Are you confronting what exists outside (your ideas of) yourself?" I wondered, in response, is there an outside, or just a lack (or glut) of information? It'd be easier to live in the present if I were a wild animal, but I'm not a wild animal, or not enough of one or I've forgotten what kind. I suffer from something. It's not not knowing. It's knowing. I know what tomorrow will bring. Either I enforce my dream or I don't. Either I let it go or I hold on, again.

Vija Celmins

"Planting dreams is an act of universal inhaling and exhaling," says a dream friend of mine. "It's the action of living as an art, rather than living and making art, and this supersedes art and the things that define me as such." I take his statement to mean that art is spiritual and not derivative. It's an experience, not a product, though it may yield a product, which the receiver receives as art.

We must decide if our world is restrictive or enabling, then allow ourselves to feel that world. Is the world, as Jørgen Leth suggests, "boundless and radiant with light, empty, with no boundaries, with nothing?"

Vija Celmins

The world says to feel everything and I do, but my peers tell me not to feel some things. Some things, they say, should be overcome, like frustration and pain and sorrow and grief and anger—unproductive things. I disagree. Happiness, like fear, will pass. I must find a way to be present to what is, whatever is. Ice. Fire. Pain. Comfort. Otherwise I'm driving and not flowing, telling and not listening, burying the path I could be following.

"The spiritual and the earthly rub and cause sparks," says this same dream friend. Yes and the body and the mind too cause sparks and the other and the self also do. That's the sparkiest spark of all, I think, the other and self. It's ever the source of trouble and resolution. "Hold this idea," he says, "art is dangerous." Art is only dangerous if life is dangerous, he says. Art is only dangerous to our worldview, to our political system, to our ability to remain the same. Art is not dangerous to the dreamer. Art is dreaming.

To be heard is not to be understood, but to be shared and to share. To be funded is not to succeed, but to be valued in one way. To be focused is to be isolated and sometimes blinded. I am not so emotionally intelligent as to know what I am feeling (at all times). I only know that I am feeling. My mind asks my body if I am perhaps avoiding something or preparing for something? In answer, my body takes a step forward or back and the question is gone. Removing the question is one way of answering it. The way to remove a question is simply to ask it a larger question or come at it from the other side.

Long ago my world told me I had to decide on one or two things (to make a life). You cannot keep on beginning, it said. You must settle on a hobby or a vocation, get a husband or a wife, have some children, buy a house. Procreate in a way we understand. But there are only so many people you can be in 93 years! A professional beginner, that's what the artist is. That is what I want to be.

Vija Celmins

Annette says a liminal state is not a way station, but is full of magic. That's easy to see in hindsight, I think, from the outside. The child in the womb isn't fascinated with its fasciations. It simply is.

German performance artist, Joeseph Beuys, was shot down in the desert. His plane crashed. He would have died except he was found by some nomads, medicine men, and taken away to be healed. Is this real or was it a myth? It is a dream of mine to leave this world and return again. The power of returning is what I long for. Beuys said, "The artist must remove himself from the consumerism in which he has dreadfully been trapped and instead contemplate Time, its perception, on the different spiritual depths of man and nature, exploiting, on the one hand, the value of the spaciality of the mind as an attitude of man's intuitive potential and, on the other, the courage of truth, of the truth that goes beyond the systems needed to live and love reality." Like Campbell, Beuys believes our prisons are self-constructed and we know (only we ourselves know) the way in and out of them.

I do not know what is coming for me. I only aim to be open and opening and stepping into your (my)(our) dreams. I've received poems and objects and large and small instructions and vague ideas of possible horizons and I thank you all so very much for your work and for dreaming with me. Without you as a companion in this world, I would die, I am sure, of loneliness and neglect. I intend to give you my every attention in thanks for your heart.

Vija Celmins

I've collected apple seeds and will collect conifers as I go, to plant with our dreams. My mother has agreed to send a package of dreams in June, so if you haven't already, and still want to, send a dream by snail mail, but do it soon: Mimi Allin, 117 E Louisa St #201, Seattle WA 98102. It will go to Seattle first, then to PA, then to me in CA. You can also go into the woods all by yourself (or to the sea) (or to the meadow) and dig a hole and whisper your dream into it or put a hand written note into the ground and that will also reach me.

My dear friends, Laura Musikanski and Clinton Bliss, have offered to receive my handwritten notes during this journey and scan and post them here to this blog. If you want to follow my journey and see our dreams planted, check here from time to time. I will otherwise be off the grid and fully immersed in these, our dreams. All blessings to you.

Who's Afraid of Dreaming?

Vija Celmins Working Photos

[On Preparing to Be Criticized for a Forthcoming Work, The Woman Who Planted Dreams, 2014]

Who's Afraid of Dreaming?

I am. We are. There's always doubt. Right now, I'm anxious about my current project, The Woman Who Planted Dreams. I'd rather be free of these questions and onto the path—to be known, knowing and making known. I feel unsure for several reasons. First, it doesn't feel pure. Second, it has no end. Third, I'm coming from a place that doesn't even know itself, let alone its art. It should be easier to leave the self behind, when a serious work is pushing through. Unsure as I am, I must go on because, well, there's nothing left to do. Such is my circumstance.

This is not a pure idea. It didn't burst forth as a passionate life preserver thrown to a storm of circumstance, the way some projects do, yet the circumstances are no less dire than they once were. This idea was, rather, adapted from a real life possibility and question. Can art and life meet here, where I am, in what I'm doing, in what I want to do? My partner was planning a through-hike of two long trails, The Pacific Crest Trail and the Pacific NW Trail, back to back. It's the kind of thing I would have jumped at 10 years ago. Such endeavors feel like life to me, like unbuffered contact with the raw energy of life, but now art gets in the way. I'm too busy making art to do real things like hike and sail and climb and travel and cook. I can't afford to take side trips when my art is calling me. I must continue to make work, build my artist, earn a living. Rent is low, but not yet free.

This isn't an aside. Bear with me. For 10 years, I've been both formulating and attempting to articulate a deep-rooted project in me called The Clown. The Clown, as yet unmade, will be a 3-4 year research-journey to Mongolia via Clown School in Paris. I can't explain it yet, not really, not exactly, but I feel it. I feel it deeply and one day will heed it, because if I don't it will eat me. The fusing of life and art meet there for me, in Mongolia, in the Mongolia I will enter through a little door in Paris. That's my dream. It might make sense to someone. It might make sense to no one. Now in the meantime, until I forge on, or find words, I sit and train and struggle to understand my longing. Will the world that makes me an artist endorse me in this endeavor and help me fulfill this dream if I find the right words for it? One reason I give myself for not forging ahead with this dream is that I wish it to be pushed up from within me, not nailed down by or under me. It doesn't matter that I don't have the money to do it. The words are the important thing. And so, with these pressing concerns, I keep myself from living and walking. How can I plant dreams when The Clown is agitating me? That would, ironically, be like loitering. No, I must go on sitting here, in my stupor, banging my head against my notebook, until the words fall out.

Vija Celmins working photo

The many-armed poet, blind and sick, is wobbling, convulsing, jerking about, needing a lathe, a path to be on, while Mongolia, ever foggy, ever distant, as it should be, shimmers on. Who says I can't walk? Who says I shouldn't go? Perhaps I need to. I went out conferring, discussing the idea with artists and friends. In what way can I make this journey mine? I asked them. Am I avoiding The Clown? Are these works the same thing? Might the dream work be my training? I let my peers in. Show me the way, I say. A friend shows me a short film about a man who planted trees. It fills me with an urge to commit to something big and see it through. My spiritual work is far from done. I have for years felt a voyage coming on. Why not this journey? I am still in limbo, once an artist, not yet an artist. Who am I? And why not this journey? Who acts, who decides, in these states, and why not this journey? Perhaps an action will elicit a mantra and that will induce a purpose? Doula work. And why not this journey?

Walking satisfies. When I walk I feel solved, connected, as if I'm creating something, the world, an art form, a self. The idea of rousing dreamers from their sleep as I walk feels right and necessary. How seldom we encounter the dreamer awake on our path. No sooner had I found the idea then relief set in. For the first time in years, things made sense. I'd been struggling, not because I'd found the path, but because I'd left it. Going back to the mountain was the thing to do. Not impure. Adapted.

This work is unquantifiable. It has no end, no beginning. It's middle work. It won't start at the southern terminus and won't end at the northern one. When grantors ask to know the end of the work before you begin, they cut the work out of the work. I pity the grantee. If they are honest, they do two projects to satisfy both the work and the grantor, or they say, How can I know the outcome now, and risk losing their grant.

Planting dreams doesn't respond to an organized need. It doesn't make people feel good about their neighborhood. It only invites people to dream, or to dream again, or to consider what it means to dream an intentional world. In the meantime, it's just me doing the work I need to do, but then that's something, something I learned at Tent City (Song of Tent City, 2010). I can't do your work. I can only do mine. Inspire and breathe. That was a powerful lesson. It makes everyone an artist and everyone a witness and no one a critic.

Vija Celmins

I'm done with clever art. No more injecting good ideas into fertile eggs. I want something simple, personal. What's public about my art is that I say to you, I need you for this work. I need you to become this artist. I want you to make this work. Plumb your soul, as I plumb mine, for a dream, for the faith we need to see it through, for the courage to witness and be witnessed. If you say it's important, then it's important. If you say it's trivial, it's trivial. Or, like me, you can waffle back and forth. One day it is, next it isn't. What does it matter who I am, what my world is, worthwhile or not? Loveable? Loving? Forgotten? Seen? Safe? Wonderful? Wild? Tame?

I've been asked so many times, by so many people, What is a dream? What do you want? Do you mean a sleeping dream or a hope for the future? It seems to me the dreamer is sound asleep. I say to you, dreamers, poets, lovers, friends, wake up! This is about alchemy, emergence, something from nothing, the world we want, the things that stir us. We don't plant dreams alone. We plant them together. Together we find time and space and draw them out and shape our world. The action of bringing dreams to seed is our work. Let us begin!

When they say "living the dream," they mean the standard dream no one really dreams. The dream we sometimes paint over our secret dreams. What's real? What's true? And who's afraid of dreaming? Is there shame in our dream? Awkwardness? Mistrust? Fear? What will they say when they hear about mine? It's too small, too literal, too simple, too complex, too selfish, too vague—it's just not of this world. I ask you, what's simple? What's complex? To what world does your dream belong? I want your input, yes, but moreso, invite you to do the inner work with me and seek the circumstances of life.

Last night, I spent time talking about this work with a dear and gifted friend and artist, Vanessa DeWolf. We spent time organizing our careers into chapters. I decided I was in my third or fourth chapter and Vanessa titled my present one, The Liminal Years. I'd entered The Liminal Years in 2011, while performing a conceptual piece on Mt Rainier (Tahoma Kora, 2011). I left my artist on the mountain and entered a limbo state, a place of healing, a womb. 

I've been confused and struggling and open about it. I don't know where or who I am or what I'll become. I'm not fighting it, but I'm also not comfortable. When I first returned home from the mountain, I felt a deep and decisive shift and a loss. At first, it meant I sat catatonic at my desk for 10 hours, then it meant scratching my head, then just scratching out ideas I had no interest in realizing, then in desperately trying to jump-start a pulse, a new life. I wandered about in this state, attempting to understand who I was, with projects like Sonnets in the Sand (2012), Surrogate (2012), Burden of Purpose (2013) and Hunger (2013). Still no birth. I wait. And wander. And now a new work, which is maybe more wandering. I don't know.

My previous chapter was one of bringing language (poetry) into the physical world (movement). My works came fast and furious, one on the heels of the next. I was full force ahead and knew what I wanted. Works like Poetess at Green Lake (2006), Window Show (2009), Corporate Poet (2010), The Blue Line (2010) and Song of Tent City (2010) attest to this. Then, after the mountain, I began reaching in for my work, instead of out. One cannot do research online when one is reaching in for material. One must do the spiritual work, attend to the body, the soul, the feet. Because the direction of my sourcing changed, my work changed and that changed how I was received. I can still see the worth of my earlier works, but can no longer make them, for it would no longer satisfy and is not worth the grants I could garner.

I was no more the artist I was. I had new and unknown needs. With this transformation underway, I proposed projects to various granting agencies. Not surprisingly, the further I went along, the less attention I got, and the less money. If that said anything, it was that my work was growing less capable of promising something known to my public and more likely to express a doubt about myself and my own ability to do anything, let alone make art. In the past, my audience saw and stepped into my work. Now I am asking them to see me, and teach me, and work with me towards something or step aside and let me in. I spent years facilitating experiences for others and stood by watching them glaze to the profound, feeling exhausted myself. Now I wouldn't think of doing that! It's essential I be in my work and live it.

Vanessa offered a profound new perspective in suggesting that what had shifted was not the artist, but the attention of the artist to the moment in which the work was perceived. If that moment shifted, back or forward, perhaps the art hasn't happened yet, or happened long ago? Looking back to earlier works, I can see the exact moment when the art happened. It was when the receiver fulfilled his or her role by acting out my concept. In this new chapter, there's no saying if or when the work takes place, or if anyone fulfills anything, or what it signifies. There's only wading into space and spending time there. Perhaps an outside source, a shaman or master of ceremonies, could help me understand. I've already consulted two for help. One said I wasn't finished with the mountain. The other said I wouldn't wait two more years. That was 6 months ago.

If my attention to my own work is shifting, my art is now about seeking the moment of art in lieu of procuring it. That means I lose control. I either have to trust some larger force or learn to work with it. The Woman Who Planted Dreams may be one of those works, who knows, where words fail to convey the gravity of the event, where the sacramental and intentional moment the work lives in is all there is, where the work lives in and only in the work, and the work of the work is the only space and time in which to understand the work. The after-words and second sources and stories are all weak substitutes for the work.

Is this training for The Clown or is it The Clown? I don't know. Mongolia long ago transcended real time and geography. It lives in me now as an idea, a place that must be conjured through various rituals and dream states. One day I'll go, or I'm always going, or I'm there. I'm planting a dream in which all art and life fuse, where there's no higher or lower plane, but only life and the will for life, which is love, which is the absence of fear.

everywhere & in everything

there is a dream in everything
in a parking meter
in a swing

the tree dreams of the sea
the sea of an etching plate

a plate dreams of a spoon
a spoon of dirt
dirt of an apron

a scarf dreams in alarming colors
where is the gate in this city fence

a book dreams of a well
a chimney of a shelf in the sea
a flame of a trumpet
a balcony of a sun

a burglar dreams of a neck
in a wine bar in a burglar dream

it wasn't water to wine
it was water to cream
there are dreams in old coconuts

a rock dreams of an oyster
an oyster of a parachute
a parachute of venus
the venus of fallen things

what's between art & the artist
what's between artist & i

if i said you were good
would you believe me
you're good you're good
you're good

instead of dreaming you could be
swimming riding dancing fainting

the cosmos dreams of your fingers
your candles dream of being one
with the one being

a dream is when a yoyo unwinds

your nails dream of the houses
your dreams are assembling

when an animal
you've never seen before
appears to you
that is a dream

dream is a word for reach
dream is a word for round
dream is what is coming up
& what is going down

whereas life
is unnecessarily complex
a dream is simple

some think dreams
are the spice
they are not
dreams are the stock

take down this recipe
the holy trinity of dreams
skin desire path
purpose body heart

a dream is a vote for apollo

if you listen you will hear
every 6th word
is dream

dreams are like parents
that are not hiding hard
but playing along

the minute you become shrewd
you lose your dream

you can regain it
whenever you want
by crying out

there's no eating a dream
a dream is not a plate

if you have a recurring dream
what does that mean
analyze it all you want
you'll never catch a star

there's no darning a dream

what kind of a dream

someone asked the other day
what kind of a dream should i send
i answered any kind of a dream
the kind of dream you dream
i mean who is to say
the kind of dream you dreamt
last night last year when you were a child
a waking dream a sleeping dream
a past present future dream
a foreign dream a domestic dream
a dream that lies between here & there
a dream about becoming
a little dream for you
a big dream for a friend
a cosmic dream for a mother
a lover one another
a wish for the world
a hope for the future
a thought that begins something
something already begun in you
a something inside that's yearning to be
whatever kind of a seed you find
is the kind that would be just right
for planting or if you have another idea
that would be just right too