I about to share with you a picture that I find disturbing. Not the one right above this sentence, that picture to me is beautiful. The one above is of course our Sun, the source of our power and perhaps our very existence... and most certainly, what I genuinely consider to be a view of how my HEART must really look.
No. the photo I am, I guess, .....ready to share with my blog audience, is one that was taken in spring of 1999. Looking at the photo I remember that period being a little bit of a blur, but I will tell the story as best as I can about the context of it and WHY I would want to show that to any other human being.
So... bam:
In spring of 1999 I was waaay too skinny. The place this picture is taken is Hamilton, Bermuda and in the home of a caring and crazy woman named Wendy Avery. I had arrived there in September of 1997 and began working at what I discovered to be a one time million dollar business on the edge of inevitable collapse. The enchantment of what I believed to be an ideal job, living on a most dreamy, paradise-like island nation, had now been replaced with the primal determination to not be sucked under the tsunami of the dysfunction and karma of other human beings willing to exploit the naive willingness of, say, a bumpkin from Centralia, WA. Wendy is NOT one of the those human beings. She was there to help. This picture of me at Wendy's home is actually one that feels like greater possibility in my life, despite how exhausted and burned out I look, it was an improvement from just six months earlier in my life. Wendy helped me quit my job at the only glass blowing studio in Bermuda, and I became her first employee in a company that is NOW the only glass blowing studio in Bermuda.
Dockyard Glassworks. It was not much at the moment this photo was taken, I was working in Wendy's KITCHEN.... learning how to make beads and little glass animals we could sell. More on all this later.
This was my day to day life as I worked on hustling gift items in front of the market of tourists that Bermuda abundantly has, as well as jumping through the legal hoops for me to stay on the island with a new work permit for a different company than I came to the island to work for originally. Wendy was working at a car dealership and then hustling the necessary capital and support to launch a proper glass studio with furnace and staff to handle the work load. INTENSE period of uncertainty and risk.
I can still feel the effects of that effort as, in total, I spent ten years working in that environment and it ended up being a rich training ground for what I am accomplishing now.
I will assure you that I will revisit some more of the stories of my history here, but.... who wants to read and pay attention to a novel size version of this post? That and I have some more production to do TONIGHT as I am not only preparing for
Art in the Courtyard
at the 2012 Lowell Folk Festival at the end of this month; July 27, 28, and 29, but I have a glass order for two of the Artist Coop accounts I maintain.
So.... back to my torch! and I will get back to the narrative soon, I was mostly wanting to set the stage some and will be responsive to questions or comments if there ends up being any.
ONWARD!
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