Eating peanut butter and crackers in the middle of the night

            There’s an adjustment to be made here in this process of reintegration into domestication after going through the gauntlet of post-materialistic realization. I am awake. I have awakened. I feel the gnawing of hunger and remember that there is peanut butter and crackers in the kitchen. At 4:30 am I rise up from a night of restless sleep and get these and the cup of cold coffee left over from the previous day. As I sit and eat and sip I reflect back on my reality two years ago. I was sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. I had no money. I would walk an hour from where I was staying to the community kitchen for food on the days they would serve free food. On those days they didn’t serve, I would try to have something to eat, but sometimes that didn’t happen. I was staying with a friend who considered it irresponsible if I wasn’t employed and earning a living, so he refused to help out with food. He had a jar of peanut butter and crackers by his recliner. He would sit and eat these for a snack while watching television. At night I would get up when the pain of hungry got to be too much and go eat some of his peanut butter and crackers. I would try to do it so he couldn’t tell that I had taken any.

            There are indications that it takes time to overcome obstacles and recover from hardships. Living in survival mode took me past my usual sense of self. I can endure. I will endure. I have endured. I have been enduring to the point where endurance is a function of everyday life. I don’t have to lay there and be hungry at night any longer. I have been disciplined to endure so I forget. It is a reality I never forget. Lying there at night knowing that if I try to sneak in and get something to eat my father will hear me, and we all know what happens next; that memory. I endure.

            The need to survive emanates from chosen stature. Others would attempt to impose cellular re-modification in an effort to disrupt the ability to endure. The knowledge that survival is ego-based and a healthy ego survives best ensures that I keep focused on the goal beyond post-materialistic dis-unification. Reunification integrates that achievement. The reintegration process utilizes all aspects of self and self is defined by cosmological vision, not constrictive societal constructs. Society would have it otherwise. The paradigm of behavior modification is that if enough pain is imposed upon a person they will yield to societal demands. Endurance and the will to survive with the understanding that reunification and reintegration are self-regenerative processes that supercede non-irreparable damage makes it possible to persevere. Beyond irreparable damage is the knowledge that regeneration will occur anyway, transcending time and space through incarnate behavior.

            Nothing is lost. Nothing is gained. It is all the same. “I don’t miss the crumbs/I do miss the crackers” was recited as verse in the appeal to White Feather. Now some crackers are missing. Now some crumbs are revealing. After the deluge the idea remains intact. We are Holy as One/and more/and more/and more.

Oliver Loveday © April 27, 2012 7pm EDT

Loveday Studio

Singing across the spider strands

Singing across the spider strands

For several years there had been these dreams. I didn’t know what to make of them, really. I had tried to seek understanding by going to a teacher, a wise man, a medicine man, but that wasn’t my path. My journey kept taking me back home to the mountains and hills, rivers, streams, rocks and springs where water flowed up from the rocks. I walked amongst my people like a stranger in a strange land. They were as alien to me as I was to them.

And these dreams. They would show me how to do these activities that would alleviate physical problems others endured. I would wake up and wonder why I was being shown these things. I wasn’t a medicine man. I am an artist, poet, singer, dreamer, and lover who loves the

Old Ways

and wants to feel a part of the tribal mind that once was here. Finally in November, 1991, my oldest sister died of cancer. I had dreams about how to help her if she ever asked. She never did. I felt anger because she would rather die than ask for help through the

Old Ways

. To her it was evil. I didn’t know what to do with my anger. I vowed to Sun Dance for four years and pray. I went to a friend and asked for help to do this, as it is a Plains Indian ceremony and I am Cherokee. He agreed to help. I felt the need to go on the hill and pray for a vision as well. I wanted to ask spirit if I was supposed to use these dreams, this information, even though I did not consider myself a medicine man. I went on the hill during dogwood winter for three days and nights. I stood there in the wind on the top of a mountain with nothing but a pair of shorts on and a quilt my grandmother had made when she was still a young woman. I would raise up the Sacred Pipe and asked the Creator to take pity on me. “I am a child down here in this world. I don’t know what I am doing. Please forgive me and let me live in spite of my mistakes today. I mean no disrespect. I only wanted to ask for understanding about this one thing, these dreams.” I prayed hard. It was hard. It was cold. Several mornings there was frost. The wind blew all the time. In the middle of it a thunderstorm came all day and all night. I would watch from the mountain as the clouds come over the horizon, and then they would split and go to the north and south of me moving east. All night that night they would flash from the north and south. I got a little shower a few times. I prayed hard.

There is a little I can say about what I experienced up there 20 years ago. I’ve said just a little already along the way. It is who I am, so I really don’t need to talk about it that much, just do it. It became obvious real quick that I was supposed to be using the information that was coming through in dreams to help others, including my family. There was more information while I was up there, although I wasn’t praying for it. I got it anyway. Then one day of it up there things shifted into a strange sort of theme. It was like a dream of the future. I saw waves and layers and patterns of information about communicating with others across a web. I didn’t know much about the internet yet. It was still being invented. Over time I came to understand what all of this was about. I thought spirit would reveal things in vision like birds and animals in nature. It appears like spirit knows all about technology and will challenge a person to utilize all aspects of reality to help make this a better world to live in. I survived. That was the real answer to all my prayers. I was glad to be off that mountain and back amongst family and friends.

That summer I danced for four days at Sun Dance. I prayed for the spirit of healing that comes forward through various humans to help the People. I could tell that what I was doing was a little off the mark, but I prayed anyway. I knew the effort would result in my becoming aligned with what was most important in all of this. I kept asked that the Creator take pity on my and look the other way when I messed up. I am a child in this world. I know nothing. The next year was different. A new family member was in my life, my daughter, Margaret Olivia (Maggie) Loveday, born June 14, 1992. Other family matters disrupted my plans and I was only able to dance for one day that year. Family comes first. That is how it is in the

Old Ways

. It was okay. The next year I had to go to a different circle and friends and ask for help to honor my commitment. It was hard. Afterwards a friend told me that it was hard because I had to make up for missing three days the previous year. I also understood that praying for the healing energy and for my sister who had passed away was not helping anything. The most important thing I could do was pray for family. Always, no matter what, pray for family. From then on I prayed for family. I can’t make someone ask for help. I can only pray for them in that sacred manner related in the dreams if they ask for help. Otherwise, I need to leave them alone and let them walk their own journey and accept that it is their journey. But I can always pray for family, no matter what. It is a duty. It is what is in my heart. Honor the heart. Honor the Red Path, which is the path of the heart. The last year of my four year commitment my wife and daughter were beside me during part of the ceremony. My daughter fell asleep and had a child’s dream in the circle with me. That is who she is. That is her journey. I prayed.

Twenty years later it still hurts. The woman who had stood beside me many times from the “Stick Holding” ceremony, my sister’s funeral, ceremonies and other life events chose to walk a different path. Others who had asked for help and agreed to give back over time as part of their expression of gratitude gave back the least they could if at all, and most kept taking more than they gave from that point on until their journey took them in other directions as well. I worked hard to accept this and not become cynical or let it harden my heart. I still pray for acceptance every day. Some did great harm on their way out to other paths. In the fall of 2003 I entered into the 7^th Challenge of the Seven Challenges a medicine man faces, as related to me by Rolling Thunder in the spring of 1991. For almost seven years the process went on where I lost everything. My marriage failed. I was unable to generate funds from my work. I lost the property I had taken ownership of in the manner of “white man’s law” after a breach of contract. I spent 15 months staying with my father and watching his health decline. Through it all I kept the altar I had been using to help other with through ceremony and I prayed for my family, especially Maggie. In January, 2010, I had an experience and knew that I had completed the 7^th Challenge. I was homeless and sleeping on the floor of a back bedroom in a friend’s house trailer. I had no way to earn money and he wasn’t feeding me. I had to walk several miles to a community soup kitchen for free food twice a day except Sunday. On Sunday I could fast or come up with other ways to eat.

For the past nine years there have been many dreams but there are very few about information on how to help others with physical problems. I have enough information on that topic already. I could forget most of it and still have more information than I could ever use. Today the dreams are about the young people that will be coming to seek help in understanding their dreams. Unlike me, there will be someone they can go to. I had no one. That person I was seeking back in 1976 after my first vision to help me understand it and make sense of it and possibly use it in my life now looks back at me in the mirror. I am the person I was always seeking.

Today I don’t have the energy I had twenty years ago. Nor does anyone else my age. So what. In the

Old Ways

it is said that if someone asks for help and I have a reason to say “no”, then I can say “no”. If I don’t have a reason to say “No”, then I have to answer “Yes”. I have more reasons to say “No” today. Few ask. Last summer a friend whom had asked for help in the past came from Spain and offered tobacco and asked that we do a Pipe Ceremony. It was good to do this. In the dreams she will come back again some day. In the dreams I will be back home before this happens. I remain in exile today. On July 20, 2011 a woman offered me tobacco and asked for help. That request was responded to in the affirmative and she is under protection of those spirits that came forth in response to her request for a full year. She has faced great adversity already and she will face more adversity between now and July 20 of this year. Those who would seek to intervene and keep her from honoring her path will fail.

I watch many people suffer but I’ve learned my lesson, as much as it hurts. I can’t help them unless they ask for help and all signs indicate a positive situation. It is more important now that I prepare to pass on this information to the young people and get them started in how to use the

Old Ways

to help others. I have enough energy to do that. I have very little time or interest in relating this information to older people. The effort has already indicated that it is a process of diminishing returns. Most of my own generation feels that it is acceptable to take and not give back and there is nothing I can do for them. There are a few exceptions and they are a joy to have around. Of the rest, the sooner they are dead and gone the easier my life will be. That is a sad thought but they have chosen to make that their reality. It hurts. I tried to wish it into being some other way but that is adverse to the universe and the law of free will. So be it.

Oliver Loveday © April 22, 2012 4pm EDT

Loveday Studio

The creek downstream from Buffalo Springs, Grainger County, Tennessee.

Colors become sounds

This was in a dream some 20 years ago or more after working on a painting late into the night and in the dream I was standing in a museum and a group of children on a class trip to the museum walked up to a painting of mine and became very quiet as they all looked at it and even the tour guide stopped talking and just looked and finally one of the students looked up at the teacher and said “I can hear the music in this painting…” and that is when I started hearing the music also and remembered the dream when I woke up and got up and went into the room where the painting I had finished the night before lay on the table and still waking up from the dream I sensed the music and knew that it is humanly possible to hear music from visual elements inside there and the dream stuck with me and the painting they were looking at in the dream remained in my head so that I had to paint it also and I can remember the dream and in the recall I can hear the music of each work of art that I do as I work so that it is like creating a song and in the Old Ways of the Native American tribal cultures it is said that when a potter makes a pot from clay that there is a song that goes into the pot and you can feel the song come through your skin when you touch it or maybe even hear it when you hold the opening of it to your ear like hearing the ocean inside a sea shell but when the pot is broken the song is released back into the universe but not all of the song goes away because I’ve found broken pieces of pottery near an old village and held it in my hand and a little bit of the song was still in there singing through my skin so I could hear the song and have a bit of insight into the place and time of the clay as it became pottery and pigment that goes into painting comes from clay as all the colors come from the earth even it they are created in a paint factory like some of the man-made pigments but it was earth transformed into pigment so it makes sense in that strange manner of tribal mind that making a painting is like making a piece of pottery only with a thin skin of clay on canvas or pottery so I take this idea and seek ways to transform the experience into sound as well so that the sounds I’m “hearing” inside my head can become audible sounds in the air as guides to others so they can learn to hear the sounds that come from colors or clay or earth and expand that sense of knowing the songs that rise up from the earth that are the vibrations of creativity that transform us as we grow spiritually in the dance of dreaming a new life into each moment

Oliver Loveday © April 1, 2012 12noon EDT

http://www.lovedaystudio.com

7th Street Sunrise (close-up)
pencil, ink, pastel, oil pastel
11 x 15 inches
February 2, 2012

The Gulf of Dreams

It’s not polite to be radical and speak so openly about unseen energy abounding amongst our midst and how dare the soothsayer be honest in the naked truth for when to do otherwise could cause a great loss of lives but is that the only reason to be honest when the King loses face in the moment and so the soothsayer dies for yielding to the message that came forth and there in the ramparts stands the dreamer alone in this naked truth but we all look away too quickly for fear it might be contagious like I mean after all isn’t ignorance bliss while the coils like tentacles form around us in anxiety tension and the dreamer stands over there watching and singing with tears streaming pleading that we be spared but there is no salvation in obfuscation only distortion of how the water got muddy to start with and without clarity no one can see the truth so send the clowns home and dare the dreamer to dream once more alive as the pilgrims report back from the future of past lines drawn in the space of demarcation as we sing and shout our bondage to materialistic illusions that look like scattered bones in the wind

Like scattered bones in the wind

Oliver Loveday © March 5, 2012 6pm EST

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In the fields where the coils lay

It's the field workers, sir.

They have all left on a pilgrimage.

and the children were all staring

at the military parade as it drove by.

the cold depths of madness have bitten

the snakes as they lay entwined.

it is spring here.  The Body Electric awaits

the thawing out of the winter bones.

Yesterday the children laughed.

Today, they are gone and the silence is eternity.

The fragments lay in stillness waiting for the axis

to pull back in line.  Summer skies.

The wind pulls open the feathers.

Birds list to the East, hurrying before the rains.

Ho!

Oliver Loveday © 6/1/83/5pm EDT

Website: Loveday Studio

The Gulf of Dreams
pencil
5h x 3.5 inches/12.7 x 8.9 cm
February 24, 2012

Taming the muse

Muse this as we ride the ancient skies like a herd of buffalo across the dusty breeze of seven incarnate thieves between here and eternity and back again back again as the water’s fine water’s thrown many of us have said and it’s the pilgrims again into the night into the bleeding night as we ride like wild horses into the night and this is how they say it but I don’t believe it is true that the Muse is a woman and you entice her to give you her gifts of inspiration so you can achieve greatness in poetry song and dance but I don’t believe it is true because it sounds like a romantic relationship between a lover and a suitor and she’s no whore selling her wares but I can’t see beyond the shroud of imagination so it all sounds like some male-dominated bullshit to me like what happens when a woman wants to become a great dancer and seeks the help of a muse is the Muse and the dancer lesbians in this movie and maybe so maybe this is the way it is but I don’t think so I don’t think so I have a different feel about it but that’s not where this is all going as this is about the death of art of creativity of failed attempts to tame the muse in the midnight in the midnight as we wonder into the fields at night and pretend to not notice the wildness that surrounds us and each culture has a story about the origin of creativity and all the cultures and all the stories are correct and a true and accurate account of how we got to be so crazy and used this crazy wisdom to transform our lives into something new and different and it is very unwise to diss another culture even if I don’t think that my understanding of the information I have at hand is true because all I have to do is consider the story of the Muses in ancient Greek history and remember that those stories got handed down through a lot of translators and there’s the rub that someone establishes that this poet or that playwright is the greatest of his peers from Ancient Greece but we don’t know if that’s the way that they felt about it because we don’t have a lot of critical reviews of poetry or plays to go by all we have are the few works that have survived over time and we have no idea of what didn’t survive so it seems really stupid to me to assign greatness to that which we do have and the fact of the matter might be that the greatness is only in the ability of that work to survive because it was so bad by their standards that it got tucked away and never accessed again and that’s how it survived but God forbid that anyone suggest that there be anything greater than what has already been established as greatness and so we have this idea of a muse and we have this idea of creativity or we could go with another culture and say that spider woman brings us the songs poems dances bead work baskets weaving knitting and so forth but after a while the point isn’t about who brings what but the start of it all and the wildness and sense of freedom with the relationship with this source of creativity and we dance and sing to the new energy brought forth by the lyre poem body movement ancient or fresh off the press and over time the artist starts to cater to the tastes of the patrons like the soothsayer who tells the King what he wants to hear to save his own neck and who could blame him really but the artist starts trying to tame the muse to feed the wealthy what they want to hear see feel to reassure them that they have the power to delegate what the muse offers to humanity and as the muse starts to see the desecration of creativity the muse starts to seek a new co-conspirator in the work of creativity and after a while the artist dries up with new ideas and starts to recycle the previous work as an affirmation of the power of the wealthy to dictate creativity and thus the Muse is never tamed but rather moves on to new artists willing to ride the wild horse across the night sky like a night mare of untamed unbridled raging into the wind and storm and beauty and insanity and it is said that the Muse will drive a man mad or even a woman because we’ve already established that there is no gender preference in creativity but the challenge always is to ride and never be thrown off in the darkness of the next wave of fresh ideas and the real scope of it all is the challenge of the artist to never try to tame the muse and damn the rich old farts that sit around looking down at the rest of us like their shit don’t stink and give them the power to destroy a great ride like the muse is an untamed horse riding across the night sky I said that already and the proclamation underneath all of this was that once a friend told me that I would be a great writer but I needed to clean up my writing just a little bit and if I would let him edit my work then he would show me how to achieve that greatness and I ignored his offer because the truth is that it is easy to go back and correct the mistakes like spelling errors and sometimes it is okay to rephrase something this way or that but the fact of the matter is that a lot of times this is the way that it came to me and I’m not going to mess up a great relationship just to please the anal retentive word wizards that don’t have much to say but say it with good craft and are jealous of those that gained the favor of a muse and write like there is no tomorrow damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead into the midnight and I leave this to reader to decide with a few quick examples but nay that isn’t the answer it takes all of it the full breath and scope of it really to decide but here’s a good place to start with a few examples of poetry and art and ride like fury into that good night amen a-ho!

Oliver Loveday © February 22, 2012 5:45pm EST

Meat Dreams

This is a long stream of dreams

They collide with my

Broken prism of reality.

The dreams of sex,

            Sadist, homosexuals,

            Fauns, and beautiful virgins,

            (worn-out whores)

Tools of the trade

Pornography without flesh

The Meat of the Soul

The truth of God’s visions

I am pure.

The dreams are my heaven.

A glassy malfunction

Of creativity while standing

In the hollow glaze of

The crystal sun.

Oliver Loveday © July 1975

(The above poem was written on newsprint in ink.)

Floating Past

The clouds are empty beside me

Cold Mountain is the opening to nothing

When I take the next step, I anticipate falling through

Oliver Loveday © 2012.02.18.2:00am EST

Sketch from February 1976

3 works in progress, February 22, 2012

A close-up of an index card being prepared for mail art, February 22, 2012

Another close-up of one of the index cards for mail art, February 22, 2012

A work in progress, on calligraphy paper, of ink and yellow ocher watercolor, February 22, 2012

 For more information on my art work, poetry, and writings, as well as links to my music and videos, visit my website, Loveday Studio.

POV: Six works in progress

It is lost, most of it, due to the lack of interest. “Lack of Interest” and by that I mean, in a manner of civility, that most would prefer that it had never happened, but in that it did happen, they are contented to see it dissipate into the dust of bygone history as if it never happened. But it did happen and I didn’t go away with the “it” of this dilemma. If that exposes an element of denial on their part, that is the risk I take in remaining present and vocal in the spirit of creativity.

It isn’t just about the Industrial Culture in the Nuclear Age, but it is about that also. The impact of “The Bomb” resonated through humanity after the war. As a young man venturing into the world of art in 1971, the photographs of David Smith (sculptor) working in his studio on the farm at Bolton’s Landing in upstate New York, with drawing paper on the floor and ink or home-made egg tempera brushed onto the paper opened a new window into creativity. The drawings would become sketches for welded metal sculptures, or flow into the endless stream of new work being produced in the 1950’s as artists around the world seemed to go into hyper-drive in an effort to produce as much work as quickly as possible, because it could all be gone in a flash as the race to produce more nuclear warheads moved steadily forward as well. There was no time to carve stone any more. Creating works through the new tools of the trade made it possible to create more works, almost as fast as the drawings themselves happened. The rush to produce became an obsession. The photographs and films of Jackson Pollack doing “drip art” at the same time in an out building (or outside the old shed) on a small farm on Long Island became another example of how to work. Combined with an interest in pottery and thus, Japanese pottery, raku, and Zen Buddhism, and the styles of decoration from which all of this merged in some <rewind> fashion back into the whispers of history, gave me impetus to take up a brush and make marks on clay, paper, or canvas without touching the brush to the surface. This became my new handwriting by the time I was 20 years old.

Later I read that Jackson Pollack had observed the ritual sand paintings of the Navajo as a small child and that was a major influence on his effort to recreate something he experienced of that time and place. To reference that as a matter of importance in the early interest in his work became a bit of small print in the general consensus of this new and radical departure from the norm. Similar references of inspiration fall to the wayside in other approaches to creativity, as if humanity was “inventing” a new form of art in this Industrial Culture. Most of the work was well steeped in specific elements of ancient history if one took the time to notice. But popular culture isn’t about noticing the details. So it is easy to ignore the details of this work, the history that has been intentionally destroyed by a detached society in an effort to make like it never happened, as I stay true to the vision and keep working anyway.

I live in “public housing” rent free today. I moved here ten months ago following a period of time when I was “homeless”. Five years ago I went through foreclosure and lost the home and property I had spent many years working to have as a place for my family to live and work and host guests who had benefited greatly from that time I was there, we were there, but in the end, after a nasty divorce around the spouse’s drug addiction and the failure of a supposed-patron who had signed a contractual commitment to buy $100,000.00 worth of art over a two year period of time as part of the mortgage contract with the lender, reneged on that contract, stating that he was a Christian and I was a Cherokee Indian, and as such, he could not morally excuse himself for continuing to honor his commitment to buy art. I’ll call him Kevin C. for the same of identification. Kevin had visited the studio many times over the previous year following the divorce and my return to the property after having been falsely accused of assault and forced off the property through usage of character assassination and a court system that favors the voice of a woman over that of a man in matters of domestic violence, even if she was the one who was guilty, but never mind any of that. No one else seemed to mind, so why should we make that a sticking point today? Kevin would look at some work and admire it and ask how much. Rather than go check my price list I would name a price well below what I had it listed for on my data base, because I knew he didn’t have that much money at the moment, but since he had a large holding of real estate on the market that would allow him to buy work in the future at the pre-established price, I didn’t worry so much about it at the time. He was happy to get the work he admired and I needed what little funds he could shake loose at the time. Later I realized that he had a gambling problem and I consider that to be as much a factor in why he backed out on the contract as anything, but he gave a reason and I’m the fool that takes a liar at his word for some reason.

So I don’t have any of those works on hand to support the fact that I’ve been doing this for a while. What got sold or given away is out there, but stacks and stacks of work went into storage in 2007 and have never been seen since. I don’t know if they exist or not. I approached my sister about contacting other family members a year earlier before the foreclosure, and she related to me that none of my family cared about me. Their silence in this matter speaks for itself. I exist in a vacuum in this environment and yet the will to continue to create drives me forward. From a small stipend I have purchased some paper, oil pastel, ink, and brushes, and am able to produce art again in this makeshift studio. I make marks on the paper with oil pastel to give a pre-existing composition that my ink marks follow in creating a new work. Six pieces of paper laid together on the grass on the lawn behind the apartment, with the digital video recorder a friend gave me a few months ago held in one hand while I apply the ink with a brush or two in the other. No one comes to see the event or hold the camera. No one comes to see the work. Only one or two people have stopped by in the past six months to see the work previous to this work. I exist in a vacuum, and yet I have this sense that it isn’t the nature of humanity as a whole but of those around me that generate this vacuum, so I work and document and write and inform a greater community of this effort, like an SOS signal out there that I am being held hostage by a repressive and genocidal people who seem to hold an air of disinterest in the matter, like it is only a matter of time before they starve me out and then the matter is resolved. In time they will win because time is on their side.

Oliver Loveday February 1, 2012

A close-up of one of the works in progress

POV: Six work of art in progress (the video on You Tube)

These works will be added to a new page, "Ink 4", on my web site off the "Works on paper" page soon.

Sidewalk meditation: Journalism

I hate journalist, newspaper reporters, media reporters, and the lot. The idea behind journalism is to give an honest and truthful account of the journey. The town crier would walk through a village at daybreak and “cry out” the news of the day. That was then and this is now. Today, journalists write fiction and call it a true and accurate account of events that have transpired. They take the truth and modify it to fit the market. When you give them a quote and choose your words very carefully, it doesn’t matter. They’ll rephrase it because they are arrogant and think they can tell the truth better than you can, so don’t even think that your words will be reported the same way you said them. Even television reporting can be edited so a phrase or sentence can be left out and make it come out the way they want it to be. It’s best to avoid those newspaper word whores as long as possible. They sell it to the highest bidder and, honey, you don’t even have any jingle in your pocket compared to what the boss man is paying to make it sound like what the advertising customers want it to sound like. Truth is stranger than fiction and their truth is a very strange account.

Oliver!

Loveday Studio