seehere.info Co_creation a la LYNDSEY SCOTTseehere@seehere.info

Make
Grow Beyond

What mountains are you willing to move to get where you’re going?
How is life inviting you to embody what you haven’t yet dared to?

This song + video is my creative response to working for two months as an art sub at J.W. Eater Jr. High — the very same hallways I walked as a teeniebop some twenty-odd years earlier. As someone who thrives in flow and connection, submitting to public school bells & rules was sometimes an uncomfortable stretch — but so worth it to get to meet the young people of my village! I dream of learning communities where trauma healing is priority, where pLAy, critical thinking, autonomy, and intuition are skillsets valued as much as reading/writing/’rithmetic, and where circle process, song+dance, and nature connection (food we grow?!) are the glue that holds this process together. Sticking with the choice to sub definitely forced me to *grow beyond* my stuck points and opened up powerful love and humbling insights —- as attempting even baby steps in bringing our loftiest visions into slow clunky physical reality always do.

After the principal’s school pep assembly highlighting the district’s motto “Grow Beyond”, a song immediately started to land in the dreamy doing-the-dishes time of the evening…… I shared it with my classes and it stuck, and began to grow legs and images and beats and ideas. Michael Linder made it into a real song with harmonies and instruments and a lovely snippet of Stevie Wonder’s “Smile Please.” The motto underscores the building’s own process of renovation (and the challenge it is to run school amidst construction), so i wove in sneak peeks of the new locker rooms and coming-soon innovation center to assure the kids ~ it is happening.

Lovingly shared as a parting (meeting?) gift with this school community::: thank you for opening my heart and getting me out of hermit studio mode xoxoxo and, as seeds planted for further restorative work here in Rantoul our home.

Trust the seed
Power With

********MINI DOCU VIDEO COMING SOON! ****************

In March, I got to hang a show at the University of Illinois Women’s Resource Center. It felt like scribing a love letter to my twenty-year-old self and anyone else bewildered at the brink from girl to woman. From the show card: “this lyrical installation celebrates Womens’ History Month by paying playful homage to women’s wiles, wounds, wombs, and wisdom. The work dances across walls ~ pulsing between pop affirmations + collage portraits + sacred geometries + plant medicine. Captured in paint, photography, handmade books, shrinky-dinks, and things-found-on-the-forest-floor, these works live as by-products of dynamic inquiry that invite viewers to stand inside the questions too: what am I here to embody?”

Earthspeed

in which we practice asking! ::::: Thriving Changemakers Summit

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” -Mark Twain

….in good faith i carried my cam around on my day-to-day as i prepared to launch the fundraiser for my soon coming trip to WashDC for the Thriving Changemaker Summit. But y’all beat me to it! I was funded before I took time to sit with these snapshots, but I wove them together anyway — for practice with imovie, for fun with Following Through, for joy in sharing solid peeks into my present space for so many friends who’ve not yet made the pilgrimage to Rantoul. My first funder said “your bravery sparks my bravery….” and my cells nodded amen. we — be. i’m so grateful for each teacher and friend who models how to authentically stretch open to the unique divine gifts we each hold within. Thanks so much for instant & complete support. Stay tuned for a report back from this gathering!

Soundwaves @ #FergusonOctober

sounds from saturday, october 11, 2014

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+ I go down to the river to pray (lyndsey & the mississippi)
+ Mike Brown gigante (patrick ritchey, digger, mel, megen, + more)
+ This Lil’ Light (an awesome songleader & crew I don’t know – do you? )
+ Pray for peace (celia)
+ Artica mural (hap phillips)

perfect love // MIC∆H’s MIND remix

Sound when stretched is music.
Movement when stretched is dance.
Mind when stretched is meditation.
Life when stretched is celebration.
~ Ravi Shankar

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Thanks, Micah, for stretching us. IN life and in death.

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Owen on banjo
Ezra on keyboard
Village Fire on vocals

=============================================

My precious wild friend decided to leave this earth plane. I needed to write, to sing, to color, to stitch some moments into an amplified adieu. After spending the most beautiful string of days on his family’s land, in awe of how graceful Goodbye can be {{hand-built coffin, brothers dug grave, chiseled stone, children played amidst in between, fire tended all the day long, sage, flowers, braids, laughter, keening}}….I left with giant mixed feelings before he made his way back to the midwest and was laid to rest; my own alive-life and commits beckoned. Halfway home in STL I knew we had a date with the River. Breakfast from the place we met, songs, painting, tears; color, light, sound. The melody is one I wrapped myself in to traverse the dark four flights up to my Lemp studio, safely. Here I am teaching it to a circle for the first time. May we all be so held.

Love all ways. Infinite to live our bigness, to beckon our dreams, to hold our grief.

REFRACTION / Interpretations of Light

i made a music video! a very simple one. the more chaos i see also arising in our shared story, the more i value time spent purposefully grounding in beauty, too. Grieve, release, peace. i wanted this to feel like slow listening, like happy staring at the soil watching tiny things move, like patient curiosity, like sun or water or breeze feels on bare skin. physical mundane magic. mundance. content with microscopic discovery and how that lives in the subtle body, that lives us (alltogether now) Alive. best watched when you’re willing to slow down and breathe deep. kudos to these talented musicians, and to my beloved yoga teacher Maggie Taylor for the broad vision to invite and produce the process. For over three years musicians from CU have been improvising to provide live music for yoga classes taught by Maggie — this coalesced into a full-length album, perfect for accompanying an hour long yoga practice. She invited me to create a visual accompaniment to Refraction, a track layered with cello, guitar, and doumbek.

To come to the cd release yoga class party, visit the facebook event and buy tickets from eventbrite.

Musicians featured on this album include: Andy Miller, Xochi Siobhan John, Mark Enslin, Erin Brooker, JP Goguen and Michael Shapiro

For more info or to purchase the full album:
MaggieTaylorYoga.wordpress.com

VILLAGE FIRE 2014

Lucky me just landed from a song gathering that sung my soul back into believing.  Game on! Mostly I was too enraptured to remember to reach for a lens; here are a few quick glimpses of the goodness.

From the Village Fire website: “How do we go beyond sustainability and learn to thrive again? How do we entertain, inspire, create? How do we make connection with each other without elaborate technology, using simply the inner resources we were born with? We raise our voices together in songs that celebrate love, diversity, power, the rhythms of the year, and the circle of life. We sing songs for times when comfort is needed, and songs that remind us of our ancestors. We sing songs to give us courage in our work to re-wild the world. We sing songs from home and songs from afar. We sing silly songs and songs that invite dancing, songs that you can take home and sing the rest of your life. By the circular, non-hierarchical, harmonious intertwining of our voices we bring light to the world.”

I couldn’t sit close enough to the feet of special guest song-leader, the gentle giant Laurence Cole. Teacher, teach me!  Loving that eureka that happens when you meet someone who you want to grow up to be just like. He says: “Part of my mission is to re-acquaint people with their birthright and natural ability to make beautiful and meaningful sound together. Most of the songs I’ve written are short, easy to learn, chant-like songs with several layers that fit over and around each other in interesting and pleasurable rhythmic and harmonic challenges that make them fun to sing. Group singing is one of the most ancient and primal ‘technologies of belonging’ that we humans have been using since our earliest times, possibly before speech itself. When we make joyous and passionate song together, it nourishes our souls and offers an enlivening gift back to the natural world that made us and gives us our sustenance and our very being. When such an exchange is genuinely made, and the song finds its natural ending, often there is a sweet, lively silence in which we simply stand and hold the ‘enchantment,’ the sense of deep and genuine communion.”

More, please. Stay tuned. This is a door I want to walk through and through.

I AM LOVED

I keep making them. Until I believe it consistently. Until I live it unconditionally.

I started painting these awhile back when i lived in a neighborhood with lots of abandoned buildings — i got the idea when a kid at the immersion school where I taught art in Spanish gave me a “Soy Amada” button. So i started making gigantic, bilingual “buttons” made in recycled insulation foam to adhere to the plywood of dilapated buildings. They were a hit, and it became a habit.

It seems to be something a lot of us can stand to hear a lot.

I AM

I AM
Oil on panel
5×5′
2013

◉ C I R C L I N G ◉

“The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.” (Empedocles)

I returned to my hometown of Rantoul this spring after being absent for the better part of a decade. “Come full circle….” my soul seemed to tug. I heeded, and returned to build a large circular food, herb, and flower garden at a local halfway house. Reconnecting wtih my family and tending seeds in this labyrinth-of-sorts, I felt myself held, grounded, healing.

In studio, I found myself painting inside of circle shapes. Moments. Mandalas. I Am Loved! Celebrations, meditations, quirky ditties, quickies. Homage portraits to lady power heroines. Ions of rainbow power, erupting. Curious molecules in the process of osmosis.

In community, I find myself increasingly drawn to circle work. Improv singing games, listening circles, womens’ moon circles: being together intentionally to hone “our powers combined.”

This installation at the Living Yoga Center and Green Yoga Spa is a celebration of concentric ripples and continuing cycles —- encountering myself at home in my skin, in community, in this wide and mysterious universe. One moving dot on the mind-boggling map of All that Is, co-creating as we connect.

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For heartfelt local press, see here.

For more pictures of the installation, see here.

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Ghettomorphosis


GHETTOMORPHOSIS I, II, III, IV
Oil on acrylic on photoshop collage on canvas (No worries, it’s archival! ;) )
8×8″
2013

Ghettomorphosis, n. = the word landed in my gut while working with kids some might call >at risk< in a neighborhood some might call a >ghetto<. Letting go of that language and the hierarchy of hand-outs, they became my teachers as i woke up to the shadow & light evident in each of us and in each situation. Replacing judgement with curiosity: nobody criticizes a cocoon. Nobody has to tell a caterpillar how to sprout its own wings.  To me, Ghettomorphosis means accepting and loving the shadowiest places in ourselves and our world back into vibrant interconnection — celebrating our wholeness, while it’s still becoming. Trusting process.  I gave myself the assignment of crafting a ‘visual sentence’ that could describe this concept. Here’s what I came up with.

Hydrate These Cells

So I’m struck with a novel bit of fan-dom.  It’s been a long dry spell, I think Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid was the last time I got this riled up??  I think I’ve resisted it since the tabloid-pimping-boobtoob-hustling-fame-game has historically pissed me off as a master plight to hypnotize the masses into forgetting their own power and letting personal giftings hibernate untried. Now that I’m practicing letting go a la ‘what you resist persists’ and leaning into embodying my latent power and light with complete abandon,  buzzing adoration of current thought-leaders —aka fan-dom— is flooding back in a wash of heart palpitations & major swooning . . . . Among my new crushes (also known as Teachers) are: Amanda Palmer, Sera Beak, Stoya, Kris Carr, Danielle LaPorte, Rising Appalachia, and sliding in an easy first (she blushes) : Nahko & Medicine for the People. Based in my frozen needs around earning a precious workaholic daddy’s attention, he pretty much had me at this line:  “….you got the keys….. but i’ll never keep my door locked….you can always come right in….and if my arms are full you can bet your sweet ass i will drop that shit right then…i might be busy… but i always got some time to surrender to your beauty”….   !?!?!?!!?!?!?  Freak out.  Trigger.  Melt.  Lyrically laying out the map for transforming a masculine-overdrive society to the present-moment-minded sensuality of feminine consciousness.   If you ask me.     So when I caught facebook-wind of their video contest for the song Budding Trees, I was flabbergasted by the instantaneous and complete physiological “do this now” that flooded my body.  Overwhelmingly.  Adrenaline whoosh, spirit-created to override my “…but that’s just not something i do…..”  Oh yeah……… Desire! I remember this.   An engraved fuck-you to Reason’s “Reasons Why Not.”    I stumbled on the contest late but saw I had a handfull of days before deadline, so I made a list of images/places that aligned with this song that had already made a home in my soul.   I carried my camera with me on bike rides, to studio, and in the garden and found surprise collaborators with a field of dancing wheat and a masterful thunder storm.  And my mom.  Even goofed a bit with stop motion.  Here’s what I created, with the willing camera-work of Mama, Morgan, and Monica (thanks, ya’ll!):

Watching the other video entries (google search youtube MFTP Budding Trees Video Contest), my typical residual patterns of crusty-egoic better-than/worse-than dissolved into a softness of celebration, of sacred curiosity, of connection.  Tenderness in my feeling-body, getting visual food to help grok how songs crawl into each of our souls and lay eggs that hatch into harmonies that carry us back home, toward each other.  Toward the whole. Toward God.

Yesterday they released the final cut.  When I watched it I remembered this fantasy I used to have of heaven when I was little.   That heaven would be getting to feel inside of all the bodies alive at once.  Like…… “I want to Be all of the people who are taking showers right now all over the whole Earth” or “I want to Be all of the people walking.”   Sketches, right?  Art is practice.  Creation in step with the technologies we’re playing with.    To my heart, this is good art ~ casting a wide playful web toward embodying that sense of Now-Heaven-Is.

Pure Land

Here’s a page from my diary.  Don’t laugh… you have a diary too, don’t you?

The “pure land / my heaven my home” rif comes from a round that Grace taught us during YTT.  It came to memory and welcomed me home, like the long walks in the bare fields did, for this summer-swadhyaya-sabbatical in my hometown.  What to grow?

Desire cracks the stiff hull of these seeds that wants to sprout.  Aint no shame in it. #beginnersmind

ROCKET SUPERNOVA

♥ My brotherfromanothermother.  ♥ We first met in total serendipity:  i was in the middle of a film shoot for Atnas but couldn’t find the go-to neighborhood kids on bikes for extras. I stepped outside wondering: ok then, Who?  And on cue:  Rocket skated by looking so cool and custom cast in perfect colors for the Christmas scene~  lime green, red sunglasses, black, white, & styled just right…..  Then he opened his mouth and laughed something something bought “you know, the law of attraction….”  OjO: Check your stereotypes: this not a Cherokee street hood. (And what is that thought anyway?)  Since 2009, my life’s been blessed sharing spontaneous run-ins at the Archive, yoga, and inquiry with this unique mystic.  He constantly invites me to curiosity at worlds unseen and calls me to my highest self.  I’m excited about this barter: I made him a business card and he’s making me a gorgeous hand-painted Anahata chakra jean jacket.

The we web: a peace-weaving

The we web:  a peace-weaving

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

an interactive community sculpture

initiated by art + faith STL together with Lyndsey Scott

for september 9  2012

narrative

On receiving the call for art that celebrates diversity, the web of life came to my mind’s eye. “When I move you move, just like that” says Ludacris.   “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe, “ says John Muir.  Deeper still, the words of Chief Seattle:  “ Humankind has not woven the web of Life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”              Yes.

To me, this sacred web is at once a call back to the Earth and a call back to each other.  Nature makes space for us to feel and to heal.  And to celebrate diversity, first I have to root out and heal racism in my very own heart – though I cringe that it exists, I know our culture has powered itself by oppressing us, each uniquely isolated in a fear of separation.  When I bravely seek to find what is blocking true intimacy with others in my experience, I bring awareness and compassion to the dark. Then with breath and commitment, I practice a new way – daily, like water with a stone. Gently with persistence.  With practice, I am welcomed back to the whole of All That Is.

As best as the material world and these hands can ask, this creation is an invitation to do that work, a symbol of our togetherness-in-process.    I humbly ask the wisdom of Asibikaashi, Spider Woman, of the Ojibwe people, as well as their facility with and reverence for the natural world: guide my hands.   Let the wisdom you carried again direct our ways.

You + Me.     Self + God.      Dark + Light.      Known + Unknown.       The weavings fill two interconnected circles, a venn diagram, with the space between left empty.  The mystery, the god-seed, this divine silence that inhabits the space between: “where two or more are gathered, there I Am in the midst….”   We ask for divine surprise to fill this space between, and the grace to inquire whole-heartedly. Listen intently.

The ribbons, held in each of our hands, will tie on to stand in for each our personal commitment to walk into our own work.  Softly with self-compassion.  Uniquely to each our journey.   May our co-creation be an image that lives in our guts to guide us each and, by extension, our city into the mighty healing work of releasing the legacy of “-isms” that lives in our histories and in this land, that we might be fully free to experience the diversity and power of our combined, divine light.

Kitty

“At words poetic, I’m so pathetic
That I always have found it best,
Instead of getting ‘em off my chest,
To let ‘em rest unexpressed,
I hate parading my serenading
As I’ll probably miss a bar,
But if this ditty is not so pretty
At least it’ll tell you
How great you are.
You’re the top!
You’re the Coliseum.
You’re the top!
You’re the Louver Museum.
You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You’re a Bendel bonnet,
A Shakespeare’s sonnet,
You’re Mickey Mouse.
You’re the Nile,
You’re the Tower of Pisa,
You’re the smile on the Mona Lisa
I’m a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I’m the bottom you’re the top!
Your words poetic are not pathetic.
On the other hand, babe, you shine,
And I can feel after every line
A thrill divine
Down my spine.
Now gifted humans like Vincent Youmans
Might think that your song is bad,
But I got a notion
I’ll second the motion
And this is what I’m going to add;
You’re the top!
You’re Mahatma Gandhi.
You’re the top!
You’re Napoleon Brandy.
You’re the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You’re the National Gallery
You’re Garbo’s salary,
You’re cellophane.
You’re sublime,
You’re turkey dinner,
You’re the time, the time of a Derby winner
I’m a toy balloon that’s fated soon to pop
But if, baby, I’m the bottom,
You’re the top!”
~from Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”


I love wearing this, her apron, in the kitchen. Channeling her irreverance and nurture. "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think." -Dorothy Parker

Our beloved Grandma Kitty went home earlier this year.  I was honored to paint her portrait, above. In her gaze you see the complexity– fiesty and fierce, her wit matched the grit she lived with as a single mother raising six children, bearing through the sadness of losing her partner too soon.  My cousins and I recorded her favorite poem to images of her life for our parents.

My father, her eldest, wrote her obituary:

Carolee “Kitty” Scott Katskee of Danville, CA and formerly of Park Forest and Homewood, IL slipped quietly from this life on Sunday, January 2012 at San Ramon Medical Center in Danville, CA.

Kitty, nee Carolee Lois Wunderlich, was born in Colorado on April 2, 1929 to Grace Derby and Cecil Wunderlich. In 1948, Kitty married a Chicagoan, Howard A. Scott, a WWII veteran, and settled in the south suburbs of Chicago to begin raising a family. Kitty and Howard had six children, each of whom has survived Kitty: Bill of Rantoul, IL; Mark of Wilmington, DE; Paul of Los Altos, CA; David of College Station, TX; Adam of Alamo, CA; and Anna of Oakland, CA.

Howard died suddenly in 1965 leaving Kitty to raise these six children alone and raise them she did. As a mother, Kitty gave and gave and gave, because love must give. Kitty later married Alan Katskee who, for his love of Kitty, got the bonus of helping support these six step-children.

To come to Kitty’s home was to be welcomed with an attitude of love and acceptance. Each of Kitty’s children’s spouses: Kathryn Kutz, Lois Bates, Maude Coleman, Susan Gamble, Nicki Newlon and Stan Hindman were so welcomed by Kitty and they loved her right back. Kitty treasured her 16 grandchildren: George Bates, Tom Bates, Kristine Scott Donovan, Lyndsey Scott, Patrick Scott, Daniel Scott, Rachel Scott, Vincent Scott, Molly Scott, Mark Scott, Luke Scott, Natalie Scott, Annie Scott, Jonah Scott, Cylus Hindman and Mattie Hindman. Gramma Kitty or “GK” was able to connect with each of her grandchildren in ways that made each of them realize they were each “her heart. Thus far, Kitty has four great grandchildren, Abigail, Lilly, Thomas and Samantha. Given the opportunity she would no doubt tell them, “you’re the tops, you’re the coliseum,” all the while making them “dippy eggs” or some other culinary delight.

Kitty was a voracious reader and a five star chef. Remembered mostly though will be a resolve that was steeled by life’s vicissitudes, a resolve to love. Kitty learned much at the school of hard knocks. She imparted pithy bits of wisdom gleaned by her family from her life’s experiences such as “pretty is as pretty does”, “if you have nothing good to say about someone, say nothing” and “life is too short to…” Indeed, 82 years of life for our dearest Kitty was, in fact, too short. Still, memories of Kitty and the example of her ” life well lived” will live on in our hearts.

TOPPLE

Topple /Oil on panel / 3 X 3 ft / 2012.

Moby Dicks

Moby Dick 1 / Oil on canvas & grommets. / 2012.

Moby Dick 2 / Acrylic on canvas & grommets. / 2012.

Stag

Stag (in progress)/ for MIC∆H.

Acrylic then oil on canvas. 2012.

let the circle Be

“The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.” ~ E m p e d o c l e s

Lately I am in love with painting circles. Simplify, simplify, simplify. What started as a means of focusing, clearing, healing and fundraising for yoga school; now expanding into a fascination with sacred geometry. The shapes bring comfort while I listen to podcasts that spark my imagination of what’s possible.

They are for sale at my Etsy shop, gHetTomOrpHosiS and will be available starting 5/2012 at The Archive’s new location, 2903 S. Jefferson STL.  Custom colors and imagery available!

Power Femme

In time for the Ace Me show at RAC, I painted a coven of my beloved Protectresses……..women whose particular humanity gifted the world with a way of being I aspire to.  Mythological, historical, fictional. . . . power ladies!!! Kali Ma, Artemesia Gentleschi, Veronica Franco, Martha Graham, Venus of Willendorf, Hildegaard de Bingen, Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Sojourner Truth, a few random google-image-search Animation Dominitrixes (healing/flipping my karmic remembrance of  pillory punishment of yore), Amma, Wangari Maathi, Teresa de Avila, Peace Pilgrim,  Harriet Tubman, Julia Butterfly Hill, Laksmi (not pictured), and the White Tara.  These women represent and stand guard in my minds’ eye over the sacred feminine energy of nurturing, intuitive, wily, wise, brave, visionary Divine Mother that is on its way back into powerful balance in our world.  I felt so restful and engaged painting these tiny retablos, often tuned in to a Ted-talk or otherwise edifying podcast — such as the inspiring Joanna Macy or amazing talent Anna Deavere Smith.  It’s been so fun to ‘match’ them to my beloved real life heroines, as pictured here — Micah’s mama, the lovely Ms. Pamula Beck, came over for dinner and the Venus of Willendorf practically jumped into her hands. ;0)

I have been starting to make them for friends and customers by request and loving learning about wonderful women I’d never heard of before. Marguerite Porete and Kuan Yin on deck — & orders for the holidays or your altar face-lift are oh-so welcome.  Kelsey LaPoint gifted me with a large stack of really sturdy scrap metal (with lovely rust patterns to paint into) that is now steadily dwindling — so if anyone has the line on some beautiful metal circles, let a sister know!

OH. We are fertile, ripe for transformation and healing . . . .

The We be Family Tree

The We be Family Tree. Watercolor and colored pencil on copy paper. 2011.

About me
Educated as a painter, learning as a yogi, and playful as a baby monkey: I am a willing human being __ emphasis on the Be. I am traveling-learning, designing projects to feed my inquiries while attracting adventures and connecting with tribes that grace my journey with experiential wisdom in creative healing and joyful sustainability. My passions are catalyzing radically simple + beautiful + fun intentional community, sparking spontaneous collaborative singing and dancing, acroyoga, permaculture, and loving children.