The Last Band
I know that many starseeds are artists, and I believe also vice versa. I’m curious how many starseed artists out there may at some point want to speak to share their stories of dark night of the soul and the impacts of ascensioning on their creative work and senses of themselves.
Today I want to make the connection between the ego dismantling process and the previously more innocent artist identity, but also more shadowbound, tight, and small self, I had before the more dramatic waking up took hold of me.
For me, ascension came swinging like a wrecking ball through my life, shattering so much that I’m now grateful to be free of, but with a ferocity & totality that I could not have ever dreamed up in the years before it happened. Even though I’m glad, and continue to be glad, about the demolition of structural pieces that constrained and held me so small and restricted - against the natural laws - still sometimes it shocks me to reflect upon it.
The striking thing to me at this moment is how much it had to do with music.
The last time I was in a real, full band, it was called Holly Mae and the Painted Room. The Berlin configuration was myself and 3 other women, Sara, Kathy & Molly, who were my best friends and collaborators at the time. I think of the year 2011 as a curiously whole, intact envelope of lightness, joy, and female communion, a charmed year, a seed pod protecting our musical connection.
The band’s dissolution in 2012 coincided with the lightning crack beginning of my dark night of the soul process. Each of us women have spiraled up and out of those tight seeds into more multidimensional strands of experience since then, amounting to almost a decade of dying away, burning down & being built back up as truer selves. We have continued to be in each other’s lives to varying degrees and in varying constellations of closeness and distance.
These recordings from 2011 preserve something about that moment before plunging into opening up from within. I find them compelling and somewhat painful to listen to back to, but it overall leaves me with a sense of wanting to honor who and what we were at that time. Speaking of myself, I was that much more compacted into the folds of the ego at that stage, but something important was also holding me together with a force of coherence that I sometimes miss now. After these ascensioning years I feel more gestural, partly erased, filled from within by source, less taut.
In any case, with love on New Year’s Eve of 2021, sharing these alternate recordings from sessions completed in 2011 with my dear starseeded friends of a decade ago.
Love to you all. <3
My invitation to you: Honor your creative history. Pick a song, an art work, a poem from your past, and spend some time with it, really visit with it. Perhaps it is a troubled part of your history, something that makes you feel hurt or embarrassed or otherwise uncomfortable. Sit in this rich space and see what comes out of it. If you like, make an artwork response to the past self who made that work. Consider responding intermodally, aka in a different medium than you work is originally in. Write a poem that responds to your painting from 12 years ago, make a scribbled drawing in response to your song, etc.
Special thanks to Eliza & Alex for recording us out of the kindness of your hearts. Thank you Annette & Semi Domesticated for the femmy photo shoot. & to Joanna K & Ira for the very special photography. Thank you Marius for the artwork. Love to all now and forever
