Art Garden Online

Tracy Strong wrote this essay for the “Shoes” Art Garden (and you can bet she won’t be wearing lime green in town anytime soon!

Image © Adroyt.

You Can’t Wear That in New York!

“You’ll never make it; you’ll have to wear shoes everyday.” Those were the supportive and parting works from my dear sweet mother in 1976 when I boarded the plane for NYC after trying to find a job in Florida on and off for three years.

Florida is an interesting place, so different from Minnesota where we had all grown up. The thing about Florida is that you can wear the most outrageously colored clothes and not feel the least bit self-conscious. They wear pants, shirts and shoes in lime green, hot pink, turquoise and lemon yellow and they wear them all at the same time. I wore gold shell belts with lime green shirts and hot pink shorts and scarves of every imaginable color. I would absolutely deny all of this if there wasn’t photographic evidence showing all the family dinners where everybody including my brothers and father are in absolutely blinding colors.

Moving to NYC was a big shift to the color black. I worked as a freelance production artist in various design studios. I would work intensely for several months on various projects and then fly back to Florida for a little r&r. I would come home and go through my closet and pull out all sorts of colorful clothes and go the beach or movies without a second thought as to how I looked. My mother would offer a shopping spree every now and then. We would try on clothes and if it was something in a bright color my mother would sigh and say “too bad you can’t wear that in New York”. Just to prove her wrong I would often take something back to NYC and as I would get off the airplane and walk amongst the sea of black clothes I knew my mother was right.

During one particular trip home I found a wonderful pair of very cheap lime green espadrilles. I wore them every time I was in Florida and eventually on one trip decided that I wanted to have them in NY. I was working at a design studio on 54th and Madison. On the day I decided to dress up my black outfit with the lime green espadrilles, the boss asked me to run some manuscripts over to a publisher we did work for on 58th and 5th Avenue. I got to 5th and 54th and was waiting with about 10 other people to cross the street when the lights changed and a school bus full of kids stopped to let us cross. The windows of the bus were all open on that summer day and heads and arms and legs were sticking out of almost every window. All of a sudden a very loud voice screamed “Look at that lady in the green shoes” followed by all kinds of laughter from inside the bus. I immediately felt sorry for the lady in the green shoes and then just as quickly realized the lady in the green shoes was me. I held my head high and continued on my errand, went back to work, walked home and put the shoes in my closet.

Lesson learned I packed the green shoes and took them back to Florida where they belonged. Last April some twenty-three years later, I was shopping with my sister and stepmother in Naples Florida. We were all trying on these beautiful silk jackets. I took the bright coral colored jacket from the rack and put it on and looked in the mirror. I was admiring how I looked when my sister came up behind me and said, “You’ll never be able to wear that in New York.”

In his essay, “Fire Makes Water,” which was written for the “Fire” Art Garden in 2002, Brian Higley takes us on a journey through the elemental view of life.

Fire Makes Water

© Brian Higley

There is something inside me that burns.  Something just on the other side of explanation, that has been there my whole life.  A universal something, not entirely unique to me – it feels primordial, like some kind of fire from the beginning of time, common to all things that live.

A candle burns in front of me and there it is, the very same fire that’s in my chest.  It can’t be touched.  It can’t be weighed.  It is completely alive, but not alive.  Pure energy with no solid form, wavering back and forth, seeking… something.   Something to grab hold of, something to build on.  It wants to be bigger, and brighter, and more than what it is.  This tiny little flickering gem is the same thing that warms the planets, and lights the daytime, and has the potential to devour all;  It is inside me.  

It keeps me driven.  When I fall, I can count on it to stand me up, and turn me around.  It can burn through layer upon layer of culture’s wet blankets trying to smother me and keep me down.  The problem is, it doesn’t stop there.  It keeps burning. If I feed it – it just wants more of me, and its appetite is infinite.  It keeps me running hard, and doesn’t let my mind rest.  The flames get higher and the burning more intense.  I start to wish this fire would just go away, and leave me alone.  

Eventually, I begin looking for places to escape.  Somewhere away from the red hot flames, where I can sit – in cool, restful oblivion.  Refuge where I can slow down, notice what’s around me, and watch the graceful movement of my breath as it steams into the crisp, cold air around me.  I don’t want to think, or do, or work at anything – But that’s when another fear starts seeping in;  A cold fear.

In science, Cold is not described as a thing at all.  It is simply defined as the absence of heat.  Heat is the thing.  A great energy that expands into the empty spaces, turning the nothing into something. The total absence of heat is a frightening concept known as “absolute zero”,  a lonely, desolate, theoretical environment of minus 273.16 degrees centigrade.  The lowest temperature possible in our universe.  Imagine the paralyzing helplessness of being sucked into the vacuum of “absolute zero”.  

When there’s no fire, there’s no heat, and I am simply liquid water that can easily be frozen solid, so I let the fire start building again, and the whole thing starts all over. 

Life is this fragile relationship between fire and water.  It’s a constant battle to keep things between freezing and boiling, but that’s where I need to be, in the middle somewhere, where there is flowing, liquid water.  Between solid ice and gaseous steam, there is only a tiny window where liquid water is free to flow.  This rare opportunity where water is liquid, is the only place in the universe where it is possible for life to exist. 

The older I get, the more I realize that tending this fire is my job;  The job of staying in the place of life.  I’m becoming more and more accepting of the fact, but sometimes it still bothers me to think that I will always have to work to stay in this special place, and it is rare that am ever exactly in the beautiful middle.  It’s usually too hot or too cold, and I’m trying to adjust.  The day I stop working at it is the day that the fire will either rage out of control, and I will go out of this world in some giant blaze of glory, or I will peacefully give in, watching the glowing coals as the fire dies completely away.  Heaven forbid I get snuffed out by some great puff of wind.  

I can’t explain what this fire is, or where it comes from, but it seems somehow to be an infinite collection of all lives combined, past present and future.  When I think to look up at the stars, my heart jumps with a familiar sense of kinship as I see the millions of suns fueling millions of other galaxies.  As my mind opens up, it is flooded with genuine, intense awe, and I begin asking those basic, ancient questions; How long will the little fires burn? Where do the fires come from? and how did they get started?  What makes a heart beat for the first time?  The amazing science of it fascinates me, but in the end, I’m always left with something that looks a lot like a very great God.