Hey, Coyote

Coyote, Coyote, Oil on Paper, 20” x 16,” 2019.

You’ve been on my mind a lot lately.

I go out at twilight and return just before sunrise, looking for you.

I know you’re out there. I can feel you.

At times, I am you.

My entire life I’ve snuck-on your cloak of fur and slipped between the boundaries.

Not always to my credit. Like you, I am sometimes the dupe of my own tricks, but there are no rehearsals in life. To learn to perform one must perform. And risk-taking keeps the doors open, which is the point.

There must be an exchange between things. There must be an active involvement in constructing meaning. In constructing reality.

There is no way to suppress change…not even in heaven; there is only a choice between a way of living that allows constant, if gradual, alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals. Those who panic and bind the trickster choose the latter path. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop styles (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of the changes contingency will always engender.

 -Lewis Hyde, from Trickster Makes This World

The changes contingency will always engender. The pivot-point of each new moment unfolding.  To admit the possibilities. To unhinge things if needed, to keep things moving. This is the trickster’s medicine. The artist’s trade.

Right now, we are sheltering-in-place. We are physically “stuck.” We are facing a new level of internal dialog and responsibility to reconstruct our personal lives. We are having to do this alongside our awareness of extreme and terrifying circumstances in the external world.

We are being called upon to play like Coyote, to live with simultaneity. To create small heavens inside of hell. To be adaptable. To be shape-shifters. To come out on the other side with a new world, forming.

In the Prologue of Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, she talks about how, during the black-out in 2003, the Milky Way could be seen in the sky above New York City. The elimination of that veil of artificial light exposed the heavens.

Solnit uses this image as an analogy for her book’s subject: how disasters— the crumbling of social, economic, and political structures— often inspire new, utopic orders of generosity and integrity in our communities. As though to nourish and to protect one another is a part of our deep, instinctual nature— and not just the brutish, all-for-oneself mythos we have come to believe about ourselves through capitalist rhetoric. That sometimes, amid catastrophic events, paradise is revealed through our coming-together and re-ordering of things.

What does it look like to unhinge our own self-perception and to create a new order, based on generosity?

What does generosity look like now, when our coming-together, physically, is precisely what we cannot do?

* * *

I go out searching for you, Coyote, in these liminal hours between light and dark.

The field is hazy, and the appearance of three regal deer flicker in and out as though glitching on a green-screen of my perceptual field. There and Not-There.

The deer stand still, alert. Their purplish-gray bodies blend perfectly with the wall of trees behind them. There is so much out there we do not see.

But you, Coyote, you slink around those hours, dipping-in and out on both sides.

You yourself are a shape-shifter. You see the stars pierce holes in the ceiling up above.

Your mind is a telescope and sometimes you trip over something that’s a million miles away.

But sometimes you leap from one astral body to the next with a simple every-day strut.

You show us reality is contingent upon every single step we take.

Kim & Coyote, Oil on Paper, 16” x 20,” 2019.