Why paint when the country is going to hell in a handbasket?

• I am back home after a month assisting my wife Annie in running 2 Ancestral Heritage programs up in Canada and the San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest.  For me, at this time in my life, painting is not the one thing that I do all the time, obsessively, that defines my response to our cultural turmoil.  It is the many things coalescing into a rich life that expresses through my art, or craft, where the quiet elder can hear what wants to be done.  For sure, the ancestors are clamoring to be remembered, as they want to help us understand how we got here.  So I may go through dry times in my creative dreaming, and instead turn to our gardens, growing food for the people that come to work with us, and then the urge to beauty making returns quite naturally.  My life, well liked, true to my nature, becomes the "art".  Much of what I have been drawn to in my life is a love of the "old ways".  As Gary Snyder says "Go light, stay together, know the flowers."  Living simply, knowing the complex old technology of food medicine, stories and myth, is embedded in what comes out later as a painting or a story or song.  Perhaps a lot of what we do out in this rural high desert is the practice of following our soul's promptings and remember what our particular genius is as medicine for the world.  For youngers to be with elders who care to listen to their lament.  At times going on a walkabout to renew our contract with the divine is all we can do.
• The way I am moved by paintings is rather mysterious.  I look at Richard Diebenkorn, The Society of Six(early California colorists), Alexi Von Jalensky, Fairfield, Porter, and the late Douglas V. Snow, a Utah artist that lived near here, and the magical realm opens up, knowing based on place, that feeds my particular soul.