Body, soul and money after Fish Story

It is one month since the work for Fish Story Memphis was completed. The experience was exciting, fun, challenging and educative. It was intended as a bioregional scaling up from Ghost Nets.

As I anticipated, I came back from New York to Maine after Memphis and had a dramatic Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) collapse that has left me mostly bed ridden for the past two weeks. That hasn't prevented me from assembling a portfolio of what we produced but it has been occasionally depressing.

I went into Fish Story mindful of the challenges we face to maintain a habitable planet and the personal cost of meeting those challenges. This collapse has been the occasion for me to reconsider just how challenging and costly. It is both a logistical and spiritual challenge to consider how personal change might result in global systemic shifts. Nothing much new there, but it does make me feel better to think about the limitations of my body as a portal to world spiritual evolution.

We are just beginning to do our accounting for what was spent and what was raised to implement this phase- and it IS a phase. it is not the end product. The end product wold be bioregional ecosystem health. The fund raising was difficult and frustrating. Difficult because it took time from developing the work. Frustrating because it didn't achieve all the outcomes I'd hoped for- at least, so far. The result was that I operated at a loss during the year of implementation to get this far.

On the other hand, I gained far greater knowledge of and insight into what needs to happen next and came way with many artifacts. Those artifacts: paintings, installation elements, photographs, film, the public webcasts which I have been slowly sharing here, are like secret codes whose meaning is yet to be revealed. My first task going forward, however, is simply to accept the depth of personal difficulty and cost, which I've claimed as a model for what our future requires along with the idea of bioregionally scaling up from Ghost Nets. As I continue to recover, I will share my new knowledge here, whether wrested from the secret codes or not.