Evolution
This is a story about how tattooing allowed me to fall in love with the natural world
Seven years ago, I began an Etsy shop, wherein I sold my paintings and drawings. Selling my original art was the most rewarding money making pursuit I knew at the time. After a months of Etsy sales, the idea of “what if I did this every day?” Led me to pursue a tattoo apprenticeship.
My interests and priorities as an artist and a man were so different then compared to what they are today. As a twenty year old, I was most interested in pro sports, comic books, and general pop culture. Naturally, my creative output reflected that. I almost never had creative blocks—for there was always some sports news or movie release that would inform the work I created.
By 2020 I was on the precipice of being a full time tattooer, about to graduate from my apprenticeship—and then the COVID 19 lockdowns hit. Being out of work for three months —I used that time to think deeply about what was important to me.
Suddenly, sports were insignificant to me. Movies had lost their appeal after days of binge watching popular programming. By the end of it all—I felt lost and alone. I tried to self medicate myself into feeling inspired again, but no amount of drugs or alcohol could bring me to feel that any man made/social constructs had any innate meaning.
Eventually, COVID lockdowns were lifted, and I was on the other side of a global pandemic as a full time tattooer. Because of these circumstances, no ceremony or sentimentality was put towards my graduation. Instead, July rolled around, our doors opened, and I was tattooing more than I ever had before.
While I was making money hand over fist, I still had this questioning looming over me:
“What is truly important?”
And not just general, run of the mill existentialism. Artistic existentialism (easily the worst kind there is)
I invested such time and energy into becoming a full time artist—I felt a responsibility—if not a burning need to answer this question through the lens of art.
“What art is truly important?”
And after a few weeks of flower and butterfly walk-ins—the answer became clear to me. The thing that I felt most strongly about reflecting through my work as an artist should be the Natural World. Mother Nature. God’s Creations.
Marco Pierre White—the celebrity chef said about successful chefs that:
“They accept and respect that Mother Nature is the true artist—they are the cook”
I love this quote and have applied it to my journey of finding a voice, a style, and meaning in my work.
I believe that I was put into this world to honor something greater than myself. I believe that sitting in a park surrounded by trees, plants, insects and animals plugs me into a matrix that every ancestor of mine not only enjoyed—but used to channel the strength to survive hardships and make it possible for me to be here. I believe that the most difficult questions in life could have the simplest answers.
Familiar Flickering
I lay awake with my phone in my face. It’s 1AM and Michaela is one hour into her slumber. I’m watching a video about how to evade thermal drones. Sometimes I need to content like this to quiet my mind before bed—a habit I’m none too proud of. In the peace and quiet of our bedroom—a visitor appears. I don’t see a human form in our bedroom, but rather a trace of her. She announces her presence by illuminating a candlestick we have on a wall mounted candelabra in the bedroom.
I sit up quickly and watch, waiting for it to flicker off, but it never does. After a few moments, I am certain that we have a visitor from the spiritual realm. With the light still flickering, I stand up, and walk into our home office. We have an altar in the corner. I believe the spiritual dimension exists around all of us, but our altar stands as a dedicated space for us to engage with the spiritual realm, uninterrupted by the material world.
I walk to the altar with the intention of figuring out who switched that candle on. My first hypothesis was that it was my grandmother. Grandma Gloria had visited us in our home before, perhaps it was her again. I kneel down in front of the altar and begin searching for confirmation. Around our altar, we have framed photographs of our deceased relatives hung on the walls. I scan the photos with my eyes, and get some important feedback. My eyeglasses catch the reflection of a small light behind me.
As I move my head to look from photo to photo, the reflection of this light is only visible over a photo of Michaela’s grandma. After a few trials of turning my head and having the same experience of the light hovering over the photo of her one grandma, but then dropping off as I scan the rest, I felt I had adequate evidence that she is our visitor.
I proceed to light our candles on the altar, open my heart for prayer. It was 1AM and I should have been asleep, so my thoughts were a bit scattered. It was through this experience that I learned two important lesson about prayer and channeling. First: Intentionality is the most important factor when praying.
I shuffled through visuals of people, places, and events that felt a desire to pray on and pray for. I couldn’t “verbalize” a proper prayer, but I still feel like I was able to communicate my intentions, desires, and manifestations for our spiritual guest. In other words, I presented her with a slideshow of mental images I wished to have her blessings bestowed upon.
The second lesson I learned regarding channeling was that through my union with Michaela, we’ve successfully merged our “rosters” of ancestral guardians. This was not necessarily news to me, but feeling it first hand was incredibly emotional and exciting for me. Furthermore, I learned that we each could very well have more clarity through spiritually connecting with each others ancestors than our own.
I felt that there was a certain confirmation bias in my attempts to channel my own ancestors. That I wanted to hear and receive messages from my own dearly departed that may not have been accurate. But by removing the emotional connection that we each had with our own ancestors, and focusing on harnessing the wisdom and knowledge of each other’s, we may be in store for more frequent communication, more poignant messages, and a deeper connection to the spiritual realm.