Another Goodbye

Another Goodbye

Today I say goodbye to a large collection of my art. Again.

Ever since the great smoky weeks of 2020, I have worried about the large collection of my artwork that I keep at home. Here in the rainforest, it does not rain much anymore. The trees get thirsty and dry. Each year, the fire season lasts longer. I live in a fuel loaded forest that is no longer burned every other year to reduce the underbrush as was once the case, when the native people managed the land. Of course there were no houses then either. The people were nomadic and visited here on a rotation schedule.

These days the doom looms. No underbrush clearing, combines with global climate catastrophe, a so far twenty year long mega drought of the kind last seen a thousand years ago, and the tension is palpable here on windy hot days.

I think through the scenarios. I realize that I would be OK with losing a house, with all of its replaceable furnishings, but I would not want to lose the years and years of art.  

Hence, the yearly goodbyes. I pack it up in plastic and stash it at a storage rental place. But now it occurs to me, what if fire comes to the storage place?! There is only one storage rental in town that is not in the flood plane. There would be a flood, you see, if the BIG ONE happens. WHEN it happens. We could get a great quake here at any time, magnitude nine. There are eleven old dams, in need of repair, positioned above town, which is situated in the flood plane. So I have chosen a storage rental up in the forested, fuel loaded hills. Hmmm.

So today, I say another good bye to the art, the work of decades. This work into which I have poured energy, love, thought, care, time and money. It is a poignant, terrible feeling. 

I’m just practicing though. Why couldn’t I say goodbye to it before, by selling or giving it to the people who might love it too? Maybe because I love it more?

Do I love it too much? What kind of love is this anyway, to keep your beloved work wrapped up in the dark, in plastic bags, and shut up in a locked tin building?!

Someday too soon, the art will just be a pile of dust anyway, along with my body and those of everyone I have ever known. 

So each year, I practice this letting go, this saying goodbye. You never know when it is the last goodbye.