A Saint of the Heart Chimes - pen & ink
A Saint of the Heart Chimes - pen & ink, 11×14in, March 2025
I was invited to contribute a piece for Normal Heights United Church’s silent auction in March here on Kumeyaay land (San Diego, CA); the church is a beloved community that celebrates queer folks, actively cares for their unhoused neighbors, and is committed to anti-racist work as spiritual and social calling - hence deciding to embark on the arduous work of replacing a white, surfer-esce Jesus stained glass who currently looms over the sanctuary since the building’s construction 100 years ago. You can learn more about the project here: https://nhunited.org/stained-glass-project/
In the auction, the piece was untitled. I spent the winter drawing queer masked freaks practically every dawn, with a candle lit and tea steaming. It was one of my paths of processing my despair and fury at the 2024 election, a way of praying for the spirits of humans, lands, and waters who I love, who I am, who we are. It was magic making for me. This piece was finished right around Ostara, as the light poured into the northern hemisphere once again, and was one of my final expressions in a very concentrated season of particular making.
Last weekend I sat in a community ceremony in honor of Lammas, and in the subsequent days, have been articulating the prism of the heart, the “happy sads” of deep raw feeling, as grief, joy, love, and sorrow; that none of those tears can be in their dignity and fullness without the others, that they are all different reflective sides of the sacred prism of the heart. Since March, I have wanted to share this piece, but have felt at a loss of how to articulate what it might hold. Returning now, these moons later, I wonder if the chimes are another avatar of the heart, all these notes that can speak the songs of our prayerful, soulful, and unadulterated, lack-of-shame-for-feeling depths.
In the words of Mikaela, a dear community member, ceremony facilitator, and reverent teacher of the medicine ways, people around the world have “prayed together with smoke, flowers, and song” for thousands of years. And when we do, we rejoice and we grieve, “we do not heal alone, we heal in community.” We drape our souls across the altar. We create space and time for our chimes to sing as they must, and we let the winds of our lives and Spirit blow through them. May we be chimes for beauty and poetry and mystery to sing through with wild freedom. May the queer monks, witches, and saints carry us with courage through these prisms of self. May we continue to weave icons for prayer and curiosity and remembrance.
ps been listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen. In July, on a small island in the Salish Sea, a dear old friend from college asked me in the car, “What’s your current musical fixation?” These are the questions I want to ask people. At the time, I said Lorde’s new album, but it has shifted in the last month. I have felt drawn to music that I know was made with human hands and human breath and human sweat and human conflict and human reconciliation and fucking human feeling. People in a room together decades ago, when that’s the only way it was done. And that’s how I want to make art - in a room with people, dancing in process, gnawing at the questions when it feels like we are pushing a boulder up a hill together, staring at the rain, screaming towards the prism and the chimes.
