Winter is coming. It won’t be here until December 21. Mythologically, winter is about death and loss. Many of us feel a deathly iciness in what has already descended on the world. What feels so cold is a trend towards measuring all value against a spreadsheet of dollars and cents, skewed towards the benefit of a privileged group of just a few people. What dies in the spreadsheet is beauty, kindness and joy. That is a cruel world that is built on cruelty. It is a very very sad place to live.

Decades ago, one of my oldest and dearest friends, Jon Phetteplace, committed suicide after his battle with AIDS began to flag. My ex-husband, Payson Stevens, inherited his beautiful photographic portfolio and has been trying to place it.

As we prepare for No Kings Day, it may be that the Universe is taking things in their own hands. Increasingly, despite political divides, it seems we are all in this together. Climate disasters in one place echoe elsewhere. Relational issues that we walked away from here dog our heels there.

Any democratic society, derives from the freedom to publicly voice divergent views and count on having those views respected. Art is where culture publicly voices and makes visible personal concerns that might otherwise remain invisible. The value of making those concerns public is a rule from my trigger point theory, that to solve problems, we must layer all the information. Divergent views are essential to that layering.

When I was 14, I successfully lobbied my parents to be sent away to school. I intuitively knew my survival depended on being someplace else. My mother sold her jewelry to afford my tuition and by my last year in school abroad, I prepared my portfolio to apply to Parsons School of Design and I was on my way. But it has taken me another sixty-three years to feel the world I left behind.

In unreasonable and unmanageable times, perhaps we must imagine another world. I propose imagining a world of empathy. But first we must face the cruel calamities of the real world. Neither empathy nor cruelty are new human experiences. At least one or two religions were founded on dreams of empathy. Religions have also brought us calamities of unimaginable cruelty.

My parents worked in Venezuela for many years, where they experienced a range of violence at times. One day I dreamt of a painting, which I would call, "Monday Morning." It is the image that accompanies this essay and it was only later that I learned my father had been robbed and I had painted his experience. He was already an old man by then. I am sure his robbers had their own story about what happened that day.

Midnight working in my studio in Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1987, I heard screams coming from the street outside my window. I had a glimpse of a man over a woman and a figure rushing to rescue. When I did this painting, it was entirely different than the body I was creating at the time, REQUIEM, which was about my father’s passing and how one goes from grief to happiness.

I have no idea what happened afterwards or even what happened that night. What I know is someone, a woman, yelled for help and someone came to help.

In this essay, I will sometimes refer to the current President of the United States as t.

Evgenia Emets of Eternal Forest recently described this series of articles as, "contemplative essays about how art mirrors and inspires life." In this essay, I will consider the current experience of t.’s administration as real life theater..

Last night, in a private celebratory event for New Village Press'(NVP)s 20th anniversary, hosted by author Arlene Goldbard and the publisher Lynne Elizabeth, I referenced the term refugia as a place where healing might begin after an ecosystem collapse, ie., after environmental collapse. I wonder when and how, going forward, we will find those places for this country. Surely NVP and other small publishing houses might be a start.