My essays this month will be briefer than usual as I complete a residency at Swale House on Governors Island in New York City, for the new project, “Tidal Flushing.” This Sunday at 1: PM, I will host a casual live chat on the porch of Swale House about the project. It won’t be recorded. What I hope to discuss are some of the choices we face now that climate change is forcing upon us all. One of those choices is political but I have tried, in these essays, to stay focused on systemic implications rather than individual situations. Nonetheless, like many, events trigger big emotions: rage, terror, disappointment, and my reflex is to attach my feelings to individuals. But the reason I try to stick with systems, is that even though systems might seem more abstract, if we can correctly analyze systems, we can also correctly identify where and how to intervene and create cascades of change. That is at the heart of why I developed trigger point theory and have often referred to it in these essays.

Please join me 1: PM June 6 if you will be in NYC, for a porch chat about my new project, Tidal Flushing, which I will be developing as part of my residency at SWALE House on Governor’s Island, New York. There won’t be Zoom access for the conversation but I will report after the fact. My residency is at the invitation of Patricia Watts of ecoart space. In the next two weeks as I perform this residency, I will be making a decision about whether it’s prudent to sell my studio and wharf on Vinalhaven Island, Maine to aquaculture fishermen. The sale would require me to find another place to store my inventory and another way to continue my practice. The porch chat will be about all the ways climate change is forcing unmanageable adaption on many of us and how we can commemorate those adaptations without self-erasure or denial.

Sometimes life happens. In case you missed my weekly essay, life is the explanation. May 9, I fell asleep at my post at MAC Book Pro and spilled coffee over my entire system. It died a sputtering death. I had been writing another essay for this series so it might be considered a form of murder suicide. Many people have told me for a long time that I work too hard. I once asked the late great artist Carolee Schneemann whether she thought it was possible to be a serious artist but not a workaholic. She replied immediately, “no.”

I track demonstrations of civil disobedience, for example, currently at the Venice Biennale. Despite feelings of personal anguish, I try to deconstruct the relative success or failure of the tactics.

I feel conflicted about the current protests at the Venice Biennale. Altho I agree that the current leadership is committing genocide and must be held accountable, I don’t condemn every Israeli or think the solution is to eliminate the country.

A substantial aspect of my practice studies and creates maps. Recently, I have been looking at maps of global patterns of drought. This isn’t something I am hearing much about. These patterns are being dramatically exacerbated by climate change.

Earth Day 2026, is the official launch of Tidal Flushing. This new project is about how climate change is dramatically changing the Earth and how we might adapt to those changes. I have begun work on visualizing what that looks like. Preliminary sketches will be at Swale House on Governors Island, NYC, the first two weeks of June 2026, viewing by appointment. Over the next sixteen months, I will share my plan for 2027, when I will mark the divestiture and abandonment of my long-time coastal studio to the sea with a major hybrid public event.

In each of these essays, I have prefaced my text with an image from my own practice that epitomizes my thinking in some way. In this essay, I’ve attached a map of the worst-case scenario of our future, swallowed by the sea and losing control over habitats we have depended upon. I discussed this map with Dr. Jim White, with whom I’ve worked for almost twenty years, in a Zoom about my new project, Tidal Flushing.

A diary can be a work of art. Sofia Tolstoya, wife of Leo Tolstoy, a father of civil disobedience, was a genius emotional worker who chronicled her labors in her diaries while he blew hot and cold, alternately demeaning and uplifting her while gobbling up attention from the whole world. She propped up her husband’s ego and narcissistic persona throughout their long marriage, to her personal peril.

Rule #4 of my Trigger Point Theory is that metaphors are idea models.

All societies have stories, myths, and sayings that distill their wisdom, and values as teaching tools. Metaphors influence society by projecting aspirational values. Metaphors can project such vivid pictures of comparison that a powerful vison takes shape, whether or not they are grounded in or supported by truth.

It is the first day of Spring and I am ready for something new. My new work will be “Tidal Flushing.” The lead image for today’s essay is a death mask of my father. It illustrated a previous essay in this series and was painted shortly after his passing . It is based on a photograph I took immediately after his death. It represented what I was just beginning to understand about death, life, tidal flushing, the power of the sea and the vulnerability of the land. Now, I am facing the last years of my life and my life’s inventory must negotiate reality.