There is a fine line between selfish self-centeredness and what the French call amour propre, appropriate regard for ones own needs and limits.

There is a bright line between deliberately causing pain to oneself and others and ignorance.

In nature, the line between habitats needs to be blurred for egress and ingress.

Tides arrive with nutrients and take away the remains of the day.

This painting is about the pain of erasure that replaces connection. As I edit this text, Marco Rubio has announced his intention to destroy the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero, an innocent immigrant with legal papers in order, was murdered by ICE agents in front of his three-year old daughter, in Biddeford, Maine, a quiet town not far from where I live. Two more exercises in erasure.

Erasure is a hallmark of a narcissistic system. Narcissism is a static system that depends on erasure unto death. We live in times that require enormous adaptive change. We can’t afford erasures.

There is a storm coming for the world. It has been coming for a long time. Art history has documented the path.

In my recent month spent in NYC, I attended 3 blockbuster shows of white European male artists: Raphael at the Met, Paul Klee at the Jewish Museum and Marcel Duchamp at MoMA. Each of these artists had a strategy for success our society continues to lionize. Collectively, the three represent a trajectory of how culture reflects itself in a pyramid of success.

Drought conditions across the globe are accelerating due to extraction technologies and climate change.

I will be in several shows and publications. In one way or another, they all are about ecocide. The causes of drought are the corruption that has led to unfettered climate change, The consequences of drought may be a cascade of failed states, Some people see that cascade as a lucrative opportunity to amass great fortune at great cost to others. That is how a narcissistic system works: destroy the other for selfish gain.

I think we underestimate the cost of living in oppressive circumstances as we age. I don’t just mean the costs of medical care or basic services under an authoritarian regime, but the spiritual labor of trying to go forward in life and stay focused on positivity, clarity and perseverance in the face of obstacles: threading the righteous needle of culture and humanity in the face of violence and cruelty.

The conclusions from my work on the new project, Tidal Flushing this week at Swale House on Governors island, thanks to the support of ecoartspace, has painted a grim picture of the scale of prevalence of climate change and the authoritarian-fascist dictatorships driving climate change has imposed on the Earth. I confess to periodic despair. But I seize on vision, which may be a form of hope without sentimentality. This residency has revealed a glimmer of light on vision for me.

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.”