Covering

I love the idea of covering¹. The grace of covering came for me over 20 years ago via a fisherman. Today, covering is at the core of how I make art, how I ran my business, and how I’ve tried to look out for people.

Covering feels good. It’s a safety thing.

Covering in the sense of veiling has deep roots. Women in some middle eastern cultures signal participation in society by covering their hair and faces. Covering can also be associated with shame: Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves after tasting the fruit of good and evil. Covering a bet means making good on a lost gamble. Covering a friend means taking care of them in a social situation, or picking up lunch. Covering tracks means making oneself un-findable.

For now, here’s my story of covering:

The first time I really understood covering as grace was in my early 30s. I was living alone and building a second vocation as a writer/life coach when a mentally ill former classmate took a shine to me. At first he seemed harmless, but his behavior quickly escalated and I felt I needed to protect myself. So I filed for a restraining order. He was legally prohibited from being within 100 yard radius of my home and work.

Because of where my apartment and job were situated, the order legally prohibited him from being in the town center of our small island.

While I was personally relieved, I also felt badly that he had very few options where to be. There weren’t many roads to take a person from one side of the island to the other, so if he respected the law and wanted to go “downtown,” he’d need to circumvent by taking long roads or trespass.

And to justify to myself my fear-based act, I gave myself solace that this restraining order may have been helpful for my town in general. It was deeply embarrassing for me to admit I didn’t know how to handle him, and get him off my case on my own. I had worked in restaurants after all, and had a very thick skin. But this situation – I was freaked out.

So when I received complaints about how he’d been unwelcome in local businesses, staring folks down and spouting dark oddities about Osama bin Laden, not paying and tipping, and smoking pot openly and defiantly, I wondered if something should be done. And he was rumored to have been following young girls home, murmuring weirdness behind them.

That had been my final straw. I pulled legal levers to make him go away.

A few weeks later, a wine-loving, gossipy reverend announced with snippy flair to his dinner companions, “Here’s the person who ran __ off the island!”

I could have died right there.

I looked like a deer in headlights, I’m sure, and went into a full-panic mental breakdown when I got home – just 60 feet away. My apartment was directly above a frame and gift shop in town center. I had to reconcile what I’d done: made a home-town boy leave his home town, and become visible all at once.

The experience that followed was rough. I felt as if I were to be annihilated for some reason beyond my comprehension. Ongoing panic attacks. A visceral darkness literally came over my vision, and I became afraid to leave my apartment. Spinning out, walking in circles, afraid of death, but sure I was already dead. Dark night of the soul? Mental illness? Bad Karma? All of the above? I did not have the ability to describe my state. It was awful.

At some point, my step dad² came over, laid his wool topcoat over my shoulders and made me walk Narragansett Avenue with him. He pointed at some old guys going in and out of the coffee shop and hardware store and asked, “How do you think these old guys got to be so old?”

Being marched around on a sunny day, with a heavy wool coat over my shoulders and a face as white as a sheet; I could only understand we’d all sometimes deal with the same: feeling the weight of our actions, the consequences. And perhaps even empathy for outcasts.

Thank you to Kenney. You showed me how to walk with weighted shoulders and practical grace, and how old guys grow old too.

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Covering, in Art

Signal + covering = how I work these days. There is so much to be shared from the realms of emotion, spirit, myth, and sun and even shadow. Being covered is important for me to feel safe enough to create in the first place. It’s my calling and I’ve worked hard to be able to continue to express myself in this way.

This is a piece from this week. Not my best, but illustrates the principle just fine. A phone photo of light and lens flare was blown up, and a drawing was made on top of it.

FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT

1. Yes, this is another Term of Endearment (TOE) post. ↩︎
2. A great teacher and even better fisherman, John Kenney Abrames was not “officially” my step father, but helped me like a wise dad would while he dated my mother for 10 years. I’m forever grateful for what he taught me about human nature, living in the human wild, and catching fish. ↩︎