YEAR: 2016
START DATE: June 9, 2016
END DATE: August 18, 2016

Many mantram pages and beseeching the divine. 50 people shot in Orlando. Feeling abandoned/distanced from God. America’s stance of high moral ground. Hypocrisy. Including drone strikes ordered by President Obama. Innocents as collateral damage. Piece 24 presentation to City of Dallas. Bryn, our Corgi, unable to walk to go outside. Call in to have our dog, Bryn, put down. Needing to rise above for the presentation to the City. Messaging for that presentation - the day after the worst mass shooting in US history. Piece 24 approved by city and Public Art Committee. Bryn is gone and the house is so quiet. 17 people invited to dinner. Am I nuts? Many mantram pages. Kelly away in Nebraska helping his Mom. “This call is not going to go away. You have to face it and meet the gift.” Tanya Conovaloff surgery. One of our students - Roxana - health emergency. July remembrances - Barbara’s death, Mom’s birthday, Blessen family picnics at the lake. Communion of grief. Messaging for 29 Pieces emails after the police shooting. Do we have the will to be better? Will we ever learn? We will never learn. Our raw grief is one pure language. “Raise us above the distinctions + differences which divide us.” Hazrat Khan. Nice, France violence and killing. Baton Rouge, LA violence and killing. Have mercy on us. Prayers that we not go backward to the 1960’s or before. Aching for this world. History repeating itself. Choices reveal themselves in again. Putting questions together for the war photographers for the Pulitzer Centenniel.

This is a little plain brown sparrow of a journal, yet SO MUCH was going on personally and in the world during these two months. Terrible mass shootings. Unfolding of Trump as a political leader. Hillary’s victory and the hope briefly felt. Kelly was in Nebraska for a month or more helping his Mom. Major illnesses of friends. I wasn’t sleeping. In very bad pain in my hips most all days. Our dog died.

Plain little brown journal but it feels like a sputtering of raw emotion and reactions, along with a constant effort to stabilize and lead 29 Pieces, take care of myself. News of violent mass shootings came almost every day. Trump’s popularity and the energy he stirred up was unsettling and prescient of what was to come.

Piece 24 presenttion to City of Dallas for approval. The Respect Project. The Respect Pledge. All this was a fervent effort to gain traction in what felt like an unfolding spiritual war.