theWABASHproject: Lesson 1: How to Doula a Dream

I had a dream…

So you know how folks say “ I had a dream…to sail around the world, to become a ballerina, a sports star, a musician, to go to Disneyland?” Well, I actually had a dream, the kind we have while drooling on a pillow. It was to shift my whole life. It was a calling. It was going to lead me to a place I never thought I would be. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. It’s important to set the context. What was whirling about in that drooling head before it hit the pillow?

In 2019 I was pretty miserable in Seattle. The city had become over-run by developers mining gold by tearing down anything interesting and building office towers and cheap faux modern town-homes to house all the tech money migrating to our little fishing village. It had happened before. Microsoft in the 90’s. The first tech bubble in ‘03. I can’t complain too much as my own boat was rising with the tsunami of tech money. I was mostly designing tech office space. Mostly for those little companies still yet to go public, but hoping to do so with a sparkly new office with massive cafes with kegerators, ping pong tables, secret rooms and robot coffee makers, very fun to design, but my first love will always be art. And art spaces were the first to go along with low priced apartments. All my favorite hang outs, galleries, venues, and more importantly my friends were being pushed out to the very edges. With the people came the cars, not more transit options. Getting from the CD to Ballard could be 2 hours or a $150 Lyft ride. Getting anywhere was a nightmare.

And then came March 2020. Covid blind-sided us all. I remember ordering toilet paper and tomatoes online thinking I want a different life when we come out the other side of this Global Pandemic. Since the 2016 election I had immersed myself in sacred teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, Joseph Campbel, Hafiz, Lao Tsu, Quakerism to buffer myself from the blindness and greed and unkindnesses those years seem to flame. I was searching for a way to be part of the healing, instead of othering and perpetuating suffering.

Now back to the dream…

…a very potent dream. In this dream a friend gave me a beat up old storefront packed to the ceiling with broken furniture and bric-a-brac. After clearing it out, I created a refuge and a home; a space for creativity, meditation and for tending what needed tending. Visitors traded white stones for the things they needed. I awoke in the middle of the night and in half wakefulness named it theWABASHproject

The next morning I told my husband about the dream. And though I grew up in Indiana living and playing in the woods and the creeks on the Wabash river’s banks, when he read what Wikipedia had to say about the name, I was delightfully surprised.

“The name "Wabash" is an English spelling of the French name for the river, "Ouabache". French traders named the river after the Miami-Illinois word for the river, waapaahšiiki, meaning pure water over white stones.”

The white stones are referring to the place where the clear river water ran over bright expanses of limestone. We humans are like rivers, our “banks” or bodies always shifting and changing, but we are always moving, returning, flowing back to Mother Ocean.

But how did this all happen in tiny PNW Mount Vernon?

The dream, fueled by that Covid promise of change, became my calling. I began talking about it to anyone who would listen. Two people who listened were Christian and Trina Carlson (owners of Perry and Carlson), our friends who had relocated to MV, who we would visit every time we drove through MV on our way to the ferry. Christian suggested I reach out to the owners of a deconstructed and derelict building just south of Perry and Carlson. The owners had wisely surmised that this building was a money pit and had abandoned a renovation about 5% of the way into it. Christian suggested we reach out to see if they would sell it. I ignored the “money pit” part of the equation and only saw the dream fully realized in a small town where I could walk everywhere for my basic needs. The Co-op was 2 minute walk away, the train and bus station was 5 minutes, the hospital was 15 minutes. No car? No problem.

But there was one problem. We could not do this alone. We finally found folks with the similar dreams, desires and delusions. It seemed every time we thought it would die the universe kept saying yes. I knew it was going to be hard. I had NO idea how hard. In some ways my frail scared self wished it would go away. Something would kill the deal, but no. Universe says “you are chosen to Doula this dream”.

We all thought it was a 1-1/2 year project…and the universe laughed. It took almost 4 years. And emptied all the bank accounts. But now that we are in, I believe it to be worth every tear, bruise, fear, frustration. As theWABASHproject and Dorothea Coffee builds community we know we didn’t just do it for ourselves. We did it for a tiny town in the far left corner of a country that desperately needs community and the sanctuary of common good.

So if someone asked me how does one doula a dream? 1. Be resilient- every day is going to bring new challenges. Birth is messy and painful. 2. Be on guard - change is raw and all your buttons will be pushed 3. Focus on the creative forces bringing light - not the darkness of doubt and fear 4. Enjoy that ride - new life is exciting 4. Get the hell out of the way - watch out for your ego making it all about you.

Was that what I did? Hell, no. I blundered and bungled through it. I lay face down in a dark small apartment and cried like a 2 year old. I think I even kicked my feet into the floor. All the pain came from my own desires, assumptions, agendas about perfection, timing, cost, personalities, outcome. All the joy came from accepting that it WAS happening and being grateful that I was chosen to be a witness to it. If not me, someone else would have been the lucky one. So at my very best moments I felt and feel privileged and blessed and beloved. And lucky, lucky, lucky.

two not so young dreamers checking out that little river town, it was a slippery slope…August 2020

ignorance is truly bliss..proud owners of 512 South First street, Dec 2020

raw space never felt so, well, raw Dec 2020

This one? I bought this one? Are you sure? Sept 2021

Oh, yeh, we needed a lot more concrete than what was there Sept 2021

pretty new brickwork made it a solid little building Jan 2022

Occupancy Permit acheived…still not in the gallery yet, but home! Aug 2023

and a nice home it is. Gallery finally open December 2023

Cinco de Mayo 2025

The Divining Deck

After my morning practice of meditating and reading beautiful books by my mentors (Campbell, Hafiz, Lao Tsu, Agnes Martin, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tolle, Bell), I make drawings that reflect the reading I am ingesting. I am trying to visualize some of the concepts of No-thing and No-mind and time not being linear. I mean, come on, these are tough nuggets. I guess that is why Lao Tsu says one cannot know, one can only be. But drawings are a way to get at things around the fuzzy periphery of words.

I keep a journal as well during my morning ritual. I track ideas and concepts in quotes, but more importantly in my own words. Please do read the authors I have mentioned. They are the masters, I am merely a pupil.

Also at the beginning of the development of my morning practice, I used a beautiful art card deck called Moon Angels by Ryan Rebekah Eren (Sweat & Tears Press, 2014) , full of affirmations and gorgeous drawings. I would pull a card at random and ponder how this might relate to my studies or any other issue that was occupying my monkey mind. It was fun and the abstract artwork was beautiful to meditate upon. So I decided to make a deck with my own drawings and writings hoping to ease some suffering during these seemingly apocalyptic times.

I hope these bring you joy, peace, at the very least, a smile.

Here is the first one from a deck of 33 cards. Soon coming out analogue in book and card deck form. Stay tuned!

T.01 IT WILL PASS

Consider all the events
that hastened to occur
for this moment to be
curious, messy or pure.

Is it pain or pleasure?
Is it dull or profound?
Is it what you desired?
Tell me what you have found.

A painful dullness?
It’s OK
it won’t last.

A profound pleasure?
Enjoy it fully
for it too will pass

(next time you have an itch, don’t scratch it. See what happens)

Marfa, TX: Part 2: art and space

I cannot overstate the profound impact of seeing Judd’s work in Marfa had on me. It changed my perception of life, landscape and my place within it. I have struggled my whole career with what to call myself. Am I an artist? An architect? A designer? A dreamer? A Poet? Judd didn’t seem to acknowledge these bounderies or labels. He just made stuff, wrote stuff; all with one very clear authentic voice. I crave this crystalline clarity. I have truly never been anywhere with such spatial and visual cohesion of a type that resonated so deeply with my own aesthetic. The landscape seemed dreamed by him and his artwork dreamed by the landscape. My experience enveloped inside this dream. It felt surreal. But more than anything, I felt relief. Relief from non-existent urban planning and consumer based architecture of most of Generic-America; coined “Generica” on our trip. I don’t think I realized how pained I was by most of what I live within. It’s like I awoke from a migraine of a busy, overthought, non-compassionate ugly. Everywhere I look my eye found peace. Open landscape, minimal geometries in found and designed buildings, art and graphics. It is my soul’s home.

Marfa, TX: Part 1: small town housing big ideas

I was raised in a town of 500 people. There were two general stores that sold hardware along side candy and bicycles, a library smaller than a contemporary Starbucks, a one pump gas station and a solitary stop sign. There were no addresses. You had to go to the tiny post office to get your mail from a brass covered mailbox with a mechanical padlock on the front. But if you forgot the code it didn’t matter as the post mistress knew who you were and she would just hand you your mail along with a long conversation about the weather. You could walk down the middle of the street and not be passed for hours at a time. It was in the prairie of farmland and rivers. Space was one thing it had in spades. But gradually and seemingly inevitably it shrank. The gas station and Saab dealership (yes, I know, strange) closed. Beautiful two story Federal-style brick buildings from the 1800's were demolished, replaced by a 7-11 generic metal structure. This tragedy is playing out all over America. It is a great loss. 

So imagine my  surprise to find in the remote corner of Texas a small town that was not shrinking, but thriving because a man named Judd decided in the 70's to make it his remote art enclave.

It is a town of 2000. Yes, big compared to my tiny hamlet, but very small compared to most towns in America. It sits a mile high and the light is clear and white. The desert is right at it's edge. No ring of generic suburbia. Just town and landscape. Judd chose it for it's low population and the architecture that it already contained. Strong simple utilitarian ranch based buildings. Buildings of the same era of which my small town was built. Judd purchased many of them and either restored them or at least limited their decline with new roofs. A bank, a grocery store, a barracks, all serving the higher purpose of housing art and art making. 

Now this town is an art mecca. Many make the pilgrimage from all over the world to see this master piece. Judd wanted his work permanently installed so he had control over the surrounding architecture and landscape. So he purchased many utilitarian buildings once home to a US military fort. It is of one mind. One idea. The idea of a kind of permanent impermanence. Nothing can be viewed the same twice. The high Texas light wouldn't allow it. 

There is always a dark side to this sort of gentrification. Because of the new money families who have owned adobe structures for generations are being priced out as those structures because of the high demand by newcomers and art patrons. Saving the town, but not the residents. There are ways to mitigate this. Whether Marfa is practicing any of these I don't know. But I do know that because of Judd, Marfa will not suffer the same fate as my small hometown and for that I am eternally gratefu

Great Abstract Expressionists

...oh, yeah, and they happened to be women. So it only took 60 some years to hear about some of them...sadly...I overheard a guy who was leading his lady date around commenting ignorantly, "oh, this one is actually important because she was married to a famous painter." Whaaaat??? "She" and the others are ALL important. They are here because of the canvases in front of you, you dull-witted oaf. Thanks be, he was far outnumbered by the others, who, with me, were actually looking, then seeing, then potentially awakening to the power of seemingly messy gestures expressing arrow straight visions.

My art viewing past is not full of swoon for Abstract Expressionism (except for Agnes Martin, who considered herself one although most people throw her in the Minimalism box). I have appreciated Peggy Guggenheim's commission by Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis' Seal does make me happy, but swoon? No. But I did indeed swoon at the Palm Springs Art Museum's show Women of Abstract Expressionism. Color, form, gesture. All screamed truth. In the current political climate, they seemed urgent. A call to wake up. Be alert, alive, awake to the cruelties perpetrated in the name of normal. Be exactly who you truly are, be damned the ignorance of regimented sameness.

Some of my faves: Mary Abbott, Joan Mitchell, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Goodwin, Perle Fine. I highly recommend the book from the exhibit. Gorgeous reproductions, interesting reading and pictures of these extraordinary women.

Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim Oct 2016

I recently went to NYC for a trip sponsored by Wilsonart, a laminate company I often specify on my architectural projects. I deferred my flight back so I could do what I always do in New York, exhaust myself in art galleries and museums. Little did I know that when I agreed to go there would be a retrospective of my all-time favorite artist at my all-time favorite museum, Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim.

Although I am about to throw words at the experience, it is in some ways beyond language. It evokes silence and it is impossible to photograph. I wrote in my notes that it was like trying to photograph pure spirit. But I must try to relate the experience as it was a personal best; a transcendent experience beyond time and place, beyond fear and worry. A few random thoughts while meditating on The Islands: There is a white whiter, Gradual revelations, Silent vocabulary of the soul, Low vibrations, Small accumulations generate grand moments, Wabi Sabi, Imperfect repetition...

It was also physiologically extraordinary. There were moments when the paintings seem to expand and grow off the wall reaching out to me. And I don't mean metaphorically, I mean they literally visually seemed to expand toward me. They seemed alive, breathing and waiting for the slow and close viewing to complete their wholeness.

These pieces are so easily misunderstood as nothing, but viewed patiently actually seem to contain the most magnificent calm. Or maybe they are a lighting rod that pulls the feeling of quiet bliss contained within us. In a time of social media saturation and vapid sound bites, fear-mongering and rampant racism; this exhibit is suave for the collective harried soul.

the nature of things

I find myself at 51 in an deep editing versus gathering mode of life. I find joy in giving things away and limiting objects entering my life. I have no drive to produce art as product. I am no longer interested in the effort of showing my work in a formal setting; no longer interested in the framing, the hanging, the opening, the storing of pieces of unsold art. But this summer I find myself missing the process of making images. So I have decided to make work simply in a notebook. Small studies using man-made and natural rulers to investigate the nature of the repeated mark or line. Inspired by the restraint of Agnes Martin, I search for a more obvious yet subtle approach to studying natural form. Many of these were made by tracing Maple and Fir branches, large honeysuckle vines and beach stones. The marks although attempting an order of spacing are casual, even rough. Imperfections are accepted, but not pursued. Somehow through this repeated tracing of the small, larger landscapes come to fore. This fascinates me. I am not attempting to draw "something", I am just setting up rules and following them. The image is purely accidental. Therefore these are more of a residue from meditating on the nature of things than an attempt of replication.

soul-crafting: part 1

For the summer of 2016, I am blessed with (as of late) a very rare luxury. This luxury can only occur when my merchant sailor husband's time off ship corresponds perfectly with my slow time for design projects. Needless to say, that is the rare luxury; this extended time off together. These are the moments when we can retreat from urbanity and attend our personal little work camp in the woods. My husband chose this home of outhouses and solar panels, simplicity and restraint, but I married into it. For the first decade, I used this place as an artist retreat. I created the work for several art shows in the second floor of an unfinished plywood house which came with the property. We lovingly refer to it as "the bunker". But for now, I have lost interest in producing art. I have thrown all my creative juice into my architecture. Which is why over that last two years we have been tethered to the city and why island time has been slim. But not this year. This year we have time for this place. And as I am more interested in making places than things, I find myself engaging in the physical labor which country property requires. I have done several rounds of design drawings for "the bunker", but that was not a physical act. I want to physically make it better; scything paths through rambunctious grasses and weeds, mowing our huge lumpy, thistle/ fire-weed/ blackberry vine-covered field of a yard with a solar-powered electric lawn mower. Knowing I would not have art projects to accomplish, I brought up a teetering stack of books on simplicity, minimalism, buddhism, compassion, but find myself practicing my soul-craft far more successfully mowing a lawn, pruning a tree, or clearing a path.

patternmatterform: a photographic study on the nature of seeing (part 3: form)

Back in 2002, before digital photography, online publishing and Instagram, I designed and created this handmade three book set of my photography and poetry. Photos where taken with old school cameras like a 1970 Kodak 126, a standard Polaroid, a Joycam Polaroid, a 35 mm Minolta 150 and a 35mm Samsung 115A.  Enjoy!

patternmatterform: a photographic study on the nature of seeing (part 2: matter)

Back in 2002, before digital photography, online publishing and Instagram, I designed and created this handmade three book set of my photography and poetry. Photos where taken with old school cameras like a 1970 Kodak 126, a standard Polaroid, a Joycam Polaroid, a 35 mm Minolta 150 and a 35mm Samsung 115A.  Enjoy!

patternmatterform: a photographic study on the nature of seeing (part 1: pattern)

Back in 2002, before digital photography, online publishing and Instagram, I designed and created this handmade three book set of my photography and poetry. Photos where taken with old school cameras like a 1970 Kodak 126, a standard Polaroid, a Joycam Polaroid, a 35 mm Minolta 150 and a 35mm Samsung 115A.  Enjoy!

unintendeds

The great benefits of having a dog is the amount of time I now spend outside walking in my neighborhood. Over the past 7 years, I have begun to enjoy the mess of graffiti hidden in lost corners rarely passed by. I call these images the "unintendeds". The true intention was to mark and claim territory; to speak to a tribe of which I am not a part. But although not intended for me, they do speak to me in color and texture and form and therefore, beauty.

habitats: the work of christine chaney (part 5)

Here is the fifth installation from a book about my design work that I published through the online publisher Blurb. Part 5: Suspension & Movement. If you would like to purchase a hard copy, please go to http://www.blurb.com/b/4004839-habitats. Enjoy!

habitats: the work of christine chaney (part 4)

Here is the fourth installation from a book about my design work that I published through the online publisher Blurb. Part 4: Theme/ Variation & Structure. http://www.blurb.com/b/4004839-habitats. Enjoy.

habitats: the work of christine chaney (part 3)

Here is the third installation from a book about my design work that I published through the online publisher Blurb. Part 3: Space & Layering. http://www.blurb.com/b/4004839-habitats. Enjoy.

habitats: the work of christine chaney (part 2)

Here is the second installation from a book about my design work that I published through the online publisher Blurb. Part 2: Wabi Sabi. http://www.blurb.com/b/4004839-habitats. Enjoy.

habitats: the work of christine chaney (part 1)

Here is the first installation from a book about my design work that I published through the online publisher Blurb. I have divided the book into five parts. Here is Part 1: Introduction, Intent & Inspiration. Upcoming will be Part 2: Wabi Sabi. Part 3: Space & Layering. Part 4: Theme/Variation & Structure. Part 5: Suspension & Movement. I hope you find inspiration and a brightened perception of habitation. http://www.blurb.com/b/4004839-habitats. Please enjoy.

lythe marking

So now that I am over 50, I realize how important it is to be concise; simplifying so I can experience all that is IN my life. I want to be able to touch all corners without exhaustion.  One concept I would like to incorporate into my life is the idea of "lythe marking"; limited effort for maximum effect. Here is a little Chaney Chat I created to illuminate this concept.

WabiSabi

Wabi sabi, an illusive term derived from Japanese aesthetics. Loosely it refers to the inherent beauty in the humble, the worn, the impermanent, the mercurial nature of our ever-changing material world. I have always been drawn to things expressive of use, wear, history. This faded, blurred, worn and even broken quality has a lushness I appreciate on a visceral level. It binds me to my humanness. It’s brushstrokes are irregular and painterly; it’s voice cracked and breathless. It makes me appreciate my “aliveness” within it’s decay.