Today I was reminded of Debbie Millman's ten year plan and brought back to the last time I wrote one. On April 1st, 2021, the first day of The Outwork Accelerator, the course I taught in the spring.

I haven't written here in a while,  although I've been missing it, I've been feeling the pul' back towards witnessing my own process in public facing words. And so here is my reintroduction, a calm back to my future.

4/1/21

In 10 years i'm sitting in my studio. Light is flooding in large and ancient windows. I smell old wood and cold stone, rafters hewn by hands of another age. I'm sitting at my tea table. My hands move slowly in practiced patience, never rushing.

My tattoos disappear into the sleeve of a silk robe given to me on a trip last year to a trans artist's studio in China. Most of my body is now covered in interconnected tapestries mapping the symbolic evolutions of my spiritual process. My body feels young and supple and I feel at home and joyful within it. I've had some gender affirming surgeries and I feel connected to my original form.

I feel the gentle swell of my breasts with my breath and the curve of my hips as I ground down. My favorite physical features are my smile lines and the small shock of platinum white hair amidst my long my back length blonde. My voice rests where I feel comfortable and I take pleasure in shifting its perceived gender according to given situations.

I watched the thick black tea liquor pour from the gaiwan. A shou puerh from Taiwan, a favorite but not too expensive. Present in a complex depth without being opaque.

I write. My morning pages form the foundation for my life.

I hear my partner stir in the other room. She's flown in for the week. We meet often in different parts of the globe. In different parts of our heart. She's one of a small number that I choose to share my inner heart with. Yet I give freely to everyone. I try not to play favorites. Everyone gives me something unique, something special, a perspective impossible for me to provide. I smile feeling my endless love for her. Feeling it buoyed by my love for others, for myself.

Today is April 1, 2031. It's time to begin again as it is every day. Time for beginnings and a time for endings.

I write. I let myself imagine.

I reach down and in, finding the deep connections that spread infinitely outwards, and I ask them to carry me, to allow me to be their servant, their messenger.

I repeat the mantras that have carried me.

I am awake in a dream.

I allow myself to dream. Part the tendrils of consensual shared reality that block me from the direct perception of the divine. I step through. There's nothing beyond our wildest imaginations. Only our courage to travel there. I pray for courage.

I call to mind and then down into my heart the faces and energies and work of the 1000s of artists that I have worked with in the last 10 years. I feel their pulsing creativity - interconnected, outward reaching, generative, generous. I move along the network in my mind. Artistic and personal narratives intertwine with the hopes and dreams of those they wish to serve. They are in service of the process. The artifacts of change.

I think of the experiences and work I have seen grow, among, around, and within us. The profound, the intimate, the monumental, the tearing, the grief stricken, the beautiful, the soft, the violent, the confronting, the human, the machine, the energetic, the divine.

In the presence of all the work, I allow myself to be changed. I give as I have strived to teach - completely, and without reservation. I give knowing where my energy will be received and resonate with generative feedback and where it will be consumed, already planning the ties to other parts of The Outwork that have strong processes in learning to recognize the need for personal accountability and boundaries.

I think of my own work. It's threads far reaching and particularly bright for me. Not because it was ever more important or more successful. There are far more publicly visible, wealthy, politically influential nodes in the Outwork. But because it is my own and it reflects me. My music has taken me around the world. My favorite gigs always in the old places. I take few others now. And the new places. The ones that would have been impossible 10 years ago.

I still consider myself a musician first. But my work is more about experiences than music. It always has been. Electronics and artificial intelligence work to form a long standing partnership. A cast of actors and characters within experiential dramas, between the spirituality both man and machine. I am more technoshaman than leader. I create worlds, I destroy worlds. Kali - sister, mother, lover. I offer myself to thee.

I exist in many places at once. I move in many circles. But the most important is right here. In these moments that I take with myself.

I live on borrowed time. I remind myself at my first show 10 years ago of the coffin of rope, my future shroud, that hands on my wall at eye level.

I ask not escape death, but to embrace it. To live this day fully in service of life. My art, my activism, my achievement - I exist only to advocate for the awareness of our truth and the joyful defiance against death.

I pray not for another 10 years. But to be present in gratitude for this moment. I pray for the same now.

Knowing that it is never the vision, never the ending, that is fulfilled. Rather I am filled in this moment with the abundant possibility of life.

Never forget the cosmic joke that is certainty in the best laid plans. I am a moth in the wind. Come fly with me before we return to ground.

I am awake in a dream.