Posts in PERSONAL ESSAY/STORY
The Story of Inside/Outside Ping Continues

Ping used to be a city dog, and so was I. He went on regular walks on hard side walks—sniffing the other dogs’ messages. He was cooped up all day in our apartment, and tried to escape every chance he got, and succeeded several times, creating heart-pounding adventures for us, and for him. Once, he was able to sneak into our upstairs’ neighbor’s apartment and finish their left over chocolate birthday cake, another time he ran across the street, a main highway in Oakland with very fast cars and ended up in trapped in someone’s backyard.

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Who am I and what am I doing here?

It has never felt right to use traditional or singular words to describe myself: musician, artist, therapist, teacher, writer, coach. I can be all those things, but it's not just any one those things that I am trying to be in the world, but really a combination, a synthesis. An integration. I believe this is the new way to be in the world. I think specialization is becoming antiquated, and so are traditional career paths. The leaders and trailblazers of the new earth are pioneers, warriors, multi-passionates, transparent and vulnerable sharing their message through owning their personal story.

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self & other

The paradox of humanity is that we want to be ourselves and yet we want to connect with others. We are taught to believe we cannot have both. We come to feel that in order to be ourselves we might risk losing the other because the other is afraid of our otherness. And if we connect, then we must say goodbye to that which makes us totally unique--our point of view. Connection & Separation. And so it is a dance between the two as we evolve.

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Flow on Faith

I’ve been going through a thing. I don’t want to call it a block because it’s not a block, exactly. Block implies to me that you are blank, with no ideas or nowhere to go. What I am experiencing is just a different phase of the creative process. As Lena Dunham’s character Hannah, in Girls says in her unapologetic, yet defensive way, when she is struggling in grad school : “I’m more in a pre-writing phase.”

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What is Zoëlab?

Let’s change the world through our uncertain/heart-based faith in love and creativity. Together, let’s live in presence, imagining a future that lives up to our human potential as unique individuals and our interconnectedness humans living in a natural world. Let’s revive the dying living room arts of friendship, conversation, storytelling, letter writing. Let’s restore the arts to their proper place in culture—woven into the fabric of our everyday lives.

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Art is there for us to make beauty out of the human experience.

There is anger in me about something. It is the split between art and life. It is the split between artists and non-artists. That art is somehow reserved for the special people in life, and the rest of us, well we just drone through life, asleep. I refuse to accept this piece of culture that we have inherited. I am ready to change culture by magnifying, elevating the beauty of the everyday experience into art.

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Learning about instinct from Björk and Andy Warhol

She said that her goal in her art is to return us to our instincts. She uses her own instincts, which are highly developed because since she has been an artist since she was a young child. She has never stopped being an artist. I think this is why her art is so magical, so unreal—she trusts that her instincts will take her where she needs to go.

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