Finding new footing

I've been professionally quiet for awhile. I have a couple of clients but mostly I am helping my sibling in caring for an elderly lady, our Mom; also an elderly dog.

I've also been thinking.

More specifically, I've been finding new footing: Rcconsidering the foundation of my professional practice and what I might want it to become.

I know some things more clearly than I did before.

I'm very interested in sharing things I see, but that seem to be veiled or invisibilized by systems I encounter in my work: labor that isn't named, efforts taken for granted, the structures assumed within stated problems, confused incentives, the stories nonprofits and artists and grantmakers tell themselves that don't quite correspond to how things actually work.

One of my superpowers is to ask questions until something that was hidden or assumed is revealed and/or named. Almost all of my clients have, at some point, said some version of: "Everything became clear."

I'm interested in why that happens, and in whether there is a larger practice to be developed around it.

I'm also thinking much more deeply about art—not only as a professional sector, but as a way of perceiving, relating, making, solving problems, experiencing pleasure, and imagining other ways of living on this planet and with each other.

Lately I'm into self-education about economic structures and Marxian political economy, as I continue to wish for universal basic income, healthcare, and all the conditions that make both making art and experiencing art possible.

Underneath all of this is something I've been interested in for a very long time: alignment. In dance, I learned to recognize the extraordinary feeling that can arise when a body in motion is skillfully organized in relation to forces larger than itself. I'm increasingly interested in what that idea might mean at other scales.

I don't yet know the shape of the practice that may emerge from all of this.