Authentic creativity is evolutionary.
At least that’s how I see it, and on the chance my view supports exploring yours, I’ll share it.
Authentic creativity requires curiosity,
which leads to discovery,
which makes it revelatory.
Awareness and radical acceptance produce momentum for transformation, rather than perpetuation.
And by authentic I mean, the kind of creativity that requires the creator to be unapologetic, with those who would require an apology. Unapologetic with the energy asking for a shut up, sit down, play small, stop being you.
Ever experience the shut up, sit down, play mall, stop being you?
I’m speaking to the consequences for authenticity in relationships with those that would have you not be you.
If placating relationships are familial or communal, scarcity will germinate and take root.
And also,
I think most humans are rooted in scarcity, addicted to apology and self abandonment.
Those nervous systems like familiar evidence. Finding proof of what is already known in anything, because what is known is “safe”, and that’s what motivates the addiction.
Our families tell us who to be, as do education systems, entertainment, social media, friendships, community, culture, professions, nutrition and healthcare. Everywhere informs identity.
The captivity of pretense and self abandonment, in exchange for belonging, reveals the choice itself.
The captor is the liberator, a revelatory mirror of what is happening.
I believe liberation is not the absence of captivity, it’s the awareness of choice.
Recently a vocational artistic project delivered me to a stage wherein I found myself inside this exact awareness, with bright lights shining and a choice to make.
That’s part of how I’ve come to respect authentic creativity as a vehicle for progress and growth.
me, on stage, in or right near the exact moment of awareness
Without a known critic, without an individual who can’t stand who I am, sitting second row, the choice wouldn’t have held the same power.
There’s a place for the protagonist,
value in subjective opposition.
How did I get here?
I admire provocative art, provocation invites radical curiosity and a line of inquiry that stretches all the way into discomfort. And, I like some vulnerable audacity in the art. (Which is not the same as audacity itself, without the vulnerability its insufferable.)
And when art produces a felt sense akin to, full circle moments and memory composition, I’m swept off my feet.
I find myself swept by music continuously.
I began volleying the idea of curating live music as an art project with a purpose and on purpose late summer 2022, to meet a need and solve a financial hurdle happening in our family.
Watching my daughter push the perceived boundaries of human limitations, through a long term goal of professional athleticism in adaptive alpine skiing, has to be one of my favorite life experiences.
This summer she made the US Para-ski team, a massive achievement in a decade long goal.
And, adaptive high performance race gear hits purchasing-a-vehicle kind of cost. Alpine ski racing is among the most expensive sports to internationally compete in. Female athletes are specifically underfunded, add the adaptive sector and the hurdle feels mountainous. (pun intended.)
Her leveling up requires community resources, unless one is a millionaire, for which we are clearly not.
I’d rather ask for support, find a way through, step into vulnerable audacity, then tap out.
The ski racer herself, on stage at the show
“Give-me-money” type crowdsourcing/funding is convenient but doesn’t always feel good for the recipient (we know, we’ve done it before), though one thing this project taught me was that many people prefer to support this way.
Then there’s the benefit dinner with a program type, I've been to a couple dozen of this variety, all offered lousy food and entertainment.
I wasn't interested in the traditional fundraising routes.
If I was going to ask for community support, I wanted reciprocity and nourishment in it. I know music to be medicine, so I figured this would attract many who find it the same, create the synergy I value. A concert made sense.
My relationship with music was nurtured by my dads.
My stepdad and I shared similar genre preferences, and music was a topic of regularity with him, his literal side-gig was playing weddings and community events in a classic rock cover band. He provided introduction to live and recorded music in my elementary days and kept me exploring genre’s and artists that might interest me.
One year he locked the keys in our car, while it was still running, at the Utah State Fair Park where we were seeing Primus. That same year we inhaled clean mountain air as Steve Miller Band sang about wild mountain honey in Park City.
Music carried us just as much as our vehicle did, to remote caves, mountains, lakes and earth to explore. Music was the consistent reliable thing happening for me.
He told me what he heard, and I appreciated witnessing and participating in the interpretation of art. Through him, my ear began honing itself to the distinctions between live and recorded music as markers of artistry and musicianship.
Music exposure also came through my biological father, his occasional pop into my life usually came with mainstream Hollywood vibe influences. And more profoundly at 16 when California living came through duress but was the catalyst for a job opportunity at his place of employment. Transporting manilla folders with numerical white filler, from desktops to filing cabinets for the Virgin Records corporate accounting department. Those blondies were babysitting me and I was mostly paid in music and artistic exposure.
Those accountants had vast CD collections in their offices, and there were stacks of free-for-taking discs all over the building.
On the weekend when I wasn’t pushing folders to the tune of whatever was in my discman, and he wasn’t punching numbers, he would take me to one of the Virgin stores, where I could go about discovering art for many hours through consumer listening stations where customers could select jukebox-style songs and albums to sample. Which we both did.
My ear and knack developed through this relationship too.
Two men nurtured what felt like nature to me, they fostered the girl who now seeks live music medicine and resources technology to find and curate lyrical and vibrational experiences. The kind that produce a line of inquiry that leads home to self.
30 years later I’ve well developed a knack for finding obscure but profound pieces of musical artistry, and a desire to resource my lean influence to reveal my discoveries.
I suppose this is how I found A.J. LeGrand’s work, and how I came to have a long awaited experience witnessing A.J. and his friend (now mine too) Timmy the Teeth play a private concert of benefit for our family.
Which is also how I came to be feeling completely at home embodied in the vulnerable audacity to be me, on a stage.
A.J. in performance
LeGrand’s artistry found mainstay in my lifestyle and meditative soundtracks, which is to say my family and many clients found themselves also enchanted by his soulful voice and lyrical genius. Illuminating A.J. with the little social flashlight in my hand happened in much the same way it does on any given day with any number of artists, random Instagram shares.
But this time, a serendipitous conversation followed, eventually leading to a gram friendship and a few zoom meet ups to talk about art, and living with and amongst the humans who would have us apologize for who we are. (Or even about those we found ourselves wanting apologies from.) Those virtual conversations eventually found us without a screen between.
Over time, a sincerely connected safe and loving friendship developed.
All along the path of friendship I had been hankering to hear him live, he had all the markers of an artist without need of fancy studio tech to really deliver a moving performance. And usually I’m right, audacious I know … I trust the nature that’s been nurtured.
I threw the idea out on the table during one of our discussions, and that’s how and why A.J. agreed to headline this creative fundraising project of mine. I was grateful for his trust and generosity, but also the romantic in me likes to think something in him knew this experience would time travel him full circle too.
A.J. curated Timmy in as a potential collaborator, Timmy agreed through his trust of A.J., and maybe I impressed him with a word or two.
I curated an ideal venue in our familial and ski community. From there, creative relationships and generosity expanded into a real felt sense of this thing happening.
Many hours of time-sensitive work went into getting infrastructure rapidly in place and the logistics accessible online.
Launch day came, and promotion began ….
A few weeks went by,
with lots of promise but actualized emptiness.
The shadows dropped in on me, like a storm cloud that would not cease.
Scarcity raining fiercely down, I felt drowned.
So I canceled the show.
I crumbled.
I embodied the felt sense of defeat through the experience of failure, a neutral and necessary ingredient that I turned ugly.
It was the collaborators that kept me in it and moved the project forward. The staff at Dejoria extended encouragement and infrastructure shifts to create a safe, effective and more aligned container.
The pressure I had built up, they dispelled.
Previous to the succumbing to defeat, Timmy had shared an unreleased song with me, artistry that invoked the felt sense of pain through the concept of rock bottom. In this, music held me as it always had, and Timmy to in that, a profoundly personal piece of medicine.
Rock Bottom reflected the pain I was choosing to embody (albeit subconsciously), and my addiction to suffering. An unoriginal experience with a depressive felt sense, human connection. If misery loves company it’s lucky to have an unlimited supply, potentially healing.
Timmy the Teeth on stage winning us over with organic comedic humility
A.J.’s artistry had long been medicine in my library, but found a way into optimal relevancy. His art reminded me how complicated relationships get when we function from expectations,
desperation present,
a belly of the beast moment,
fear composed of what others might do or say.
Medicine.
And our friendship held the release.
A.J. generously and graciously offered me a soft personal reflection of what he was experiencing, which wasn’t what he actually wanted. He witnessed and lovingly called out the energy I was bringing to the project that was blocking our collective intentions. A space holder for me to own, receive and release.
I am held. I have what I need.
The necessary shifts happened, so I stepped back in line and kept the trajectory set for an actualized experience ready to accept it all as it was. This attitude held me nicely when the project got more revelatory around community relationships, when we saw what we had not wanted to and what was socially hidden, but had always been there.
I was primed for deeper measures of grief and release. And grounded in radical acceptance, embodying the belief that it was all for me, for us. Alive in the process, the entire spectrum of emotions being felt. I relaxed.
If the cancellation had become the reality I would have missed out on witnessing two humans I’ve come to admire and appreciate more than most, prove their possession of artistry. Live synergy far more nourishing than studio version. I witnessed a profound delivery of talent in an intimate container built on reciprocity. I witnessed humans vulnerably audacious in their doing. I witnessed the mark of musicianship as I see it.
I would have missed out on seeing my daughter sell her first pieces of art to raise money for her own endeavors.
On core childhood memories unlocking for my youngest son, who intently and presently watched me introduce the artists, with aliveness in his eyes and then sat wide eyed singing his favorite A.J. lyrics right along side him.
the A.J. faces made when art is released into the ethers
I would have missed A.J. recollecting how in his youth a community supported his endeavors too. And how nourishing his sound truly is.
I would not have finished the day fully embodied in gratitude for having finally witnessed and felt what I had waited a life time for. Or laid my head to rest in the arms of my lover, while he cued music to illustrate his experience of me that evening, I was wonderful that night to him.
I would have missed the romance and intimacy woven into the tapestry of this creativity.
I would have not fully circulated the full circle.
I would have not met this version of me.
Emotional audacious vulnerable connection has to be the most rewarding of all the human experience. Wealth and abundance in energetic form, life expanded. We may have not raised the money I had envisioned at the beginning, but we were bathing in abundance.
This project asked me to let go of expectations, attachments, old relationships and expired energy, to reduce the suffering I was choosing and cease self abandonment.
A purification of an expired existence in exchange for an evolved one.
I can’t imagine having not experienced the home that it is.
If you want to donate to my daughters athletic endeavors, her Go Fund Me is live and ongoing.
If you want to support these artists, begin by streaming their music and following them on social. A.J. LeGrand | Timmy the Teeth
You’ve already supported me, by reading. Im grateful, thank you for being here.
All photos Anna Boynton Photography
I love to feel the depth of your words and feel the powerful emotions and experiences you are having. Verbally developing those Polaroid heartshots that create memories to be reviewed again in the future for our growth. Thank you for sharing.