In the summer of 2009, I started a project with one simple goal: draw a picture everyday for a year, maybe think about drawing, say a few things about drawing on a Blogger site that I called mynameisfaith – seemed a decent enough introduction of myself to the interwebs world.
True story, too.
Thirteen years is a long time.
Almost ½ a mortgage, a teenage kid, a public education in the United States of America.
This is the 13th year of a project that began with earnest intentions and went all sorts of ways in leading up to this point, a rather sweet feeling recursion, a return to the beginning ready to complete an ending or segue into a new iteration during these next several years which will be – as every year is – marked by transitions and the closing of life stages, curtains opening to new ways of being in my circumstances and the accumulative and ever-in-flux phenomenon of this person with this name that is my name and a history that I know as my own, fumbling forward about to and in the midst of doing what I both never thought I’d actually manage to make real to do and always, much more deeply than I have ever thought anything, felt and knew I’d do, and finding that nothing is what I expect to be – if I really pay attention – and that even in my failures and mistakes I bring the life in me to some fruition, simply in the effort drag out into the light all the things I have to show, tell all the stories I might find in myself, to expose myself as a poem that never wants to end.
Right now, I’m loving the feeling of filling the small spaces of page with ink, smoothing the edges of heavy lines to make a feeling like an opening in the back of my throat, some kind of secret gasp.
Whatever forms have arisen the past several days have been entirely line-feel freedraw mechanics, automatic almost, very focused and calm. Happy.
It’s much easier to approach a blank page now than it was in 2009, when I was trying to draw certain pictures or ideas.
Lately, I make a scrawl or slash, pick some minuscule spot in the fibers and extend a line out from it.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2015GL063699 plasmaspheric activity in the troposphere, planospheric latitudes…plasma tubes in the toroid…
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/9/8/263/pdf
PROOF OF GOD! ...and other tragedies. 
Dr. Fridman: What is Plasma?
It happened all the sudden this year, the insects slide toward the hushed elongated songs that mark the end of the season. All the robust chirring and bzzzzzrring – the sound of life insistent under a hot sun – has dropped to a murmuring question, something uncertain in the sound. Even the insects are wondering what comes next, why they are so suddenly cooling in the speed of their wings. The business of the season is done, whatever it was. To try, I suppose. That’s all any life knows to do.
To try to do what life –
In all it’s peculiar assemblages –
is built to do.
Success is not a given, but trying is almost guaranteed.
what else is there to do, but be what one is,
try to make the best of instinct, purpose,
try to stay alive.
Success is not guaranteed,
regardless of effort.
Dear Dr._______,
My name is Faith R. Rhyne, and for the past year I have been variably active on social media platforms as @_xfaithrrx_.
I’ve used other handles in the past – like my name @faithrhyne on an Instagram account I can no longer access or, in the case of Twitter, the handle @faithghost – which I held from 2010 until 2021, and probably should have kept ‘cause it’s rad.
If you’ve no awareness of who I am and why I might possibly be contacting you, please forgive any presumptions that may be implicit in this communication.
For the sake of this message, I’m writing from an assumption –
{based on intersecting milieus-of-awareness
and topics-of-interest on Twitter
and, possibly, through secondary or non-specific channels of information that I am not empirically aware of, but that I deduce are possible,
if not likely, given what I am able to substantiate
as observable evidentiary articles existing outside
of my own capacity for conjecture, speculation} –
that you are aware of who I am, at least vaguely.
It would be preferable – for me – if you were a bit more than ‘vaguely’ aware of who I am and had at least some idea of the range of reasons as to why I might be reaching out to you at this time.
I cannot count on that being the case, however. You may know a great deal about me and rue the day you learned my name. What is preferable for some is unfortunate for others.
That is something I am learning a lot about recently.
I still have a great deal to learn, so please forgive any inconsideration on my behalf, and forgive trouble I’ve caused through poorly-informed intentions.
If you are not aware of me, please disregard or inquire further or report to authorities or whatever you may determine is the right thing to do in response to receiving this message.
It would be really nice if you wrote back and asked me what’s up, why I reached out to you. Perhaps you could help me to determine who I may need to be in contact with, if not you?
Do what you think ought to be done.
On my end, waiting for a possible response
to a message sent is more interesting –
or at least different – than spottily scanning
every possible mode of communication
in search of the person or people
who might reach out to me directly first,
not knowing who or how I might be contacted.
That is wearisome and ultimately not very informative, at least not in ways that are reliable.
In reaching out to _____, and several others,
I’m creating a set of different things to be
on the lookout for – a message in response,
a text from a person saying they are contacting me
in re: to Reference # xyz123abc
or whatever fairly obvious and direct contact
might be made as a result of my sending
this message and your receipt of this message.
Dr.______ – _____ – I don’t know where I or my name or your conceptualization of me may reside on your current spectra of knowing.
If you do know who I am
in ways that could be characterized
as being more on the informed side of knowing
than on the uninformed side of knowing, please contact me at your earliest convenience
in whatever manner is best for you.
I need to speak with you about an immediate matter
of potential mutual interest – for ______, possible institutional interest and opportunity.
I can assure you that my communication with you will be respectful of your time and position, and nothing I may say, write, share, or convey will…
I was about to say that I will not create problems for you, Dr. _____-.
I can’t make that claim though, can I?
I don’t have adequate information,
and there are all the pernicious ways
that knowing – simply knowing –
of the existence of something…
in this case, the personhood
of _______, my existence
…can create problems of all sorts,
the most inescapable of which may be moral,
the dilemmas of conscience
that may come about in knowing
that a good person needs help.
Sometimes, knowing about something becomes a form of stewardship.
Please forgive me for placing you in any difficult circumstances of knowing you may find yourself in as a result of my existence.
Also, please contact me or forward this to whomever you determine may be a more appropriate steward of my interest in identifying an institution – preferably in _______ – that may be interested in talking with me and visiting with me, and perhaps doing some further inquiry as to the interdisciplinary range of potential research that I may be interested in contributing my efforts and the resources of myself toward, and – *very important* the ethical considerations that need to be first and foremost in any thinking about institutional involvement with the actual, real person who is attached to the name
that is my name and the conceptualization of who I am that may well be entirely the fabrication
of other people’s imaginations,
for better or for worse.
There are some matters that I need immediate assistance with and hopefully there are people within ____ or other institutions that may have an interest in working with me in some way that is not an extension of the inquiries and observations currently taking place by non-academic institutions and specific academic partners collaborating with private and/or inter-governmental interest groups in ways that are radically outside of ethical research, and in clear violation of institutional interests and integrity.
If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about,
please do whatever you feel is best.
Forget this message.
I am not a danger to myself or others.
I am stable and oriented to reality.
I can report on my experience reasonably well
and consistently maintain the identification
of subjective, specious, sus, and otherwise unreliable perspectives.
I am able to consistently shift behavior and communication to be acceptably appropriate – albeit within the range of my stable and normative eccentricities that are related to neurodiversity factors, which I do acknowledge can become problematic when I am under duress or basic needs across multiple domains remain critically unmet for long periods of time and which I acknowledge I need appropriate therapies to restore healthier coping skills and reduce immediate risk due to unhealthy coping efforts related to substance use and isolation, perseverative attention to not-healthy areas.
Cumulative decline in activities of daily living, and collateral damages/strain across multiple domains of well-being, largely due to lack of support and an unmanageable environment, isolation.
Note: activities of daily living have not gone to disarray to the extent of Giacometti or F. Bacon or a number of researchers, artists, writers, spiritual contemplatives that – at least for a time – forgo certain tasks of the daily in favor of other activities that are deemed to be more _________?
Important.
I apologize for sending this right after the 5:00
o’clock hour, EST. If you are in a different time zone, perhaps you will receive it – tho’ not if your _____ email
is set to auto -respond after 5:00pm.
That would be exciting,
an auto-response. 🙂
Thank you, ___. Whether or not you know me, your work has been of specific and inestimable comfort to me through the circumstances of the past several weeks.
I am grateful for whatever force of happenstance allows for the broadcast of the saying
of the word that is my name on my birthday,
not referring to the person I am with that word
as my name, but in speaking to a bishop, referencing a belief in good-promise held in all horizonal light.
Thank you, again and always,
•
This picture is only a sun dog, a parhelion. It is not intended to suggest or indicate or show anything other than a sun dog, a parhelion.