Like an Exhale, wait, then Spring

Valerie's work just came down from the walls of Think on the Bowery. It's like she's left me. The room is absolutely vacant without her.

I never met Valerie. She died last summer. She was a morning regular, I am the night manager.

Her partner Eric promised to put her work on display at our coffee shop here on the Bowery, because it was one of the last places left that Valerie felt was real, in this stretch of homeless shelters and  bourgeois shops.

It felt as though I began to know her. She has become a friend, a soul connection.

Eric said: There was a dialectical materialism and magic in everything she did. A heavy sense of freedom. That joy, that freedom, will be part of this show.

Tamara Wyndham, who curated, also had never met Valerie. After the show Tamara flew to Egypt to draw items from archealogical digs. Back to patterned animal spirits . Tamara, who paints human energy and menstrual blood.

And Eric wrote me, "Though there were few, those that came carry the eternal light. You are one of those special people."

Thank you Valerie and Eric, for opening a new facet inside of me, like an arterial vein feeling blood for the first time, remembering the way blood feels when it pumps and runs.

I am changed.