A Shrine to Something | Alison Dilworth

Alison Dilworth is a Philadelphia-based artist, muralist, and shrine-maker whose work spans the profoundly private and the intensely public. She is also someone who has spent her adult life thinking about what it costs to hold things — grief, love, other people's stories, a kid running toward traffic — and what it means to be genuinely present to any of it.

We talk about what it means to make a shrine, and how that practice bleeds into everything else she makes. We talk about the difference between curiosity and bearing witness — and why that distinction matters more than it might seem. We talk about girlhood, about what it felt like to watch herself become visible to men before she had any framework for it, about the refusal that followed, and about the door she's walking through now on the other side of all that. We talk about a miscarriage, a snow cone, and a little girl named Dagitu who showed up at exactly the right moment without knowing why. And we talk about an elder neighbor with a shovel and a gaze that went straight through her.

Alison is one of the people who taught me — without trying to — that holding space is a real thing you can do in the world. Talking to her again after fifteen years was a genuine joy.

In this conversation:

• Making art in Philadelphia vs. New York — and why "time-rich" is the thing
• The handmade books that hold other people's stories and are never for anyone else
• What attention actually is, and what it means that it's been captured
• Curiosity as childlike wonder vs. bearing witness as ethical presence
• What it felt like to become visible to men as a girl, and the refusal that followed
• Pregnancy loss, the Magic Gardens, and Dagitu's snow cone
• Why she doesn't respect grownups — and why elders and children are the only ones worth being
• Perimenopause as threshold
• What it means to honor something invisible
• The Norris Holmes mural: Sky Woman, Eve, Alice, Miss Gloria — women who chose wisdom over safety
• Why the process is everything and the finished thing isn't hers anymore

...more of Alison's work: https://www.instagram.com/brainsoulface/

Transcript

The Principal Uncertainty
Alison Dilworth — A Shrine to Something


GEORGE: I remember that walk in Brooklyn. My recollection is that you were on the cusp of, or in the process of, a pretty big change in a central relationship.

ALISON: Yeah, and what's really funny is that this is such an interesting place to start, because it's also through the person through which we met. Devin and I were together for about five years — a relationship that really reached towards so many other connections, tried to bring art in different directions. It was a really, really important relationship. The loss I was experiencing when I last saw you was just a kind of loss. And then the friendship — it wasn't right away. There was so much that happened in both of our lives. But we're family, you know? We both ended up healing — or really fucking breaking apart — in our own ways, separately.

GEORGE: I'm way overdue to catch up with Devin.

ALISON: I moved to New York for one year, which was the last year of that relationship. I always kept a foot in Philly. The South Philly house at 13th and Christian — I would work 15 straight hours every Thursday. I was just struggling to pay rent. I didn't know what I was doing in New York. It didn't feel like home. I love New York to visit, but it's not my home. Philly is such a better place to be an artist if you're not ambitious in the way that I'm not. I don't really give a shit what your name is or what your credentials are. I'm so much more interested in how people engage with play and make shit by accident. If you're not time-rich, I don't know how you can afford creative space there.

GEORGE: Talk about home. Talk about the feeling of home, the texture of that.

ALISON: My first thought is that I didn't always feel at home at all. It took me a really long time to find my people and to understand what home could be, which involves feeling comfortable. I didn't have a very smooth adolescence. I got married — I met my ex-husband when I was 19, and I was around a lot of grownups who were all UC Berkeley faculty from all over the world. I don't know if I'm a grownup yet now, but — yeah. Kind of bouncy, different lives. When I moved to Philly and went to school, I met a lot of the people who are my best friends and my kindreds through Devin. All of these people who have become family. I remember hearing their stories — they all had old stories together — and feeling kind of on the outs because I didn't have history with anyone. And then there was a time, probably ten years later, where I realized I had become part of all the stories with these beautiful people. And I was like, yeah, why am I still here in the United States? And the answer is: my community. That's my home. It's the people.

GEORGE: Do you actually remember the moment when you were like, yeah, no, actually I'm in these stories now?

ALISON: I don't remember the exact moment. I remember the feeling that came with it. When you're experiencing loneliness, you don't realize how long it takes to come out of it. It was like coming out of depression — which is what it actually was. I went through a lot of depression, and resurfacing isn't like, all of a sudden I was fine. It was a very gradual, like learning how to move my arms to get a little bit more buoyancy. It was like, oh wow, I'm clear enough to feel like a whole person again.

You're talking about doing this work and having one part of you seeking worth — that's the simple word. And it's like trying to put meaningful experience into a framework that wants to compartmentalize things and dissect them into a really linear form. I taught at a forest program in a public school for two years. I know you have some forest school experience — what was that like for you?

GEORGE: Yeah, what was that like for you?

ALISON: We just kind of stepped in because the program stopped. As often happens in public school, everyone is scrambling because there aren't enough resources. So in a situation where there aren't enough resources because our culture doesn't value children equally — I have some opinions about all of this — we stepped in. Franny, who has a PhD in botany, and I, who taught art for ten years in a very exploratory way, were such a rad team. We set up in the woods with blankets and all these invitations. The kids could check out whatever they wanted to. It was beautiful. I made a lot of great little friends.

But in order to have a program like that, or to write a grant or do anything, you have to validate it. And it's like they want proof of why it's good for kids to play. And I'm like, is this really where we are in this culture? I have to prove that children learn by playing? I can do that. I can tell you why kids learned about botany through tapping maple trees or learning about a spice bush or making tea from the branches. Playing this game where the kids would weigh rocks and acorns — the reality of math became real. Seeing a little kid's face light up when she was like, my God, math is real. Anyway, it was great.

And then it's like — I'm always at odds with the fucking world. In order to get money for children who literally spend no time outside, who don't know how — half the kids had never climbed a tree before. Some of the littler ones thought there would be bears and were scared of the woods. I really just feel like we need to do more for people, and I have a current disappointment in humanity because I feel like I know we can do better than this.

GEORGE: Yeah, the bar's not high right now. Anyway. Jesus.

ALISON: Well, it's also like — I really do think about the medium being the message. I should probably just read some Marshall McLuhan right now rather than dystopian novels, because we're already here. But if the medium is literally a machine designed to consume your attention, and money is generated based on how much of your attention is captivated, then what is the message? The message is: we own your attention. And also: your attention is valuable. So maybe you should think about how you're using it.

GEORGE: It's such a weird internal tension in that premise. On the one hand, ostensibly, your attention is devalued — it's just this constant scrolling, the relentless pursuit of adequate distraction. Think about that in relation to your art. Some of your work is intensely public, obviously. And some of it is profoundly private.

ALISON: I think there's productive tension everywhere.

Before the pandemic, I had a spin out. I was alone in my studio at night — my kids were little, Zoe was four and Malcolm was almost two — and I was like, what is it that my body is telling me right now? I was in a place of unprocessed trauma at the time, getting some very loud messages from my body that I was not yet listening to. And there came to me this feeling: I just need to learn how to hold everything all at once. That's the answer. I can hold darkness and light and all of these things that feel like opposing forces. But that's not a very gentle thing to try to do to yourself.

I know people who don't believe in secrets, and that's great for them — those are the people I'm not gonna tell my secrets to. But I've always had some secrets. I know there's some weird ego side of me that believes that makes me more interesting than I really am. But it's sort of like if you're trying to tell somebody about a mushroom trip you had — no one ever cares what that experience was for you. It's not a verbal thing. It's certainly not a verbal place to be when you're in it. Words become absurd and they still are.

So I feel like I am a person who really has a tangible process of being in the world. I make these books — hand-bound books that are probably the most visually compelling thing I do. They're not for anyone else. Sometimes I'll post a picture of a page, but I really hold them as private objects, because parts of them involve other people, and those aren't mine to share. The books keep getting fatter — paper sewn in and glued in, all kinds of stuff. No rules, I don't have to do anything in there. It's just a really free place that's become a language.

And then I paint murals — really public visual things. I have to say, the most interesting art that any artist makes is by accident. It's usually the studies for the thing that are the most alive, because you're not self-conscious, you're playing and exploring. So having a place to play — if you're an artist or just a person in the world doing whatever you do — giving yourself a place to play and be free and explore is the best thing you can do.

For people who want to write but don't know how: cut out a bunch of words. Get a book from a free library and chop up a bunch of words and see what happens. You're gonna find a word on your rug in six months. It's just gonna be like a weird message from your past that feels like the future.

I think part of the tension between public and private is that I'm really struggling with social media and the construction of persona. I get so pissed off by how careful people are now. It used to be fun. Money ruins everything — or it's not even money, it's the system that values the wrong things. So I don't even want to participate. I kind of stopped posting much. And now I kind of feel like I'm entering a new phase where I'm like, maybe I'm just not gonna give a shit, and post some things that don't have to do with the abysmal news cycle.

GEORGE: If there's a spectrum from books at the private end to murals at the very public end — how do shrines work for you?

ALISON: Well, so for a while, I thought shrines were just the things I made where you light a candle and have different objects and write an intention. I have many shrines around my house — they're kind of altars. We started talking about attention earlier, and a writer who's a good friend of my dad's elected to end her life because she had Parkinson's and really chronic pain they couldn't figure out. An email goes out from my dad letting us know that this friend of ours is going to die at a certain time on Friday.

And so the shrine in this case is a place where you write her name. And I pull a card from this package my kindred friend Lou sent me during a really dark time. He sent me this Chinese takeout container filled with little parchment paper folded with herbs and a word or phrase. So it would be like rosemary for generosity of spirit, or lavender for calm waters. And I reach in and pull one randomly with my eyes closed, and it's always the right one. So it's a little process where there's no control, and then there's also intention and attention. I light a candle. And I just hold that person while in this space.

It's a way of connecting and being really present in moments that matter and that are private. I have a friend who lost a baby, and I built her a shrine. I don't even know if she uses it or how she uses it. And it doesn't matter. Maybe she hasn't needed to use it yet. But I feel like we lack ritual in this culture. It's really hard to make meaning when you don't have enough time to breathe.

And then the thing I realized is that everything I make is a shrine to something. Every mural I've painted, there's this really intense design process involved — which is sort of ridiculous because in a way it doesn't matter. But what matters? I have written on a lot of pieces of paper: it matters how you spend your time. That was given to me by my elders who were followers of Father Divine — these awesome elder women in their 90s who would take my hand and look at me and give me a nugget of wisdom I would carry for the rest of my life. Like: it matters how you spend your time. Another: whatever you feel to do, do it now. Just amazing wisdom from these elders.

So the process is everything. And as soon as the thing is painted, it's not mine anymore. It's done. The process is so much more intense than it probably needs to be, but I refuse to make it easy. I will suffer around the symbolism of the big flowers I'm painting on a wall. Maybe I just overvalue struggle.

GEORGE: If it's not hard, how do you know if it's worth doing?

ALISON: Or like — is it meaningful? What is meaningful? I'm not a great painter. I am not a revolutionary artist. I am a person who is really good at holding certain things. And art is one of the containers I can do that with.

GEORGE: What are you holding, Alison?

ALISON: Grief. Love. Just like — how to love.

I think recognizing people in moments where they are lost or they've come away from their bodies. Those moments of disconnect — I can know what to do in those moments. We had a kid in the woods one day who ran. This kid was running — it was just so clear that this kid was running from trauma. I wasn't a school teacher, so I didn't have the same you are not allowed to put hands on a child rule. But this kid is running toward Lincoln Drive. So I ran and I put my arms around this kid and we just sat down on the ground. It was autumn, the leaves were yellow. And I just put my hand on the earth near the kid's hand and said: you are here and we are sitting and the leaves are yellow and we're just right here on the ground and you are safe and you are part of this group and we care about you. Just knowing this kid needed to come back to their body and to the world.

And that was not a safe world for this kid to be in. So there's the tension — I can tell you that you're safe in this moment while knowing you are not safe in other moments. I think that's a thing to learn.

Trauma is so fucking interesting because our brains are our biggest enemy sometimes. My friend Cindy said that because we were going to do a cold plunge and I was being a chicken and she just yelled, your brain is your biggest enemy. And I ran right into the cold water. That became a really good mantra, because as soon as you get caught up in your brain, you're disconnected from other things. And when you're in a moment of actual trauma, your body knows what to do — it totally dissociates your mind from your body. There's so much wisdom in doing what it needs to survive.

I'm really currently interested in trauma and how it relates to rites of passage. Because if you come to a door, you cannot cross through it without tripping over all the shit you've accumulated that you keep pushing behind you. Rites of passage really are calls to grow. You can't go through the rite of passage if you're not growing. So that's scary.

GEORGE: There's a fascinating thread that's been running through our conversation. You've used the words "grown up" like two or three times. You were talking about the elders, the women who are elders in your life. And at one point you threw out this offhand remark — am I a grownup yet? And I deeply fucking relate to that question. It's a conjugation problem on one level — I will have been a grownup at this point when I look back on it. Probably. Maybe.

I want to ask about the cadence of your movement between subject positions. And I'm going to get super academic for a second. When I was learning to do ethnographic field research — part of why I found the field interesting in the first place is that anthropology is the most woo-woo, goofy, crazy of the social sciences. You're familiar with the phrase participant observer?

ALISON: I've heard it. Is that having to do with the idea that as soon as something is observed it is inherently changed?

GEORGE: That would be the uncertainty principle — the Heisenberg thing. Which, not for nothing, is sort of where the title of this podcast comes from. As we look at it, we change things. Participant observation is, on the thumbnail version, that you are both participating in and observing — let's say, rites of passage. The reality is that when you're in it as a way of being in the world, you're never fully a participant and you're never fully an observer. They're just two subject positions that you move between in an uneven and irregular way. Really what you're attending to is: what was the movement between participant and observer like over time? Which is a very long and digressive way of trying to tee up a question about the cadence of your own experience.

ALISON: Before you move past this point — what is the difference between the role of the observer and the role of bearing witness? Because observer implies a kind of analysis to follow. Judgment is implied. And I guess the thing I would say is: the hinge between participant and observer would be curiosity. If you're just really curious and coming from a place of openness, I think that energy will be received as what it is, rather than I'm trying to take something from you.

GEORGE: When I hear you say curiosity, the quality of that in my mind has a kind of dry quality. But when I hear bear witness — I've been thinking about this throughout our conversation. I was in Utah for a year working as a wilderness guide in a therapeutic program, drug and alcohol and mental health rehab in the back country. And when I was trying to explain to a colleague how I understood the job, it was that my role is to be as close to a hundred percent emotionally and spiritually present as possible, as much of the time as possible. Inevitably that's going to fail — there's no version of the world in which one is perfectly anything all of the time. And it was also something I had constructed that was this grueling, exhausting, broke me, had to come out the other side of it sort of thing. But most basically, the work is about bearing witness. Which I think has a profoundly engaged ethical quality to it. In a way that's maybe different from curiosity. You're implicated. When you are bearing witness, are you implicated in a way that's different from a moment of deep and genuine curiosity?

ALISON: So to me, curiosity doesn't have a dryness. For me, curiosity comes from a child place, from the place of wonder. When you're a kid, grownups think it's funny when a kid thinks that the faraway airplane is little — because we've learned about perspective. But why would anything not be true? Things are so weird. If you just look from a kid's perspective for a while. I have to say — when I was a kid, I promised myself not to forget what it is to be a kid. I remember how often I was misunderstood. There was no benefit of the doubt granted, like, maybe I needed to dig a hole in the neighbor's yard because I had a feeling there was buried treasure there. And I didn't mean to ruin your grass. Your grass had nothing to do with the hole I dug, you know?

So curiosity for me comes from a place that doesn't assume knowledge. It's more like a place of wonder. And witnessing other people doing something that's not familiar feels so much like what it is to be a kid. Bearing witness takes the ego out of the equation because it's not about you. Observer is an active role. Bearing witness is more like: I am holding this space alongside you. That might be the distinguishing factor.

It's a way of holding. You're really holding the energy in the room when you're bearing witness.

GEORGE: So when you think about this question of being a grownup — your mom, and the image that immediately comes to mind is that stunning Maggie Manzer Pieta, you and the two kids. From a certain distance, obviously grownup because kids. But in a more nuanced way — my God, the profound security, the structural integrity, the strength of the container that you are so obviously holding those children into.

ALISON: Okay. I've been very much aware of my own struggle against becoming a woman, back when I was a teenager. I did not want to turn 18. A lot of my experience from the time I was ten years old — which is the age my daughter is now — onward, I had this experience of men projecting onto me what they wanted to see. There was this really discordant experience between how my face and body were perceived by men.

I remember being a kid, sitting on a bus, not at all self-conscious, just sitting on a bus. And a grown man — a middle-aged man — looked at me in this way that I suddenly knew I wasn't safe. And it was like: I'm a kid. There's this moment in girlhood where grown men start telling you that you are not allowed to be free anymore, because now you're a target. That message was and is culturally appropriate. It's like what's happening now with the Me Too movement and the Epstein files — it's the closest I can get to understanding why white people are the only ones shocked by the racism happening in our country right now. Women are not surprised that men in power try to rape us. We know. We've always known.

As a kid, I felt like the best way to navigate that was just not growing up. I didn't want to step into my own power because I didn't know what that was in a culture that tells you, if you are a girl, that your powers are your looks and your ability to please people — which is such a load of shit. What happened with me was a refusal. I just refused. And I won't get into the road I walked on in order to get to the next place, but it wasn't conventional. It's something I've begun writing about in a personal way to sort of unpack, because I'm now at a place in my womanhood where I'm 47 years old. I am entering perimenopause.

Which is so amazing. Being a woman, you are just intrinsically connected to the reality of your life and death. This body that I am so grateful to live in has given birth to children and has also held a life that died within my body. And has had the ability — for your body to keep showing up for you even when you haven't always been nice to it. I'm so sorry, I'm like, hey, thanks, yo. It's really nice to start appreciating that.

What I want to get to in this is that I'm in this place of learning. The term grown up feels problematic because I see it as such a negative thing to be. I remember when we moved into our house, my partner and I were in the kitchen, and I said: I met our neighbors down the street, they have a couple of kids, they're grownups. And he was like, wait, Allie, they're the same age as us. Why are you calling people grownups? Of course they're grownups. And I'm eight months pregnant and I just handed a check to the realtor that was like every mural I ever painted, every baby I ever babysat, every bartending shift — everything I had was half the down payment of our house. And it was like, I'm a grownup.

But no. I mean, I think that in a way I'm gonna identify as a kid and an old lady forever.

GEORGE: I was just gonna ask if you were thinking about growing up as something to skip over to get to elder.

ALISON: I don't respect grownups. There, I said it. I don't. I respect elders and I respect children, but the grownup phase is not cool. It's all about trying to prove yourself in this stupid world that we ourselves built. I have no patience for it. This is so boring. Why are we talking about nothing all the time? Do you really want to talk about the weather? Is that just the common ground, or do we not know how to find other common ground?

GEORGE: My God. I'm flashing to being like 18 or 19 in college, in my shitty lunatic drunken cesspool of a dorm room, with this poster on the wall of Irish writers and a Samuel Beckett quote. He looks older than time — probably like 80, but he's just like a saddlebag with eyes. It's a wonderful picture, actually. And the quote was — I forget which piece it's from — but the line was: you know, perhaps my best years are behind me, but I wouldn't want them back, not with the fire in me now. And I remember even then, as essentially a big kid, wanting to be like, okay, I can imagine being there. And there's childhood — it's the great in-between that I don't have a fucking clue about what to do with.

ALISON: The in-between is the place where you can't know what to do with it. And that's where the uncertainty is. Because while I buck against the whole idea of being a grownup, I also do feel pretty comfortable in uncertainty. It's a place where you have to acknowledge that you're not in control — which you never are. And so that's a pretty honest place to start.

It's not the uncertainty of the middle ground that bothers me. I think I occupy divergent places all the time. So coming to center — one of my mantras has to be return to center, because it's really, really easy for me to move to extremes.

GEORGE: Divergent is a really interesting word to use there. Because it's not being in two places — there's movement to divergence, right?

ALISON: Yeah, there's movement, but it's internal movement. Because there's this acknowledgment that dichotomy is a really interesting lens — one I've seen the world through forever. But I also think it's just like everything is everything. The beauty that happens in grief, and the grief that happens in love when you haven't even lost anything. There's so much depth. I was just born as a sensitive human. And in order to navigate, I do need to feel it all.

You were talking earlier about how you received the news that you were going to become a father, and that you were surprised by it — that it was like, fuck. And you weren't in a place of intention around it, but at the same time, there are times when you can hear your intuition but you can't obey it, because you're not the only person in the fucking world. And I think we should go easy on ourselves for that. In a way, there's no such thing as relationship failure. It's just not a linear thing.

Anyway, I know what it is to have the understanding: this situation is not ideal. And I can just imagine you as such an amazing dad.

So you talked about that Maggie Manzer Pieta. She's an incredible photographer and one of my best friends. She has this way — she'll do weird shit. We're at a residency in Maryland and she has us all lay in the grass in a circle. And she says: no one's going to see this picture for another ten years, and when you look back, you'll realize you were beautiful. She does this a lot — takes the most incredible picture and shows it to you later, at the perfect time. She can capture the soul of a thing.

And so: I was born to be a mother. I always knew I wanted to be a mother. I had no idea what that would actually be — you can't know what that will be. But I'm a good mom. I really do love being a mom. But I was scared to death I would lose my entire identity in becoming a mom, which didn't happen. But I was scared it would.

GEORGE: Something you said — I think it was in an interview I read — about having painted your future life while living through the loss of your child, the miscarriage.

ALISON: I believe I said that. I don't remember the exact context, but — okay. There's nothing like a really painful experience to put focus on where you are and where you choose to be.

I got pregnant accidentally. Jaren and I had been together but we were very on and off in the beginning. And then we were together pretty solid for a year and I got pregnant. And it was like: we could do this. We could have a baby. We could buy a house. We were actually in a place in our lives where we could do this. And then the day before he left for tour — five weeks — we went in for an ultrasound and there was no heartbeat.

A few days before that, I was having a magic day. I was walking through Washington Square Park in Philadelphia and I sat on a bench under a tree and I just felt so beautiful and radiant and full of life and so connected to my body and not my body. One of those days where everyone smiled at me. I was really present and I bought myself the expensive juice at Reading Terminal Market.

And then I lost that pregnancy, and it really was a real death to me, and a very invisible loss. It happened days after I had to move out of my art studio — I had nowhere to go. I go to my studio in moments where I need to figure out everything or anything.

I was supposed to be painting a mural in the Magic Gardens. And I had Jaren drop me off there after the appointment where we found out the pregnancy was done, but my body couldn't let go. And I was there, and this little girl Dagitu came out — I had taught her before, she was a neighbor — and she brought me a snow cone. And she sat beside me and we ate the snow cone and I took a picture of us, this most sweet little person just sitting beside me.

That's what bearing witness is, right? Kids are aware of energy in a way that's unprocessed and really true. And she just, in some way, knew that I needed to sit beside a child without talking and eat a snow cone. And it busted my heart open.

And that was also the moment where I was like — Jaren left for tour the next day. And while he was away, I went to an art residency and processed and painted. A lot of what I painted involved the sky. And I knew I needed to be a mom.

So when he got back from tour, I said: I need to have a baby. And if you don't need that right now, I understand, but you have to let me go if that's the case. I can't do uncertainty in this realm anymore. I need to move in this direction. And at first he was like, wait — even with no other plan, you would end our relationship if I said no? And I said: yep. Because I knew — that was one of the moments where my intuition was like, I need to become a mother and I cannot wait. After you become pregnant, your whole chemistry changes. Your body changes. It changes your heart. You're not just yourself anymore.

So that loss was really big, but it led to the rest of my life.

Yeah, the idea of time is so weird. Isn't it weird to be in the middle years where you are no longer invincible and time is real? Like, I will die. I know that. It's just a different lens.

GEORGE: You used the word certainty in relation to your intuition. What is the texture of that experience — that way of knowing, that way of feeling a truth?

ALISON: I think it's a very animal thing. Intuition and truth — the body knows it before anything else.

During the pandemic, I began having horrible migraines. As soon as the edge of a headache came on, I would enter a fourteen-hour nausea cycle. I couldn't get out of bed. And I had little kids, and we were on lockdown and homeschooling. One day I was in this nausea cycle, just so broken, and I remember sitting on the edge of my bed and the words came to me: this is trauma. And I knew immediately that that was true. My body was yelling at me to tend to this particular issue. I knew it was true — it was a bodily knowledge, but I also needed the words. The words had to connect to the body. And I did EMDR therapy after that. It was amazing.

But it's so interesting that if you ignore the things you're called to heal — about your past, your ancestry, your family, whatever you've inherited that keeps punching you in the gut — if you don't deal with it, it doesn't go away. And it's not like you can deal with it and then it goes away. But it does transmute.

GEORGE: But it does change. But it does transmute.

ALISON: My God, and it's like — you can change the narrative. You can have power in it. You can have agency again. That's what changes. So I think the idea of time is interesting because there's the notion of immediacy when you're completely in the moment, which is all there is — forever is just one present moment after another. But then humans have this ability to look back and project forward at the same time, which can be useful. But it also gets in the way of a lot of what's currently happening.

I'm also really afraid of forgetting. Memory — I think the reason that everything I make ends up being some kind of a shrine is that there are things I want to honor while I'm here. That's just the only way I really know how to do it. I don't want things to get lost in the sauce. And most of what matters to me doesn't matter to our culture at all.

GEORGE: Say more about honor.

ALISON: Honor is — okay, so I'm not sure how to just philosophically talk about honor. But I can say that I honor Miss Gloria, who was one of those elders who came from the South with her family and shared her stories with me. It was an honor to listen to her and to be allowed to be part of her life and connect with her. The idea of honoring someone or something — it's like a form of prayer. These words get to be problematic, words like God and words like prayer. But I think that as humans, it's really important to recognize when something is holy. When something is sacred. When something feels like just this beautiful truth.

It's like trying to ask someone: I don't believe in love. What is love? I mean, I don't know how to explain it, but I know it's real. The most profound things don't have containers. It's hard to explain. But the idea of honoring things, especially things that are not visible — I think it's like an act of tending to something that so often gets trampled. I really care about the little things.

Like look at the way a kid looks at a mud puddle. What even is a puddle? It's reflective and it's dirty. It's everything. It's a whole little world. And there's nothing more captivating. And it's forbidden a little bit. Don't jump in that puddle. Which makes you want to jump in the puddle. It's like the door you're not allowed to go through.

GEORGE: As you're talking, I'm thinking about the Norris Holmes mural — Sky Woman, Eve, Alice, Miss Gloria. Women who chose, maybe, wisdom over safety. Is that the opposition — wisdom and safety?

ALISON: I think perpetual safety is — I mean, you gotta leave the womb, right? If you stay in the womb all the time, you have to grow. I feel like if you cannot change, if you don't struggle — and I also think you can't change if you're not looking outside of yourself. So it's a very unsafe thing to be connected in a world you can't control. You can't stay safe and be alive. Gearing your life around staying safe — I think that's the ego wanting to protect. Scarcity mentality.

Like, I love an adventure. If you give me a day of walking around and going to thrift stores in a place I've never been, or trying so hard to speak Spanish to people in Oaxaca but they know I'm trying — experiencing the world that's new because you're in a new place and you haven't fallen back on all your old shit. I love an adventure. And that to me is the opposite of staying safe, because you can't predict what's going to happen.

GEORGE: There's such a clear connection between the way you're describing this and the childlike quality of attention. Whether it's the stuff about psychedelics, upsetting the default mode network, being able to not filter out all of the stuff — having a qualitatively different experience of presence.

And I'm also thinking about something you said a few minutes ago around perimenopause. There's this interesting tension between the kind of agency you're talking about — this way of being in the world that's very intentional, agency not to be confused with control — and also the inexorable movement of biological time. You were talking about your deep existential apprehension about becoming a woman, a grownup, in relation to this aspect of self that has its own cadence. Multiple cadences, multiple rhythms.

ALISON: Yeah, it's a bookend. The place I struggled when I was becoming a woman — this sort of denial. And so I'm at this other door.

I met a neighbor. The other day, I was outside with a shovel just busting up ice in the street because no one could park and everyone Philly style was putting their lawn chairs in the road and the neighborhood text thread was getting a little out of control. So I was just like, whatever, I'm gonna bust up some ice. And a neighbor I had met from a distance once — but we didn't know each other — she came out. She tried to press fifteen bucks into my hand. She's an elder. An elder black woman, 70, 72 or something. And we ended up having this conversation about humans and how people treat each other and being a neighbor.

She was a cop for thirty years. And she told me this whole story about this little girl whose mom was an alcoholic. This neighbor grew up with a grandmother in the house who everyone called Big Mom. And Big Mom would take anybody in. So Big Mom let this little girl — whose mom and boyfriend were wasted all the time — this little girl ended up taking a bath and eating dinner and sleeping over. They gave her shelter in this home that became her life. And this was a little white girl.

And so this neighbor of mine, she takes my hand and looks at me with the deepest looking through my eyes into my soul kind of gaze. Her eyes were amazing. And she said: we are all the same. And I said: yeah, I know we are. And she just said: you are a powerful woman.

And I have never heard that in such a deep way in my life. And what she did for me was send me on my way. Because I am about to step through a door that's a whole new chapter — where I get to be excited about finding my power as a woman that has nothing to do with anything anyone else thinks.

There's an amazing power to getting less attention for the way you look. It's really important to know that. And the culture is not very kind to women. I'm like, dude, I'm not even 50 yet. I've got a whole new chapter of life coming my way. And that broken girl fucking saved her own life and got me here. And she did. The girl I hated and was scared of got me here. She really did it on her own, with a lot of awesome people in her corner. But I didn't have to wind up in the world the way that I am. So I can honor that broken kid. Because that's the only thing about time — all of these forces exist all at once. And if you had access to it all the time, you'd be a crazy person. But you can know that all of it is here.

Don't let people tell you what your power is. And don't let yourself think you don't have power.

I will also say that my way of engaging with men in the world has been this performative thing — like not taking myself seriously, acting like a 12-year-old boy, making dirty jokes, trying to be one of the guys in this crude way. Because it's like: you can't objectify me if I'm one of you, bitch. But the thing is, if you don't take yourself seriously, no one else will. And I am a goofball, but I am also a serious person. So I'm kind of finished with caring so much about appearances.

GEORGE: That's incredibly exciting.

I can't imagine a better, stronger, more compelling note to wrap up this phase of a conversation on. I'm so grateful to be back in touch. It's been a long fucking time and I've missed you. I have so much respect for how you think about things, how you commit to your work, all of this stuff. And it's just fucking joyful to spend time with you.

ALISON: Well, how weird is it? I've never had the experience of reconnecting with someone fifteen years later in a recorded conversation. Your process and the conversations you're pursuing are going to be so cool. I'm really thankful that you found your way to this place.

GEORGE: It's sort of foundational to the project. This is my dance with uncertainty — I don't fully know what this is yet, but there's something very real about it. I'm reconnecting with people who have been a presence in my life and made an incredible impression. And it's been a joy. We've always been real together.

ALISON: Yeah, we've always been real together. And I think that's the thing.

GEORGE: That's absolutely the thing. I'm so excited for the next chapter for you. And for this chapter. And for me.

ALISON: And for you. And I hope we never figure it out.


The Principal Uncertainty is a podcast by George Laufenberg.
Not about finding solid ground — about staying oriented in open water.
theprincipaluncertainty.com