If you’re hearing Mick Jagger in your head then we’re off to a good start.
It’s been a long time since I did any kind of update on ye olde “About Me” on the interwebs. Frankly. I always feel a bit ego-centric trying to write that kind of post, but as it sets the proper scene for later discussion, here goes.
My name is Larry S. Evans II, but you may encounter me on the internet under the nickname “relik” which I have been using since the late 90s or so, when I was a forum admin on the now closed RuntimeDNA.com.
RDNA was a resource for digital 3D models and support for digital artists. By the time I became associated with them, I had been working in digital art for almost a decade. Before that, I was trained as a professional fine art painter. And before that I was painting and drawing and sculpting anyway.
I started at around 4 or 5 years old. But then so does every kid. Most of them don’t start with paintings of a Viking ship being smashed by the Midgard Serpent. I confess that it is entirely possible I saw some such thing on TV (I was very much a TV kid) but I don’t recall it. There are a lot of these odd instances in my life, which probably reinforced my penchant for magic and the occult.
I shan’t give you my birthdate, but it’s fair to say that I lived before humans had walked on the moon, and that I watched that happen. Indeed, I watched all the Apollo missions from beginning to end, and then Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz mission, and the Space Shuttle program.
It is probably not a coincidence, then, that I live in the greater Houston metroplex, home to NASA’s Mission Control, and designated “Space City USA”. So along with all that occult and magic weirdness, I am something of a mad scientist as well.
I have had the great good fortune to travel extensively and experience things that are rare and wonderful. I have done many of the things I dreamed of as a child in rural Appalchia.
I looked upon the faces of Ramesses and Lenin. I spent days roaming the Louvre and the British Museum. I crawled into the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. I stood on the battlements of the White Tower, and walked the back hallways of Henry VIII’s palace at Hampton Court. I haunted the alleyways of storied Venice. I swam among the corals and fishes of the Red Sea. I marveled at the glow of the Aurora Borealis as I flew over the pole.
I met so many people in my travels, in shops and bazaars, in cafes and pubs, in hotels and inns and airports and train stations. I delighted in how they were are different, but was constantly struck as to how we were all the same. It is this essential realization that many of my countryfolk do not have, because, sadly, they have never had this opportunity. It is not that travel just broadens the mind, it also redeems the soul.
All of us are a single species, on a very finite planet, parts of which I assure you are uninhabitable without great effort and energy. It is imperative that this species learns how to live with that planet, and with itself, because we seem hellbent on self-destruction.
I grew up in the cold war, a little too late for Duck and Cover but a little too early not to be marked by it. My childhood was imprinted with images of the Vietnam war, the Munich Olympics, and the IRA bombings, along with the persistent threat of world wide nuclear war. Our popular culture was inundated with themes of a post-apocalyptic world, almost always the result of “the bomb:, but occasionally springing from plagues or other monsters of our own creation. It seems we are collectively aware of our suicidal nature. We can find ample evidence in the films of the 1970s and 1980s. And we seem to simply morph the antagonists in light of recent history as we come forward to today.
The consequence of my personal journey across those years, is what I am calling the Sacred Life. That is, to live my own best life. to pursue what I am passionate about, and by living that, to encounter the divine within myself and others.
There is much made of ritual and ceremony. Yet all things are sacred. All actions are ritual. To embrace this elevates your daily meanderings above the mundane. It alleviates that desire to seek purpose and fulfillment because life itself is the purpose and the fulfillment.
So welcome to this, my little corner of the interwebs. I make art. I take photos, sometimes I make movies. Of late I have been learning to make jewelry, and in some respect music. I hope that you will find the content as it evolves worth visiting from time to time. I can only promise that it will be a wide variety, as I am notoriously easily bored, and jump between interests at a fairly brisk pace. Perhaps that will mean that the articles here will satisfy a broader range of appetites.
A final caveat, and that is that the opinions here are my own, and are not meant to exemplify, teach, cajole, coerce, convert, or otherwise have any impact whatsoever. That perhaps, is more egocentric than a biographical sketch, but there it is. I write what I want. You may read it as you wish, that is the only contract here. That said, if you are offended, upset, disgusted, irritated or feel in peril of your mortal soul, please feel free to go elsewhere. Comments will be monitored, and I have full and final authority regarding what is posted. I have no interest in being saved, converted, warned, or preached to, and if that is your intention, go get your own corner of the interwebs where you can hold sway. They’re fairly inexpensive and apparently plentiful.
And with that I thank you for reading, and invite you to return. I am committing to having an article of some sort at least every couple of weeks.