Homeless and need help with winter move to AZ

Toward winter's fire
And mountain study I'm bound.
Graced landscapes unfold.
         September 2020
         [original version, Nov 2017]

Thank you for your interest in financially supporting Twin Dragon Studio and Landscape! My name is Milo Mietzner, and I’m homeless but adequately sheltered. I have been self-employed as a landscape artist for over five years.  What do I do, exactly? Well, when the weather is favorable, I'm a dirt priest reimagining and rearranging the earth and its bones, a curator/designer of living sculptures I prune in late winter, a poet painting 4-dimensional fractal spaces you can walk through or sit to sip tea and listen to birds and falling water.


I'm a borrower of stones and objects that I mix together in delightful or moving ways. A practitioner of the arts of bonsai and penjing, its Chinese ancestor, and specialize in miniature tray landscapes. Sometimes stones and objects find me, but they're not all for me; I met a client once and halfway though the meeting I revealed a boulder among the rubble in the back of the truck that I wasn't sure why I bought. I showed another client the sketch of a bench I wanted to build, and they gasped and ran to get the little bench made of construction paper during a ‘manifesting dreams’ workshop...I’m a good witch, honest. I try to use my powers only for good!

I'm a digital artist mining original photography to photoshop into miniature landscapes and other fancies. A miner of emotions and whimsy, I mostly write haiku these days, but have the other half of a memoir to write. I’ve aged! Weathered? When I combined photos and haiku earlier this year, a bit of magic happened, but that is another story for later. So, when I was told that I have mountains in my heart by a landscape architect from Changsha, China, who stayed in a garden I built for his hosts, I understood and was honored. Still am. I was later hired as the Artistic Consultant for phase one of the Chinese garden being built in Lake Phalen Regional Park. I feel blessed and don't take it for granted. Looking forward to the next phase!




Winter 2020

The Covid era has hit some harder than others, especially the self-employed who don't qualify for unemployment benefits. I was already struggling last winter before the pandemic with a slowdown in the scenic set world of commercial photography. (I'm a designer/builder of sets, exhibits, and furniture, too. While we're at it, I'm also an environmental educator, visual artist, drummer/percussionist, storyteller, professional dancer (Dan di Monium), and I can carry a tune). But kindly, please don't call me a Renaissance Man. If anything fits me better, it’s the notion of literati, a Taoist artist/scholar of imperial/medieval  China. And I’m non-binary. 


A month ago I sorted all my materials, mostly wood and stone, and became energized all over again at the potential art pieces of various types waiting for me to really start living up to the other part of my company name and business goal, studio. I made winter arrangements with a friend to re-inhabit and rehabilitate her first home and landscaping sitting personless in Bisbee, Arizona. Which is great because I’m homeless! Sheltered, but not tethered, and hardly by choice.
 
Fear not, it was my choice not to renew my lease because I knew I would not have enough money to make it here alone (my roommate and familiar, Stewart, has no thumbs to pitch in much). My truck broke down for good in August and then my bicycle on Labor Day when I crashed it and bruised some ribs. I rested and didn't work for almost three weeks, which put me even more behind schedule with the two heavy lifting projects I had left that weren't cancelled this year. I just finished my season on Wednesday, getting everything done that needed to be done before the deep freeze. Gracious clients gave me advances to live on while I recuperated. I owed them.
 

I almost broke even this season and have about $150 left on my Venmo MasterCard. But of course I have bills due now, so I’m hardly fooling anyone, including myself! I don’t have a ‘job’ to jump into this winter as a subcontractor as I usually do, but I have a wealth of art just waiting for me to have the time and energy to lose myself in – sculpture, digital and visual art, silk scrolls with my digital art on them, carved bases for scholar stones and other types of viewing stones, and writing. I have a place to go, a little study in the low mountains where an old copper town is still morphing into an artistic and free-spirited small town and stop along the highway. I’ve daydreamed about seeing the Milky Way every winter night again.
 
What’s next, Bottomline?
 
I need help to get to Bisbee, Arizona, by the end of November. I now have an older sedan (thanks to Mx. and Mr. ;) that will get Stewart and me and our prized possessions and other things possessing us to the desert.
 
I need money for basic living, including 3-4 months of utilities, including phone and Wifi, startup costs/fees, HVAC specialist visit, electrician, etc., $$$$$. I have SNAP benefits here in Minnesota but will need to see what the State of Arizona can do to help me. I know that it doesn't last me the whole month here $$. I’ve worn out everything but my dancing, costume, and stepping out items, so I will need to go shopping for casual shoes and work boots and clothes $$$. I definitely need cowboy boots for wandering the rattlin’ desert and backyards, and you know I’ll rock them! I need a new weatherproof shell and/or raincoat $. I need a printer, a few new tools, basic used digital camera and lighting with a few stands, and funds for software subscriptions $$$$. I could use a newer, uncracked iPhone $$$, but I can live with my 2016 refurbished MacBook Pro, but won’t refuse a newer one!

 I’ll be back to Minnesota for my pruning season in March. I hope to make and sell things while I’m gone, but some goals of mine are to have more to sell, including on my currently inactive Etsy site, to take more commissions, and have a post-Covid solo show of my diverse artwork, including silk scrolls, miniature planted landscapes, and handmade furniture (some NFS).


Why Arizona?
 
First off, if the place is fun and funky, why not?! Before my 30s I moved with the seasons, teaching about and exploring the local geology and ecology wherever I went – Lake District in England, Hawai’i, exotic places like northern Wisconsin. The universe, nature, is the first teacher, and I haven’t learned the desert or the southern Rockies. I’ve been told I have mountains in my heart, but I haven’t yet lived in the heart of the mountains. I’d treasure that opportunity and can emulate them bones in my work firsthand.

Bisbee offers a friend’s cute old miner’s shack for me to live in for the cost of utilities. It gives me the opportunity to keep doing what I enjoy doing during the winter, working outside in nature, even if I’m transforming it into something else altogether. (Elemental alchemy and a spiritual place-making of sorts; I now realize that’s the actual job I signed up for when I apprenticed over a decade ago.) And it’s pruning season for most woody plant material. There’s a large workshed in the backyard. Local art dealers/galleries might sell on commission. I don't know. At least there will be sunshine and trails to walk. Winters are very tough for me, and this one looked so bleak that I decided to give it a go alone with Stewart in a strange, small border town with a loose connection and intro to the place.
 
Why Arizona? Besides not being St. Paul in winter again (half of my almost 50 of them), it also might be in the stars, or cards. The second half of my memoir tells more of the spiritual and artistic side of my journey, especially filling in gaps that the first half of the memoir didn’t mention, a bit to my own surprise. [To Keep from Dying is an unpublished manuscript that you can check out from the Hamline University Library. It’s a good read – unconventional, a bit pedantic but innocent, and quite clueless at times! I can’t wait to subvert and post-modern the hell out of that text with this next half].
 


Back to stars and cards. I’ve studied the Tao for three decades now and learned a few years ago how to use the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, an ancient divination tool. I tossed three pennies six times and looked up what I got, which hexagram(s). My reading not only pointed to Bisbee being a favorable move with auspicious timing if I persevere, it also related directly to the piece of art I was working on. I’m developing 8 of the 64 hexagrams as prototypes of a set of cards featuring original photography and a haiku related to the topic of the hexagram. I hope to publish a whole set but want a solid start to show a publisher.
 
So, I tossed the coins and got wind-over-water (59) Dispersion (Spreading waters), with a secondary hexagram of wind-over-lake (61) Sincere to the Core, both appropriate and instructive to my question. The card I was working on in Photoshop, lake-over-wind (28) Greatly Surpassing, was the inverse hexagram to my reading. For the card, I also considering water-over-wind (48) The Well. However, the poem I had already written to go with the image fit well with (28), but both fit my situation now. But that is another story. If you understood a portion of that, good for you. The main point is this highly improbable coincidence is hardly a coincidence, probably!
 

Conclusion / Denouement
 
As if I didn’t already have enough ventures to keep me occupied, I also want to prepare a proposal for an interpretive set of regional exhibits, media, and in-person talks and guided hikes of the glacial history of the metro area. I have made initial contacts but need to do more research and develop one or two site profiles with illustrations of exemplary locations, such as Swede Hollow, Lake Phalen Regional Park, and/or one of the Maplewood nature centers to seek partners and funding. Three years ago I casually then earnestly studied online maps of the bedrock and surface geology and soils. I drove and hiked much of the east metro to understand how the Grantburg sublobe stalled and cracked over the Twin Cities as the bulk sheared away toward Des Moines. I have been envisioning the southwestern margin of that stagnant mass melting over decades, or even hundreds of years, creating the surface landscape and land use patterns we see today. I want to show others how to read the land backwards and forwards in time like I can. So, I may find myself imagining and sketching a dying glacier in the desert…


Thank you so much for financially supporting my efforts to again be able to support myself and continue bringing some beauty and a bit of mystery to the world! I’m certainly bemused by it all and often just along for the ride! On good days, I am able to get out of the way and get some magical work done. I once explained it to myself in a vision as ‘holding onto the tails of twin dragons chasing celestial pearls,’ but that too is another story I want to tell. Shopping for an agent/publisher for the memoir, Tales of a Hesitant Taoist, is on the task list.
Any takers?!