“Levi Neill, Red Cedar, North Carolina” © 2021 59 inches tall.
Price: $495, shipping not included. All pieces hang off the wall. All work is signed, dated, with its title. I will hand deliver the work to anywhere in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. I'll just need some gas money. Outside of the area, I will ship USPS, FedEx or UPS but it'll be pricey. We'll figure it out.
"A 180 degrees from sick is still sick."
"I know the middle path is where I want to be, but I tend to fly by it at 60 mph, as I'm bouncing off the walls."
"If you're pissed off at someone and you want to be spiritual about it, you can say fuck thou instead of fuck you."
"I had a professor in graduate school who told me that I had the best self awareness of any of his students. I puffed out my chest. Then he said that with all this awareness, I had the less amount of willingness to change of anyone he knew. That deflated me."
”As a therapist, I’m willing to work with someone who has no money but has willingness. I’m willing to work with someone who has money but no willingness. But I’m not willing to work with someone who has no money and no willingness”
Levi Neill was important to me beyond words, in my first few years of sobriety in the late 1980's. He was my friend and my mentor. Many a Saturday night, after I got off work at Sierra Tucson, we would sit in his hot tub in Catalina, Arizona, under the moonlight, and I would just listen to all that he said, be him talking about shame theory and shame reduction therapeutic practices, or what his favorite films were, or what Holotropic Breathwork meant to him.
He was a very large man with a very large personality. He was far from perfect and eventually a disagreement over something small broke our friendship, but for those two or three years he was the most important man in my life. More important than my two sponsors. More important than my therapist. More important than my father. He was that big a deal.
Sadly, the last years of his life didn't go well. He moved back to Kansas to take care of his mother, but he didn't do very well there by some accounts. Levi became more and more isolated from others, and his health declined. When he died at home alone, no one found him for many days. He was sober when he died but I don't believe he was very happy at all. It's sad.
But from 1985 to 1988, he had a profound impact on my life, and many of the things he taught me I still believe today. Not all of them but many.
"There is a little bit of black and a little bit of white and a shit load of gray." Yep. I believe that.
"That's either a profoundly honest truth he just said, or the best rationalization I've ever heard." Levi said that about a priest we knew. Was funny then. Is funny now.
And lastly, when he would say he was willing to spend a little bit of money for just about any new experience: "I'd spend 50 bucks to watch a monkey fuck a football." Not something I would ever say, but it still makes me smile.
Rest in peace, Levi, and thank you for all that you did for me and for others. Wherever your soul resides, I hope you're happy there. I really do.
#levineill, #stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries