The One White Crow That Proves Not All Crows Are Black

Goodbye, Dan Hillier | Making meaning and looking for answers with art

Feb 20, 2024

Shivering, but also sweating, bundled tight under two robes and a down blanket, sunk into the Lisette-shaped pillow puddle that’s held me all week, I’m watching Neon’s silver hair move in and out of a band of sunlight while he makes me coffee. He flew home late last night and is now recounting the finer cinematic points of John Wick 2 and John Wick 3.

I feel tears suddenly riptide through my body.

It is a miracle to love and be loved this much and the world is such a heartbreak and being sick is exhausting. I’m glad he’s home.

Alone & thwarted this week by another round of Covid, I missed the Girls Rock retreat I’ve been planning for the last four months— which felt like missing my own slumber party. Drained and disappointed by it all, I spent a lot of time in my notebook just letting it fall onto the page.

My relationship to illness changed dramatically after surviving my 2012 cancer diagnosis. My relationship to my creative practice changed dramatically, too.

Remission meant relief, but has never meant relaxing in quite the same way. Any sense of certainty, let alone control, left me then. A headache is never a headache again. An ache, a pain, a freckle— normal ways the body behaves— are forever suspect with my health care team. “Because of your health history” medical escalation accompanies every malady, “just to be sure”.

Getting the flu really shouldn’t overwhelm the nervous system and send a person directly into the existential bardo realms, grasping for answers about death and consciousness, but… because of my history…

While my doctors throw the book at every sniffle on my behalf (for which I am deeply grateful), I look for my own answers with the tools I have— namely, my creative practice. Had I been an athlete, I might have turned to ultra-marathoning to work through the discomfort of living in the Mystery. Maybe if I was an investment banker or Navy SEAL or mall cop or whatever I would do it differently. There are so many ways a person can confront their own mortality.

My way is art.

I learned this week from a touching tribute by

RAJ KAUR

that the world lost artist Dan Hillier to what sounded like a fast and fierce dance with cancer. Six months. One day he’s posting flash sales on Instagram and then suddenly someone he must’ve loved and trusted has posted a final message to his several hundred thousand admirers. Penned from hospice… “I have life-ending cancer, which has spread throughout my body.”

I didn’t know Dan, but I loved his art & I suspect we are connected through any number of threads— as humans whose search for meaning and peace has delivered them to both psychedelics and the Dharma, as artists who use their work to describe the ineffable, to grasp at the noetic…

Researching his life & work, I find this 2020 article and notice he’s wearing a shirt reading “In the end, I want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.”— this from

Andrea Gibson

, another brilliant light writing poetry through their own journey with cancer and love and the Mystery.

Dan’s final message chokes me up— he continues:

“I truly don’t know what to say, other than I wish to find a way to live through this and emerge on the other side.”

I think…

When you know your life is ending, what does it mean to find your way through? To emerge on the other side?

I think of the bardo realms again….

I think of the way we cracked the window when cancer took my father so his spirit could find its way out…

I think of the first dream I had of him afterward— exceptionally vivid, so alive— how he made sure I was watching while he sped his motorcycle along the edge of the caldera at Crater Lake and took his hands off the handlebars— ARE YOU WATCHING? DO YOU GET IT?? NO HANDS!! HAHA!!!!!!!

I feel with my whole body how it changed my life, a couple years later, awake and lucid, to suddenly be talking to his ghost…how I sobbed and urgently told him I forgave him, how I loved him…I thanked him again and again and again for showing me that such an unbelievable connection across the veil was possible…

My dad was a visionary artist & a poet, too.

Rest easy, Dan. I trust you’re finding your way through to the other side.

In the interesting way that life folds meaning onto meaning, USPS knocked at the door while I scribbled these thoughts onto the pages of my notebook from my little Covid nest. There was a surprisingly heavy box…from…Robert Bigelow…?

I had forgotten Neon mentioning this caper, but he had somehow scored one of these boxed sets for free from Jeffrey Mischlove— Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies Proof of Survival of Human Consciousness Beyond Permanent Bodily Death, Winning Essays 2023.

I flip open Volume One of this impressively gilded tome to a title that reads:

SOME WHITE CROWS1 — An After-Death Communication Changed My Life

…now, that’s poetry.

My own White Crow…

In some ways, everything I’ve written or drawn or recorded or filmed in the last 7 years has been a response to that life-changing moment with my dad’s spirit.

I spoke to no one else in my life about it for almost a year while Neon and I quietly interrogated this new reality we found ourselves in— a reality where you can be catching up with your partner after a business trip in one moment, and in the next you’re sobbing urgently into your deceased father’s chest.

But, we were actually making an audio recording the moment it happened…

A seed can fall on all sorts of soil. Again— not an investment banker— I’m an artist preoccupied with artist things. This is not to say investment bankers and Navy SEALs can’t also be artists! Every artist I know has had to do other things to make a living (my own list including drywall finisher, resort manager, healthcare assistant, sushi waitress…)— but I mean that I’ve devoted my life to making films and playing with sound and writing poetry and drawing flowers in notebooks. That’s the primary soil my experiences fall on. And I feel both a unique opportunity and an obligation to use my art to process these things because of that…

When Lu Valena launched Bait/Switch — an exquisite corpse of a publication project — I saw my first opportunity to plant this extraordinary seed of experience into my public-facing art. Above is the experimental short I made using a portion of that audio recording… You can read my interview with Lu here.

Because I’ve been moving quite slowly with the Cov’, this email is coming to you several days late.

I have no pithy wrap-up or specific creative prompts for you today (this is the most coherent string of thoughts I’ve had in over a week!), but if you’ve had your own life-changing experience with cancer or Covid or crows-of-another-color and have been trying to find someone who’s been there to share your story with, I’m here. You can reply to these emails or contact me here any time— really. I’m always incredibly honored to hear about these experiences.

And if you’d like to use drawing and writing to explore the topic of death amongst a supportive group of visionary artists, you can join me for free in the next Art of Dying Creative Death Cafe: Wednesday March 20th, 2024. 3pm Central. Online— Go to our host here and click “Jump on the Vision Train” to be taken to the Zoom call.

[You don’t need to identify as “an artist” to join these sessions— mall cops, investment bankers, Navy SEALs, endurance athletes, doctors, construction workers, car salesmen all welcome. In fact, I’m especially interested to hear your points of view…]

And if you’re moved & so able, donations to Dan Hillier’s chosen charity Arts Emergency can be made through the link on his Instagram page.

In solidarity with your humanness, my pen in hand— I love you all!

Treat yourselves gently & remember to hold those around you in great care— You never know whose immune system is struggling to make it through winter, whose heart is struggling to make it through grief, whose spirit is trying to make it through to the other side…