This is my story, my myth, my truth and the story goes that this is also your myth, your story, and your truth. This is the story of Indra and how he turned into me. This is the story of a beach and of the ocean. This is a story of shells that come home and the lovers that do not. The story of how twenty authors came to Hawaii without ever leaving home. This is the story of Pele and Kali and how they became one, within a girl from eastern Washington. This is interconnectedness, auto-bio-mytho-poises, individuation, reincarnation, alchemy, education and truth.I set out on this project to answer the question “What is art? Why do we make it? And how does that shape our consciousness and in turn shape our culture?” I started with my friends in casual conversation, dropping subtle questions in anywhere I could fit. Through these chats with friends I formulated a series of 6 questions ranging from thoughts on cultural identity to philosophical reasons for the creation of art. Through these formal, video recorded interviews I started to see an overwhelming pattern of thought; Art IS language. No matter how it was stated or reworded, the answers where all the same. Art is the way we communicate the abstract, the fleeting, the unspeakable. From the dancing women of Alice Walker’s Over Coming Speechlessness, to the deity worshiping art-surrounding Pele, to the intricate details of these seashells, art is the way we and all other creatures express what cannot be express.The first part seemed to be so universally clear, art is a language and we create to communicate. The second half, the bit surrounding consciousness, that was a bit harder to decipher. I listened to many different artists speak at the Alcheyemez Visionary Arts and Consciousness Conference, all of them discussing what the connections of art and consciousness really consists of. Speakers like, Jamie Janover claimed ancient, sacred geometry is the bridge between art and consciousness while the day before Romio Shrestha stated he was the seventeenth reincarnation of the master Tibetan Thangka painter Arniko and that was where his art came from. Artists like Chris Dyer feel that connection through skate culture turned visionary in contrast to head promoter of the festival Rio Gordon whose connection comes through his fellow artist. I danced for three days with the president of the Maui Dance Advocates, Anthony Simmons, who said that dancing just comes from within, a feeling that is pulled out with music. I read myths and stories about the authors of myths, like The Heart Eater a Sri Lankan story about a Genie that eats the hearts of the villagers to gain power. The author says that this story came from his grandmother just before he was kidnapped to become a child soldier, making ancestry and memory the root of his conscious connection to art. I spoke with the people that were kind enough to house me, like Maverick Carvalho who sang the Goddess into a the “Genius Waitress”, calling upon the love of and for women as his passion to create. I built a sculpture in the yard of a friend to explore why I create and where it comes from, finding that my creation comes from the deep within the earth and myself. From this information and the words of great authors such as, David Loy, who spoke to me like a Buddha of the 21^st century, telling me to connect myself to everything and become nothing, to the myths of the pantheon of Hawaiian Goddess and Gods, I realized they were all saying the same thing. They were all saying everything and nothing; the fact that they could all express any answer to my questions is the answer. We are all connected through words and when words fail we get creative, we move, we dance, we draw, we sing, we play, we all find a way to express the same idea; we are one.Not just in the way that we are all made up of protons and electrons that are popping in and out of existence, but that we are all part of the same kind of conscious reality. People tried to explain why we create or how we create and at the same time were creating, just as I am now, trying to pull together the reasons for doing something we can’t truly explain. The connection between consciousness and art I asked, well, there is no connection, it is connection. Art is the expression of consciousness, which is the expression of other people’s art. For example, language is the greatest form of art and it holds the greatest influence on our consciousness. To express that consciousness, we create art, which other people are then influenced by and decide to make more art to try to explain the connection. I have been shaped by the art that surrounds me and the culture that art is trying to express, therefore the need to express something intangible in an intangible way. Something needs to be created right at that moment through a form that each of us honed to use. Some of us tell stories, some paint and draw, some build houses, some knit tiny sweaters for their dogs. The conclusion that I have come to is that, no matter how you put it, humans create to communicate, we communicate to express that we are the same and we are conscious to be able to see the connection. The art we create is a way to express to each other the same idea, to express the collective consciousness in a way that denotes more than one form of language at a time. It takes multiply layers to express the unyielding thoughts of our own conscious mind but add it that of the collective conscious and humans need much more than words to try and communicate that kind of information.