To Be An Artist and to Be Alive

I had to leave work today because I realized I was doubled over in pain.  And normally I’d feel guilty for leaving my team or worried as to why I felt so ill… Or perhaps simply put on some Netflix and vanish for a bit.

But no.

Today I am grateful.

Today I am holding tightly to the coattails of creativity, trying to stretch out my thoughts towards inspiration; octopus arms reaching anywhere and everywhere for a single morsel of prey.

Only I’m not hunting to kill, I’m hunting to create.

I’m searching for a crumb of thought, a thread of an idea that maybe has a pearl strung onto it somewhere down the line.

I am stretching my mind in as many directions as far as it can go, before I lose the creative strength to keep reaching.

So much of life is scheduled.  Is spent waiting for times to exist; breaks in which to realize that we are alive.  To live in that bright clarity, the blue skies of assurance and reflection conceiving one moment in time where all of your past and your present compress into one thought.  Where we can stand upon only one stone and say “wow.  This is me.  As I am now, as I am here.  No regrets or worries play any real role in who I am; all that is true is That.  I.  Am.”

So rarely do we get these moments to genuinely discover our own existence.

And I am now.

So I try to discover why....What have I done that has allowed me to feel this free.  To be, to live, to create.  It’s like there’s an urgency, like needing to pee, that until I can have my computer in front of me, my mind managing to puppet my hands as quickly as it develops each individual word of the sentence, like forming one step at a time up a staircase with no yet decided direction….that is what I must do.

I think my dream is to be in a space where I can say “excuse me for a moment” and go-do.

Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic talks about inspiration as something to respect.  If we flake on it, put it off, tell it now’s not really the best time, to come back whens something more important isn’t occurring….it’s never going to return.

All I want is the freedom to create when inspiration comes to visit.

I was listening to Pete Holme's podcast with Reggie Watts, talking about the need to seize those “micro-moments,” those “windows of opportunity” when you think of a question, a little risk, inviting someone over, asking a friend for a truth, talking to a stranger, going somewhere new and alluring….all of these thoughts have little voices whispering to us…what if we raise their volume and choose to follow their advice?  

That is risk.  That is adventure.  That is opening yourself up to the world tentatively wondering whether to show you its magic.

That is the crumb trying to decide whether to be found.

The seed considering whether to let you grow…this is the beginning.

So what is new.

I have new people and even that is in constant motion, like landmarks to hold onto when crawling through a storm, like a moving subway car.  I grip onto someone there and beautiful and perfect, helping me found my ground, and then the Universe shifts, and I am stumbling again, no longer able to hold onto them for support.

I am reminded of the tea leaves I read for myself a few weeks ago.

Moments of suspension preceded and deceded by the constantly shifting winds.

And so I have them.  A new system of those to fall onto, to lean into the worlds of those so unique and rare that I can’t help but be sad to lose my balance from them.

But that is my desire for control.

That is my not trusting that where I fall next is where I need to be, and not trusting that maybe I’ll fall back onto this same space, and I’ll  be able to appreciate her more after our journey apart.

I suppose these landmarks aren’t stable themselves.  We really are just a sea of people all falling and catching ourselves on different strangers….well, only if we have the courage not to form a landmass of unchanging stagnancy, latching onto a group in hopes that nothing will never change, those in the cave who can’t see the light, and thus never learning what else there is to be explored.

I am trying to love the momentum.  I hate loss…all that I want is to love love love those that I love…and to make art and go do.

But maybe I need to voyage to get to this space.

If I hadn’t feared losing a bouy, I wouldn’t have chosen to spend time with new friends.  I saw a storm headed towards me in the east and so I set my sails west.

And had that storm never existed, and never would’ve found the coattail I am gripping onto that has lead me here.

If I hadn’t been too frustrated at being saddened that I couldn’t endure music, I wouldn’t have found a podcast, which referenced another, which had that interview with Reggie Watts, the master of organically moving always.  If the winds blew my sails to my end destination, I wouldn’t have spent time with the friend that lead me to rediscover who he is...nor the friend's friend who validated the podcast.  Nor would I have put it on to help endure my physical pain on my subway ride home from work.

This creation would not exist.

And it is infinitely more valuable than arriving now to where I want to someday be.

By not seeing the foglights taking me home, I had to journey somewhere else and collect the gems that now have light shining through them, casting the newest image of the artist and person I want to be. 

I am creating these words because I couldn’t receive what I wanted to hold.  Empty hands, an empty heart being teased, told to wait while fearing no return...that, is what’s allowed me to grip more tightly onto where I need to be.

And like a kite with a long tail, the wind will blow me off course.  The back of the bus is bumpier and shifts you places you didn’t expect.  And that kite tail collects wind-bound strands of DNA, is caressed by leaves it otherwise would never have met the beauty of - sometimes the ambiguous momentum is where the real journey lies.

In music it’s a chord progression that doesn’t quite finish when you wanted and instead takes a bridge to another land, which allows you to feel the final chord from a different perspective.

And it's not about appreciating the stability when it’s found….it’s realizing that the journey you’d hoped for all along is the one that is of the most tumultuous, most terrifying and sometimes painful waves, that cause you to realize “holy shit I am so alive.”