It's been an incredible week.
Sure, there've still been those moments when I'm aggravated and wishing for change, but then again that's just growing. A tree bends and shapes itself towards the sun, and that's what I'm trying to do.
And art - that is my sun; my source of life, that which allows me to photosynthesize and recreate myself into the person I want to become.
And this has been a successful week.
For one, I've started writing a play that I actually really love. I've been working on it before and after work, which actually has given a sense of accomplishment to my day. I'm often too exhausted to do anything at all after my nine hour shifts....but knowing that I've worked on creating a world...it's much more satisfying than then watching something on Netflix until I fall asleep.
Speaking of writing, this week I also read aloud some of my poetry. It was on a stage and everything, and I don't even want to acknowledge how long isn't been since I've stood on one. It was very assuring. My friend invited me to a Galentine's Day event, with face-painting, arts and crafts, friendship bracelets, snacks and art; a.k.a. it was dream.
There was a lot of stand up, one incredible conceptual art piece presentation revolving around Tinder and musical performance, and me. The day of I still didn't know what to read. I realized I'd forgotten a notebook with most of my writing at a friend's place. I considered reading something from this blog, but most of my posts are a tactful organization of my stream of consciousness; my poetry is different. More vulnerable.
And then I remembered something I started back in October: I have a daily planner but instead of deadlines and appointments, my agenda is a poem.
Back in high school, an incredible teacher taught us to see art through the scope of "Creator vs. Interpreter": to put it simply, to do a play I made is creator. To do Chekhov, a friend's work, or something made by literally anyone else, is interpreter.
And the goal of my planner was to hold myself accountable for doing both each day.
It's like an artist's version inhaling and exhaling.
Thus I sifted through some of my exhalations from the last four and a half months, and chose four poems which I read in three chunks and called it Love in Three Parts. Don't worry, they're at the bottom of this post.
And loves, it was incredible. I was in a room full of strangers with the exception of the one friend who invited me. And I get insecure in big groups. I know those of you who know me don't believe this, but I do; especially when they all know one another. It's not noticeable to them, but part of me retreats. So to go from that, to someone speaking my truths, I felt the room change. The way they saw me, the way they saw themselves; like the heat coming on after the streak of a cold breeze.
It was a moment I don't think I will forget.
And to seal off the powerful week, last night I saw my friend's production. He directed an original play called Subverted, which was so powerful and appropriate that it was haunting. It's the type of show I want high-schoolers dragged to, not realizing how much this will shape the person they decide to become. I heard the audience struggle to suppress their "mmm"s of empathy as we collectively fought tears. It was exemplary of what theatre is meant to be, and the power that art has to change the world for the better.
I am inspired. I am motivated for the first time in awhile, feeling finally that art isn't taking a backseat to survival (and seeing as I make art to survive, it's been a vicious cycle when it's not at my forefront). It's reviving to know that my day has consequences, that I'm not just repeating the same things over and over for paycheck...that I'm part of helping the world grow. It means there is light again. The sun was obstructed and I was withering.
Now I must regain my strength, and blossom.
How hard it is to stay warm; that no matter how many years I’ve accumulated on the east coast, that I still never seem to have a warm enough coat; how sad and foreign the leafless trees look as the cold rolls in…
And I’d forgotten how hard it is emotionally.
How much shorter life feels when you only have a few hours of sunshine and you spend them all inside at work.
How much more difficult it is to adventure to a favorite place, to explore somewhere new, to see friends at all, or to make art or time for any of the things that make you smile when all of a sudden you’re tired at 8pm and you barely have the energy to do it all again the next morning.
I’d forgotten cold the nights are and how much more noticeably lonely without someone snuggled at your side; how your heart loses warmth in the winter, too.
The cold feels endless; life feels less.
It’s a reminder that I’m getting older, that I’m spending most of my life working just to get by. How badly I want to have more sun in my life and how out of my control that really is. Warmth becomes more a dream than a memory.
Winter is what I’d forgotten, and all I can remember.
And I know that Spring will arrive, and with it comes hope: new leaves, new habits, new appreciation for the little bursts of warmth and joy; but for now,
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.”
