fear

Intermission for a Word from the Editor

If this blog seems like it is in an odd phase, it might be. In 2022, I fell into a pattern of writing drafts and never publishing them. And for the past several months, I’ve been resurrecting those. It’s strange and uncomfortable to dig up these past pieces. And there were so many drafts of the same posts. I had a writer’s block of sorts, yet was still writing all sorts of things. Things that went in totally different stylistic directions, at times. I didn’t feel so good about the writing at the time, for reasons that didn’t feel like good reasons. Or maybe I just didn’t feel good about publishing them. For some of these pieces I didn’t know where, or if, they fit in. Or I felt that my sense of timing was off. Or I was just in a weird phase personally. Maybe a combination of all of that. In short, I did not feel great about what I was doing – but I was doing it anyway. I was simply not sharing it.

I am used to managing posts in mostly real-time, as it were – as events are happening and the writing is fresh. Right now it’s a real mix of past and present. And then tying it all together. The result of this production feels confused, if only to myself. I will sort it out, but it may not quite add up for a while. I am doing this because I want to practice allowing things to be what they are. For now. I have had to tell myself before, to consciously be in a state of allowing. Not only with craft, but also in life. I enjoy breaking out of my patterns. I enjoy patterns and cohesion; I also enjoy blowing it all up creatively. Unattached to what came before. Actively detaching. I like a good challenge. I do not always want to visit the same places I have been, and for better or worse it shows. Craft can be an adventure. An experiment. The rest of my life is fairly routine. Craft is the escape, the dream, freedom.

I could’ve just let those old pieces go. But I never intended to hold them back. So I will just keep adding in this random assortment; this chocolate box of different stuff. The habit of hiding is one I’ve been breaking for years.

Mystery is a lost art. I wanted it bring back, but I can sometimes do it too well.

What is Our Power? – Notes from a time of writing trash #3

A better world isn’t always created by taking the safest journey. Or the more agreeable journey. So why keep myself restricted, protected, enshrouded as an artist, even as a person?

In a truly better world for ourselves- a freer world we’d want to be in – a world where we can see opportunity and we actually take it – where we embrace the fullest expression of ourselves – we’re even more alive. This world already exists (especially here in this place). Whether we live that truth or not. So, why not?

There’s the risk of course. And the fear. But why are the risk and the fear really so bad? Objectively, they aren’t. I could come up with some excuses, and also with legitimate reasons, for allowing the fear to halt this whole process. But are those good enough for me today? And what if we choose to simply ignore all of that? Even fully disidentify with it? We could. Separate the fear from ourselves, objectify it, look upon it with a bird’s eye view, own it rather than allowing it to own us. And so transforming the sense of risk. Can true freedom even happen, without risk? There needs to be some baseline of stability, a foundation from which to build. Yet how could we feel optimally alive – so alive, without the contrast of a prior fall, or at least the prospect of peril? As we have earned this aliveness precisely by conquering fear. Which is only the fear we inherited – others’ fear! Not even ours to begin with. So, we can begin to give that back.

I speak from my own “successes” and also my “failures,” because I want to be proud of them both the same, because they have fed one another, and because the total fullness of life is upon us for the taking. And I have been the type of creator to leap off of metaphorical cliffs. I am no stranger to that type of risk, the experiment. At times, even fully allowed for the judgement of certain peers who would rather we corral and contain ourselves into one coherent message, absent any sign of a multifaceted complexity. Yet, all this without an underlying willingness to get past myself and honor all of it, and be truly free. But that closet of potentials is full now, so full. Why? I hardly want to know because that feels like a detour — on a day-to-day basis I just want to do.

Do for today, like yesterday and all this other stuff doesn’t even exist. It’s survival. Right? Do my job in the straight and narrow, linear professional world, and the artist in that moment doesn’t exist. Be the romantic in one project, a punk in the next, and the twain never meet. But why can’t I embrace the whole?

Why compartmentalize all of this incredible existence? Why live for poetry, and then pretend to be a five-paragraph essay? What do I feel I need to represent, that would disallow the artist? Do I think that I’ll die and life will be over if I dare to take on all that I could possibly give? It’s some type of irrationality, a purgatorial prison. But it absolutely will be temporary and I am going to kill it off. I am going to kill this character, this persona who won’t let me have all that I am destined to be. If I can not do it, bring these ideas to light, then who else can? They are out there, and the ideas may not wait for me. And the others like me too, afraid to the point of paralysis? They are out there also, I know. We’re never the only one. Right? So, what are we doing?

What is going on today that makes some of us who have so much to say, want to hide? Like this part is ok but this part is not. Elevate this, but disown that. It doesn’t matter. Forget all of that. All the dumb stuff that there is, out there, and what are we worried about? Are we afraid to look stupid? To disappoint? Any stupider and more disappointing than the stupidest most disappointing junk that is already happening all around us? What do we imagine we will lose? How can that seem so much more than, what we will certainly gain? Who is going to punish us? But then, who will reward us? To those who would leave us just for having an imagination, just for having the daring – are they even good enough for us? Perhaps not. That has got to be okay. Are we here on this planet just only for them? Are we? Our imagination is our power. This manifests our best possible world. There are more like me out there. We have our day jobs. We have our lives. We keep our act together. Our… act. But deep inside we know we can do something else too, perhaps something we are even better at.

Why limit ourselves? What if, creatively, we had no limits? What would we do? What if we woke up today and we had a brand new life, and we started over from scratch? Who would we allow ourselves to become?

July 6, 2022