I’m going to start sharing some personal entries that I first write in my diary. I think I have a way of explaining things to myself that I hope will cushion others in their thoughts on existence as well. Most of my writing stems from this place of echolocation, and I want to share the way that looks.
6 May 2024, Monday 7:47 am
I don’t have pointed ambition. I have day ambition. My drive comes from wanting to do all these little acts so I can be in the sweet zone of feeling - I won’t even cap it with feeling good, I’m just in the business of feeling. My ambition is for stringing the days together with story - my own, the week’s, the month’s, the moon’s, the seasons’. Tying it all together so I know where I am in space & time. Daily location.
I’m not totally sure where this drive and need comes from, but it feels like it’s been carried through with my soul through the lives it has occupied. Or maybe it feels like because of past lives it is integral my soul does this now, it’s survival, purposeful for me to capture a moment in time almost everyday. And maybe my past life is just lives I’ve lived and shed already through this body, this existence.
When I think of “my life” in an ordered way - this happened, then that happened - it feels small. Un-ecompassing of the worlds of emotion and underlying dynamics that were afoot in every instance of life. This split feeling of seeing the external, understanding it sometimes, while having such a visceral body experiencing its own internal reactions and weather patterns simultaneous to this outside world. For me, I’ve always been able to pick up or feel without knowing the undercurrents of dynamics at play, the motives for behavior, the intense masking of hurt and messy emotions that we all do. I’ve always had a split perception. It’s not always what it seems on the surface. That notion is how I can understand the way my body senses this undercurrent atmosphere, and also it’s comforting to take things as they are. It’s not always that deep, it’s not always meant to be analyzed. Things on the surface are just as beautiful and taking things, people, situations for what they are presenting makes life more simple. I just can’t deny that my body has to digest a lot of what is under the surface as well.
This digesting is also location for me. My connection to the split realm, the sweet zone of both this reality and the portals that smell, memories, stories and sounds take me to, allows me to see and be apart of many worlds happening at the same time. And that is survival. Refueling in my escape worlds so I may energize this current world.
I can do the same daily acts for millennia it seems. When I write it feels like I’m connecting to that thread of remembrance all the way back to all the way forward. And sometimes it feels like my only way forward.
I don’t know what I want to be yet, and I know nothing really falls into your lap randomly. It’s happenstance, it’s stumbling towards. And in the stumbling you remain open or closed.
I think it would be helpful, at least “commercially”, if I did know what I wanted to do, what kind of an artist I wanted to be. There are some known routes, yet each & all still uniquely individual as is every human life, a set of circumstances, situations, stumblings.
But I value this - mornings, free time, feeling. A container to be lost in play in. Which is why I can’t see past week to week & only three months out at a time. I want appointments that spark more creativeness and ways to do so in the future, but I don’t have a big vision. My vision is to create enough space and time each month, each season, so I’m not working so hard that I can’t feel, so that I can catch what it feels like to be alive on this day, in the next day. My vision, though still ambiguous, is to find work that will align with my own rhythms and movements. I want a creative reason to be some place. I have the bones for what I need yet no vision for the what I will do yet.
While I’m here, potted, I want to nest with the house spirits and tend to the animal spirits and coax the land spirits to breathe with me. These are my portals.
I don’t often feel left out when I’m present with all that’s around me. And I hope my next chapter is imbued with some nomadism. Traveling with rhythms and reasons that take me to places and people that feel like home. Places that plenish my spirit. For now, I’m here, figuring out my vision. Finding relationships with those who can help me craft who I want to be. How I want to be doing me? What it is I want to be doing most of the time? How I can keep stumbling into happenstance?
