My ski vest has buttons like convenience store mirrors and they help me see
That everything in this room right now is a part of me
The only thing to remember, every moment you can, is that you have a choice before you. Everything you sense—see, hear, smell, taste, feel—is a part of you. You’ll have an emotional reaction, however slight, to anything you encounter, and these reactions tell you everything you need to know about becoming the person you are meant to become. You need only pay close attention and prepare to be brave.
I was standing in a shower this morning at 5 am, lit by streetlamp-through-4-inch-thick-glass bricks. In the dim, I saw before me that the 6-inch midnight blue tiles of the shower wall spanned no farther than the bulk of my human senses: my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears all could all fit, diagonally, within the six-inch squares before me. And I remembered that I know nothing, but I couldn’t hold myself responsible for knowing nothing, couldn’t blame myself for being so utterly clueless, because the blunt tools given me for understanding this world could fit into an unemptied 10-ounce bag of M&Ms.
Sometimes I think that creativity exists in people as their only tool to uncover the secrets to their lives. That is, whatever you’re driven to do is the correct path for you to take because the unknowable force that binds it all together is the source of creativity, and it reveals itself to you in tiny increments that you can take up only as quickly as you can create at a wholly intuitive level. So when something resonates for you, let loose and give yourself to it as best you can. Conversely, I suppose, if something isn’t your cup of tea, it’s just as well that you avoid it, because it’s nothing you need to propel yourself forward at this moment.
Other times, I take stock of what this philosophy has gotten me and I become a little disheartened. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the exploration or think that my life should be better (or worse). It’s that it still seems to fill my life up with stuff and one thing I am not so great at is organization—so I’m left with all kinds of attempts strewn at my feet and I can hardly imagine what must be in there. I’ve got a lot of musical instruments, all of which I know how to play a little. I’ve always been very drawn to music, but there’s always a point where I am flustered by it and put it all away for months at a time. And I’ve got loads of photographs now, and I still can’t really think of a reasonable filing system by which I can keep track of what I’m trying to do. Of course, the fact that I don’t know what I’m trying to do probably makes it difficult to devise a reasonable filing system.
And there’s the writing. I’ve been awful at writing lately—both prolifically and qualitatively—but when I write, I want to keep the things in some kind of order so I can revisit and rehash as is appropriate. But I have so many categories, and so many folders now. This is partially why I started this blog. I wanted a place where tags and categories would help me keep track of my mind as well as give me a platform to improve as a writer. But I stopped tagging or categorizing long ago, and I’ve been fearful more than once that I’m writing on a topic I’ve visited before and just don’t remember. So I’m probably annoying any readers this blog may have, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s the nature of the mind, to visit and revisit topics of interest to it, changing its ideas about them slowly over time.
So I’m just trying to do what I should be doing, but it’s not doing anything too constructive, I don’t think. I don’t see it becoming constructive, either—it’s all just stuff lying around me, being there, no monuments, no signposts, just a mess. And it makes me think about purpose.
Because in the end, you aren’t really anything but your function. What you do is all that you are. Even though you’re an absolutely unbelievable organization of atoms working together to give you an opportunity to be alive, you’re actually nothing but what you make this organization do. These atoms will disorganize, and they’ll go on to be other things, and they’ll change their own natures along the way, and the control that you once thought you had will disintegrate along with them. And that’s fine. But what did you accomplish while you still had them working with you?
What’s a broom for? If you think it’s for sweeping, then what if you are trapped in a room with a broom and you use the handle to break the window, to give you freedom? Function shifts, and you can change your function. You just have to use your will and your creativity.
I don’t know what I am, and I don’t know what you are.
I don’t feel right when I’m making money and I don’t feel right when I’m not. I don’t feel right when I’m avoiding being sociable and I don’t feel right trying to have fun. I like talking to people about their fears or their thoughts about life. I like doing little things that people appreciate. Otherwise, I feel useless. It’s strange to know that you only feel good when you’re choosing to be a tool. That you feel best when you accept that you don’t have a real drive in life and that you don’t really function unless you’re making it a little better or easier for someone else. I have to admit that I still really wish I envisioned a function I really desired to become.
That last paragraph was for me, obviously. I’m leaving it in there. Just because I hope to come back across it one day, lack of organization be damned, and realize that things have changed for the better.
I was watching Bjork’s performance at the Royal Opera House this morning, and admiring her stunning creativity across disciplines—I’ve always held her music, her words, and her vocal acumen in the highest of regard, but her staging and willingness to trust in collaboration are also impressive to behold—when I started to feel a thought. Which is a heck of a thing to do, by the way, feeling a thought. Good luck with it. You aren’t thinking, you’re just appreciating from that zone in which you’ve read your heart should be, when suddenly you’re thinking, only you didn’t mean to start thinking. But bam, you have an idea, and it didn’t come from your brain.
And what I was think-feeling was this: Love is Creation. Creation is Love.
This was a confusing feely-thinky for me, but since it didn’t really come from my brain, I decided to entertain it. At first, I only liked it because I’ve always had a problem with love. I know that there are people, animals, and things for which I feel severe and sincere care, and I’ve been happy to consider that love, even if I couldn’t define the parameters of such a love. And I’ve always been a little dismayed to see how widely varying people’s ideas of romantic love is, because if we can’t agree as to the purpose and scope of a particular feeling, then it’s not an institution—that is, it isn’t a single thing known by all who experience it—and there’s no sense to saying that we are in love, because we’re really just in two loves that intersect unreliably and aren’t necessarily meaningful to one another.
But Love is Creation. Love is any product of the use of our vast imaginations. It’s how we build our entire world. An idea becomes important enough to manifest, and its manifestation is a labor built entirely upon the beauty we felt in the idea. I was thinking about this when Bjork began “All is Full of Love,” and for once, the obviousness of the situation wasn’t lost on me. I glanced out the window, and I saw that it was an idea: to at once shield and to permit commingling. To separate and to keep unbroken. It’s a beautiful idea; a form of love.
There are those of you who think I’ve really gone off the hippie-drippy deep end, and to those of you who do, I say this: I hope you will still hang out with me when I come to town, Allison. And you may think I’m crazy, but you’re going to agree with me one day.
Creation is Love. Also, destruction is love, in that an idea comes to pass. Every idea comes from a wish, a need, and enacting is always leads to purpose, even if it’s hidden from you at first. People are just strings with a lot of kinks, and everything they think and do is an effort to straighten themselves out. Sometimes, they tie themselves in more knots, but those knots will eventually come out, just like all the ones that already exist. It just takes effort. It just takes more ideas and more doing. Which is all that creation is. And everything you do to bring yourself to that loose, carefree, complication-less state is love.
I’ll end with a Beck lyric from the album One Foot in the Grave, which I think is a pretty remarkable although not-so-obvious champion of this Creation-is-Love idea. If you haven’t hear it, you should give it a shot. And don’t worry about liking it or paying attention to it. It does its work subtly. To wit:
go where you want to
do the things you feel
walk around with a broken leg
and a hundred dollar bill
A lot of times, artists are poor. I’m not an artist, but I was wondering the other day why I wasn’t. Then I realized it was because I had no talent. But then I realized, and just stay with me here, that I was an artist, and it’s not just because I’m poor. Though, sadly, it turns out that my second-grade Art teacher was right: I am a poor artist.
I am an artist because I am drawn to mediums that should help me express what toddles about in my heart and in my head. I’m a poor artist because I don’t stick with a form long enough to sharpen my blade to the point that I can do so compellingly, clearly, vibrantly. That’s okay because of my relative youth. Perhaps I am still trying to get a clear perception of that which toddles about in my heart and in my head, and no attempts at putting these probable aberrations into the world is going to be successful until I do. Maybe I’m just finding it difficult to be honest with myself about what I am. Maybe a large percentage of us have this problem.
I know so few parents who can happily encourage and assist their children in exploring the things they wish to explore. If you think about it from a purist viewpoint, isn’t that exactly what we should be doing? We arrive in the world, and we bring other people into the world, and the real aim of anyone should be to find the path that is best for them, their growth, their being. But that’s not possible in our world, where there is a basic set of accepted values, whether they are distorted or not, and everyone and everything in a new person’s world can’t help but relate to the child through a veil of adopted values, essentially dropping the veil over their eyes as well. Whether those values are best for that person’s development and exploration isn’t important, really. It’s about being given something rather than being given the chance to figure it out.
I used to be, and sometimes still am, so frustrated that I can’t seem to pull the trigger on any of the career masks our world has prepared for me. But I’m starting to come to a point where I see the whole play as such madness that I can hardly believe anyone else can do it. This is one hell of a playground we’re given, and what can we think to do with it but learn a set list of teachings from our institutions and choose, at an “appropriate” age, one of the previously devised things to “be.” Whether I choose to take the postman’s costume, or the attorney’s, or the butcher’s, in the end I’m just covering myself up.
I was thinking about this because I know a very bright, very kind young lady who has just decided to go to law school, and I blinked ten years down the road and I saw her being a lawyer, sending her kids to school, kissing her husband good-night, and there is nothing wrong with any of that. The richness of any manner of life can be astounding, and I believe wholly that your experience can always be amazing if you just pay attention. It’s just that when you put on a costume, when you choose a pre-formed career, so much of your energy is automatically devoted to pulling that one lever, and so much of your personal development is pushed to the attic for later. I just feel that maybe a lot of that lack of personal development, the world over, could be be responsible for our deficiencies as a species, deficiencies that a lot of these pre-formed careers are needlessly institutionalized to eradicate. That’s just my sense, though.
Artists, on the other hand, and I know that there are plenty of them who look to create art that is commercially viable, which is tainted in its own right, but true artists are people who have a much harder time than even I do thinking that they could possibly take what is inside of them and squeeze it into one of these molds. So they go their own way, and they let their minds and hearts take them to do things they are compelled to get done, most of them probably without a prayer of helping them sustain their living. Where there is no avenue for others to understand what they are doing, others don’t take the time to value their work. You blaze your own path in this society at your own peril for loneliness and destitution, and it is an amazing thing to see people walk that line.
It’s a commonly held belief that the best artists are often tortured souls, but is it possible that these people are actually just amazing human beings who are tortured because their compulsion to go their own way separates them from the rest of their people? When people are so oriented to value a certain set of established skills and ideas, do they not involuntarily but automatically ostracize those beyond their immediate understandings? Is the artist a tortured soul, or is the artist a human being who is tortured by their lack of acceptance in the world in which they live?
I got a surprising number of notes and pieces of hate mail after I posted this past week but password protected it. Okay, no hate mail. But a lot of “wtf” mail. For those of you unfamiliar with the acronym “wtf,” I think it is a forestry group based in Canada. To clear the air, I wrote on Monday night in a fit of anger, and my anger was directed at myself, and I was not kind. I posted it because I wanted to see if I really felt that way about myself. So that I could return in time and see how things have changed, if at all. I wanted to post it because I know that no matter how uncharacteristic, it was me, and that nothing any of us says at any point in time isn’t us. I wanted to keep others from seeing it because I don’t like that part of myself, obviously, but I wanted it documented and appropriately timestamped. So, sorry. No one gets the password. If that’s not a metaphor for the darkest chambers of the human heart, I don’t know what is.
Feel free to put this song on as you read the rest. Or stop and watch. You get to see Christopher Crisci without a beard, even.
This week has been a long crawl out from under that feeling. And it’s not over, but it may never be over, which isn’t a problem. Just a circumstance. Last night, I took my night alone and listened to music. I hadn’t done that in a while. I just sat and listened to whatever music I wished for a few hours. I love doing this because you’ll find all kinds of thoughts that have been on the edge of your mind and all kinds of feelings that have been on the edge of your heart shaken loose by the music, and they all fall into place, mingle sweetly or otherwise, in the moment of your being. Your brain directs your focus most of your days; but with music, for me anyway, my being gets to notice itself in a seemingly random parade of aspects that make sense in a way that words don’t describe.
So there I was, recognizing myself as a million different things, a million different people, seeing my current state against a backdrop of everything I’ve been and will probably have to be before the end, and it was… nice. I don’t feel that different today. But it was nice.
I awoke with one of the songs in my head, “Blue Eleanor” by Old Canes, and this is a song I’ve always liked (it’s why I picked it last night), but today I got obsessed with it. Immediately upon waking, I put it on repeat. I got my guitar and learned to play it. I turned the song off and tried to play it, but I don’t know all of the words and frankly, the strumming is faster than I usually play, and I kept losing my pick like a teenager. I didn’t want to ruin my plans for the day—doing a little tune-up on my neglected car—but I didn’t want to stop with the song, so I grabbed my earphones and ipod and put the sucker on repeat.
A quick aside: it is a popular misconception that NGK spark plugs come pre-gapped; they do not. I would like to make popular a truer conception that you should always gap your plugs, man. Don’t be lazy… pay attention. You’ll save yourself time in the end.
As I listened to the song all morning whilst working on the car in a really perfect chill, I realized I couldn’t have picked a better song, and then I realized that I hadn’t picked the song. It kind of picked me. It’s beautiful because it’s the perfect song for feeling sort of bad but sort of hopeful. It’s full of platitudes, but they’re truthful platitudes. It’s got a simple but infectious energy; you feel up to the task even though it is hard and you know the outcome isn’t falling your way. It’s emotionally honest but melodramatic, which is a big plus… it makes the song a little manipulative, but if you’re feeling the tone at all, i.e., if it’s resonating with you, it’s kind of fun to take up the slack of the emotional rope. And the best part about it, if you’re in the state of being that can appreciate it, is that it mopes but it doesn’t dwell.
It’s a song of a tough moment that doesn’t bemoan the fact that it’s a tough moment. So nice.
I’ve got one more thought to add, because I never stop when I should (after first paragraph). Taking the line “you’ve got a hole in your heart” totally out of context, I was thinking about how the only reason anyone we know exists is because they’ve got a hole in their heart. If you don’t, you feel absolute love, and according to a great many spiritual traditions, you’re outta here.
I say this because that means you can look at every single person you meet and know that there is something within them that is aching, that they don’t know how to fix, and they’re doing the human thing of bleeding out but constantly trying to refill their hearts with love. They may not be doing it in a very kind way. They may feel weak and act pitifully. They may feel so frightened of running out that they behave jealously, angrily, demandingly, trying to squeeze all of the “love” they can out of others so they can feel whole. But no matter how we each behave, if nothing else, we can look at one another and recognize that we’re all in the same proverbial boat, and everyone is deserving of your empathy and admiration.
Yeah, probably should have stopped earlier. It’s cool, I maintain revision rights.
