Category: Uncategorized

Christmas has come and gone and we’ve settled into vacation week. Changes loom heavily on the horizon. It’s puzzling how everything I knew to be true for forty years has been shaken at its roots; sometimes shifted and sometimes abandoned altogether in the past two years. My therapist asserts that circumstances are all around us, that we need to tap into sure things, that the only things that we can really be sure of are our breath and the ground that sits beneath our feet.

I’ve resisted this mantra for a long time, but change is ongoing whether I am willing to accept it or not. I’ve taken to reading westerns that my father had in my house growing up and drinking primarily decaf coffee but for my cup of regular to start my day. I’ve relaxed some of the rules for my kids. They have had so much change in the past two years it just seems unrealistic to clamp down harder.

But then, clamping down is just something that I’ve done to myself and everyone around me for ages, expecting everyone to function better while constricting worldviews. Shockingly this has produced inconsistent but generally bad results.

I have, after some trepidation, begun to start anew. Artwork was something that has been set to the wayside for the past two years. True, I’ve produced a daily drawing this year, but I have not been centering my existence around the amount of artwork I can produce.

This freedom sounds innately good, but there is some question as to how one creates and what they might create in the mindset as well. I have struggled with this. Not so much as a sense of artist’s block, but more in a sense of being conscious of what I am making. I’ve begun to liken it to recovering from an injury. We do not immediately dive into activity as usual. We find our edges, sometimes pushing against them just a bit to see if we can go a bit farther or achieve something new.

Last week I began to think about the way that color seeps and dries as an event. I had seen a painting in pastel colors of stripes and I suddenly found myself yearning for a flat tipped brush. I hadn’t used one in ages, but I found myself resolutely and indeterminately focused on watching paint dry. It was one of the loveliest afternoons of recent memory.

I had every intention of getting a bit more done today than it seems I have so far, and yet, I’ve completed quite a bit. Will this feeling ever escape me? Expectations are the bane of human existence I think.

Alas, I was going to finish up a physics lab that I’ve been needing to do after my therapy appointment today, but I found myself buried in WordPress attempting to find my way around again. My friend set this site up for me months ago and this is the first I’ve really dove in to attempt to do anything. Shame on me?

But anyway, the meat.

Chess

Last night I played chess with my friend Nick in the park. It was a good game. We had quite the dance upon my back line as I had taken his key big pieces but he was in position to promote to possibly promote to queen and create some real trouble for me if I were to blunder. I did, but it was a good game. It was the first game that I ever really recall using the King in a tactical position rather than reacting to other players’ moves in terms of retreat.

It is an apropos metaphor for where I currently stand in my life. I have some big events coming up here shortly which will dramatically alter the course of my next 12 to 14 years. I am not altogether certain that I am ready for it, but I feel that it is time to stretch out the legs on the old king and go for it.

What Does this Mean Creatively?

It must mean something. I’ve found, over the course of the last few weeks, that I have a renewed vigor in creating, but that I am also less concerned with my productivity and more concerned with the act of making. I have long wanted to work on things for people. I feel my calling is to spread some joy through creation, but money and career has often stood in the way of that calling.

But now I am finding that a morning creating with my daughter, or a quick jot in a sketchbook can be equally as fulfilling as a painting that I spend forty hours a week on. I’ve also spent a lot of my life worrying that I had become a person whose practice is merely a hobby, but I feel less inclined to worry about that now. I make every day, sometimes a lot, and sometimes a very little.

The events in my life have dictated a different sort of living which would obviously lead to different ways of creating. I am starting this site up not as a continuation of what I was once doing, but as a replacement, which is more interested in what I am now doing. It is now after all.

So, if you’ve missed me meandering or wondered what I am working on and thinking about, I’d encourage you to drop on back. If these things are of no consequence to you, that is okay too. Take care, and goodbye for now.

 Space.

It’s less the final frontier and more the unattainable aspect of life when you spend your weekends solo parenting. Space: The Unattainable Frontier. I have, again, felt pressed for time and unfit to do anything about it. Therefore, I have determined that I must develop a new invention, “A Temporal Alchemy Machine.” The Temporal Alchemy Machine will create time where there is no time. It will help the average person work one, two or three extra jobs, whatever they might need to solidify a more substantial and supportive income. It will allow people to produce more stable and beneficial relationships with their loved ones. It will allow you to play those games with your children while STILL finishing that very important contract with the extremely necessary client. You, yes you, will become harder, better, faster AND stronger.

Since my wife and I split up nearly a year ago, my weekends have been almost entirely devoted to the needs of my children but I still manage to create here and there around the edges. But am I stealing time? Should I actually be focused on the entertainment and development of my children at all times? Is this like a dance that some people are just better at because they’ve worked on the muscle memory? I rather suspect that is the case. 

 I’ve been carrying the sad for so long I don’t know if I exist without it. I can’t separate myself from it because it has become so intrinsically a fiber of my being that it is sometimes the only thing that feels true. For years I’ve looked to others to fix this: to hide in their joy, to mistake their happiness with my deeds as my own happiness. 

But I struggle. And I realize that we all struggle, but I struggle to maintain a sense of caring. I do often paint myself the victim in my story because I overreact to others criticism. I view their displeasure as my short coming but then blame the situation on them and talk about these people and their horrible ways as a way to exonerate myself from my own inner sense of justice. It’s no way to live. I don’t suggest it. 

I’ve read a children’s book over and over to my daughter: Zen Shorts. Stillwater, a panda who has moved in next door teaches a young family of morals and mindful thinking through parables, the author explores giving, good and bad luck and carrying negativity. They are such simple tales and they make so much sense, but only a priori, at least for me. I tend to complicate. 

So I sit here in this hot bath, after bedtime went so well, then so poorly and then came to a screeching halt. My sinuses are achy and stuffed, my body tired from another week of giving and seldom taking. And when I do, feeling guilty about it. 

I don’t feel built for what I’m doing. But like Alan Watts attempting to define Zen, I find it easier to name what I am not built for than what I am built for. 

And so I sit here attempting to carry the zero.