I am in love with the way poetry always has and has always been criticized for the poet often being unwilling or unable to reduce or separate layers from meanings for fixed and firmly being understood in a clean definably containing and unchallenging way for readers, or rather the comforts of critics more likely. Surely this extends far beyond poetry, however.
But art, art at its best defies such things. Wanting to be tightly constrained. And many artists burn or drown through all of recorded histories for the art they make. Sometimes for the mere art that one holds or beholds. Yet art is made for the artist and those who would potentially value the artist’s art, their making way or holding space, not those insistent on defining or misunderstanding it, isn’t it? Art itself is heritage in culture so of course its also contentious.
I have learned to cherish seeing in so many how the artist carves forth space from their own growth pursuits and trajectories. Interject process. And it doesn’t mean the world always wants the thought space, intellectual or imaginal and often both, being grown to flourish or exist. Sometimes quite its opposite and in such tiny degrees of difference under those more constraining. The basis of Christian mythos teaches us this, doesn’t it?
I wish I would’ve learned to lean in and laugh at all of it with a whole lot more self-love and unbound compassion sooner. I am so grateful for growing up in wilder reaches of the Wild West. For all the conditioning and wholesome feralness that came along with it opening me to be able to see my own breaking aways from it.
Life has taught me my ways of seeing and relating are far from for everyone, if much of anyone, and that may be a good thing, who am I to know, but isn’t that a great and rich part about life in our times, that we can choose to be so free so as to be ourselves and experience others doing so as well? Is everyone not free to look away from anyone at any moment?
Thanks to fields of creativity at large, and the richness of my own life’s experiences thus far, I mostly look at humanity’s relational blunders and histories and present tensions and problems and solutions too therefore constructed out of such predetermined understanding’s a bit like this personal mantra now:
sometimes
it’s everyone’s fault
all at the same time
And that scale may not be peaceful for some, unsettling even, it may be irrelevant for others, finding no point in seeing life in such ways, but for me in my overly relational ecosystem sort of being, with personally integrating my own now lived experiences for me, it empowers me to look out at everything wonderful and the troubles and shadows and unwellnesses and tragedies, including my own, swirling in and around our times without getting as weighed down or closing off myself to the ways the sacred and mundane are always in play and relation with one another through all of us.
We can’t much walk anywhere without seeing strings of it, so for me, it was this necessary to come to interior peace with the whole of it. Everything just as it is and as it’s been. My happiness fully detached from anything externally changing, even while I dream for changes in human ecologies and landscapes and tiny little openings across my life.
In being most honest with myself, I may not express or create things having value for others, being measurably proven now, but I do know my life has been made richer in immeasurable ways by means of my art, and cherishing the art works of others along the way. Especially in the manners of leaning into where no sacred cow out there outside of me has life force power over me in deciphering for me my worth, my art, my intentions, nor my heart or spirit, and least of all, my existence. In a world drunk with dehumanization around such notions from all directions, I think the world could use a little more of this.
Learning the differences between value and worth is making all the difference in my being able to still share after all that’s been endured. And not just share, but to want to share again from having gone so far within and away from it. And because of my perseverance, I’m well on my way to laughing about the whole of it having happened as so tensioned soon enough, as I am readying myself in personal growth and overcoming my lessor self to grow in love with the art of sharing about my art. Letting all the rest of the noise of the world fall away from me. I’m here to be me, as I hope you are you.
The hilarity of things that have already unfolded in quiet preparatory solitude moments are serendipitous and helping me to laugh at and lighten this unfolding. There are a lot of trauma layers in this for me now, that never had to be, yet I am unapologetically me and like all artists before me in heritage, wholly imperfect. And I wouldn’t not want to be.
I am inspired by allegedly verboten things, that I’d rather think of as more timeless, and reigned in by having met fully my savage interior. I will never do it perfectly. Art. Nor will I want to.
I do know, however, that I want to make and express art whose service empowers others to feel into appreciating such freedom for their selfs. And I know it is more than possible because of where I’ve gotten within myself as a result of having made the art I have thus far. And I’m just getting started. I hope that more and more of that comes through as I get out of my own way. Here’s to growing in personal and hard ways.
And here in this parting, here is where the deer laid down amidst a field of flowers that I stumbled upon. Scenes such as this, knowing how to see them, is such an exquisite part of being here in this existence. And it’s all happening all the time.
