The house
unraveling/re-raveling is still in progress. I am trying my best to not to get lost down rabbit holes of nostalgia, but I am also taking time to revisit some parts of myself that have been packed away. It had been good to witness past me and remember the wisdom she holds for me now.
What parts of the past are ready for you to unpack? Here are some of mine. I hope you enjoy.
1. Once upon a time I was an art student.
There are boxes of portfolios and sketchbooks that have been pushed to the back of storage. I had forgotten a lot of it. It was good, and
complected, to see them again. Like opening a vault to who I was and remember how hard I was working through some heavy trauma and deep depression. The past me who made art from it and let it save me.
Words from 33 year old me I did have. Part of an art manifesto assignment circa 1993. Including double spaces after sentences, which was a thing we did on typewriters way back when.
😅
I still ask myself these questions. Success still comes when what I do makes me think and understand my world and myself. Even if the understanding is that I don't
understand at all.
What makes what you do art? What if we didn't have to ask but just knew it already is?
4.
Why are we all creative?
Because we all have the memory.
Creativity is at bottom the combinatorial work of memory and imagination. All of our impressions, influences, and experiences — every sight we have ever seen, every book read, every landscape walked, every love loved — become seeds for ideas we later combine and recombine, largely unconsciously, into creations we call our own.
The most wondrous thing about these seeds is that, when they first fall into the fallow ground of the mind, we have no sense of what they will bloom into years, decades, and selves later, what alchemic cross-pollination will take place between them and other seeds in the dark underground of consciousness where we become who we are.
Our brains will take the seeds of our memory and mix
and match them over time and space and logic and reason into something new. Isn't that amazing? Isn't it wondrous to have imagination?
5.
A blessing for your week:
(Tree Keepers Oracle by Angi Sullins, art by Stephanie Law)
May the rawness of alive be alchemized into the art of living.
