Spent all weekend working on a project that failed. Today’s newsletter almost didn’t happen. It’s hasty and haphzard. When it comes to luster, it’s lacking. But…it’s here…
It’s a fine line between a healthy obsession, and toxicity. Between frustration, drive, spite, desperation, and apathy. Between giving up, falling apart, figuring it out, breaking through, and continually spinning. Relapse, recovery, and sobriety, one or all of the above I’m told comes into play. But, maybe that’s just me...
Everything is made of small things. Electrons. Atoms. Nuts. Bolts. Screws. Prayer beads. Everything carries bits of something else. Nothing arrives fully formed. Everything starts as something other, becomes one thing and then another. Shifts. Changes, and then becomes something different yet again.
Somedays we push, and pull, and pry. Most days we blister and ache. We feel the weight of every failed attempt like sediment. Like coarse conglomerate. Immovable granite and bouldering clay. It's heavy. It's hard to carry. It's hard to move, but even a little bit goes a long way...
We "assemble a life from the usable fragments", Lewis Hyde says. Sacred relics of the wreckage, gathered and connected. We experience the world as wholeness when all our pieces have a space.
We collect the instances of what's expected of us. Air-quotes-normalcy. Air-quotes-conventionality. Air-quotes-respectability. In other unsaid words, side-eye-conformity. It’s the breakfast of champions, they say...
You have an affliction. A malady. Everything in the world, all its equipment and armaments, its slings and arrows, its sticks and stones, its words that always hurt you, that break your heart and your bones. Osteogenesis imperfecta. All your inner structures turn brittle, little, and weak.
You put yourself together. Bit by bit. Part Sometimes you do it with clarity and precision. As if by a manual. As if provided with a step-by-step guide. At other times, in total darkness. In the midnight hour. Grappling with esoteric secrets. With hieroglyphics. An impenetrable mystery. Like Ikea instructions for building anything...
Better starts with dissatisfaction. A holy discontent. A decided refusal to never relinquish the possibility of what could be to what has been. To never accept the current state of things. It starts with a willing rejection. It starts with a conscientious objection.
“It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means”, Anne Lamott says. But, sometimes the really magical, top-shelf, good shit, sometimes WE PROGRESS when we realize we don't know a goddamn thing. I came to collage to stop overthinking...
You have a condition. A sensitivity. The symptoms are invisible. Whether you were born with it or came to it. Something in your genes or something that happens as you age. Who knows? Who’s to say? It’s a kind of osteopenia. A loss of inner strength. A kind of poverty. You can’t rebuild quickly. A reduction of volume, of mass. An inadequate density.
Super excited about Monday’s newsletter. I made a piece of art for a fellow writer's poem last week, and I “try” to write alittle bit about my creative process in making it and the way collage relates to my creative proces as a whole…I know…it’s kind of a lot…
On the packaging.Hidden in the terms and conditions. Who knew it’d be so foretelling, so prescient? “Some assembly required.” Like a chant. Like a mantra. Like the Rosary. A testament to how you’d spend your time and your days. A lifetime with tiny pieces. Trying to fit them in. Trying to figure out where they go...