I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to write. More specifically, how to activate writing as a creative act for me. I have so many different methods that I’ll utilize when I’m stalling out before a painting, some methods worn from trial, and others new that inspire a jolt, flipping the whole thing on it’s head. Writing seriously and with intention is a new act. I’ve written so much, lots and lots, over the years, but nothing too coherent or sensical. Just notations of my life, scraps, or fleeting observations but nothing robust. Nothing thought over and constructed, nothing with a goal. But now, I have things I want to write about, ideas I want to tack down with the clarity of language, mostly for me and maybe for the curious experience of throwing out a fishing line and seeing what gets caught and brought to the surface.

I am a student again or maybe for the first time. My educational history has been such a saga of both predictable and unpredictable upheavals, so to some degree, I feel as though I am starting fresh. I’ve always been endlessly curious, a vast reader, and a real self-learner but to be a student is a very different identity. It requires a different attention, I think. When I read a book just for me, I can pick it up and put it down. I can read as much as I want and then abandon it for the next text. But to be a student is requiring new patience and love (this love is an act of humility and attention). In this new role, I am learning what deep attention brings to my general synthesis of the world and it’s all revealing itself to be deeply intertwined. There are moments lately where I want to jump up and down and yell, “Do you also see how all the dots are connecting!?”. Even though it’s all in my head and seen only through my eyes, it’s wildly invigorating. My own personal study feels so much richer and life feels more satisfying. It must be the feeling of being in just the right moment or place.

It is this experience of threading all these seemingly disparate thoughts together that is what I want to write about, or I want to write the thoughts themselves. Carving into the page these moments of connection so I don’t forget (I’m afraid of forgetting my thoughts). I hope that these through-lines might then be capable of evolving into a new form. I have all these capital Big writings I want to do like something about the utility of beauty but what do I even really know about that yet? Not nearly enough to give it a monumental title such as The Utility of Beauty. It’s laudable but I know it’s the arrogance of my youth and that I’m not ready to write that yet in the way I want to. Maybe I’ll be ready this year, or in the next five years or not until I’m sixty years old. But I have so many thoughts about that and everything else, I am taking in so much information right now that it’s beginning to build something in my head, a foundation maybe.

I have to admit that I feel scared to write. Sometimes I feel really terrified to paint too, even though I’ve been doing that shit my whole life. There are so many reasons why that fear chokes me into inaction but I think it is as simple as: if I never act then I never have to figure what happens next because that is what is actually scary, that endlessly receding unknown. I know I don’t want to live a life of inaction and I know from experience that when I fight past it and just make the damn thing, there is no better euphoria in this world. It’s alchemical and the closest to god that I feel. So I’m going to write and I’m going to continue painting. I’m going to do whatever it is that I want to do because then I know what’s next and that’s something and something is way better than nothing.