Finding Your Natural Current

It’s 5:45 a.m.

My dog has been vomiting for the last two hours.

I have decided to stop reading my book and come here to talk about how unintentionally hypocritical I can be.

Yesterday I was restless.
It was my time allotted to record a podcast episode and I simply didn't feel like talking.

The first time in almost 4 years that I actually didn’t have anything that I felt like saying.

If you know me at all, you know I'm not in the business of forcing it.
If it wasn’t hurling out of my mouth like a raging bull, I feel no need to spend my (or your) time with it.

Almost four years of the podcast and despite missing episodes due to life and LIFE stuff- never for lack of something to say.

Feeling out of sorts and strange, I decided to go to a second hand book store.

(luckily this time, alone- without my youngest shouting and licking the cart. (( my soul leaves my body when my kids inappropriately interact with germ infested public areas.))((( don’t ask how un-disney like I acted when my son licked a pole at Disney the other week.)))

ANYWAY.
I got a bunch of books.

So I start reading this book by Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding & Writing Poetry and I just can't get over how in love I am with with writing from strangers in used books.

It feels so intimate, so private.
It almost feels wrong for me to even be reading their notes.

I’m also someone that needs to underline as I read. Otherwise, I can't comprehend it.

It’s like taking pictures in a moment.
A way of comprehending something more deeply.
Synthesizing.

So it's really interesting to see what another person underlined versus what I would underline.
where is the overlap?
where is there the gift of offering a second glance thanks to the aggressive double underline of the previous bookkeeper?

You begin to have this relationship of sorts-
as I'm reading it, “oh yes, of course you underline that.”

It kind of makes me want to cry.

I'm reading these same words.
Obviously, I'm a somewhat similar person.
I bought this book, this person has already read this book.

(ps- they have beautiful handwriting. If anyone has books with my hurried & horrendous handwriting in the margins, they will be perplexed/stupefied to say the least.)

MARGIN NOTE: "Get acquainted with poets of the past.''
*an exclamation point next to something.*
*single underline.*
*double underline.*
*TRIPLE UNDERLINE.*
*bracket.*
“Words were initially created to reflect realities through their sounds.”

Oh, I love witnessing how someone's brain works.

How heartbreakingly beautiful.

Of all the things this person could be reading or doing, they're reading about poetry.

The earnest underlining and triple underlining and bracketing and circling.

And then it smacked me.
As I'm marveling over this person with not actual idea about the reality of them as a human- I think, “you hypocrite.”

YOU are reading this book.
YOU underline.

Have you ever marveled at yourself?
At the magnificence and innocence and beauty?
The efforts and craving of taking in a poetry book?

One of the quotes in this book says:

“It is written to empower the beginning writer who stands between two marvelous and complex things: an experience. (Or an idea or a feeling.) and the urge to tell about it in the best possible conjunction of words.”

I read that and “yes…and photographs. I immediately equate it to photographs. An experience (or an idea or a feeling) and the urge to tell about it in a picture.”

of course…

And then I spiral.

Why do I keep wanting to talk around the process instead of being inside of it?

This is a very specific thing that I've been frustrated with myself about.

Swirling, twirling.

I can't stop.

I can't stop wanting to talk about the experience of the work.
the consumption
the metabolizing of these ideas.

And then, the should’s.

"I should be doing the thing."
Why am I reading about poetry instead of writing poetry?
Why am I talking about photographic practice instead of creating something with the photographs I take?

The very questioning of my undeniable desire is the antithesis to what I believe to be true.

Honor your fucking instinct.

I don't believe that there's this hidden inner working, worthiness issue, or avoidance of doing work.

I believe I’m realizing that the “outside” IS the “inside” of MY work.
The work that is mine to do.

I do have a craving to create more physical things. In the past I have just completely glazed over creating a book because so much of the work I do is just never ending & it doesn't ever feel like a good time. It's just all forever.

But I also want to give it a special place.

And yet, I can't force the fact that it doesn't feel urgent.
Time is precious and I have no tolerance to spend it outside of my soul’s urgency.

What is urgent to me is this pile of books next to me.

The new/used additions to my collection from the bookstore trip today:

The Way Under the Way by Mark Nepo
The Amazing Laws of Cosmic Mind Power by Joseph Murphy
A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
Solitude: a return to the self by Anthony Storr
The Inkblots: Herman Rorschach, His Iconic Test & The Power of Seeing.

My impulse to go to the store and out of this whole store, thousands of books, these books.

What if I pretend that I AM that wonderful person that I'm singing the praises of that wrote in the margins of the book.

What would I say about that person if I knew that these were the books that they bought?

I'm trying to unlock my ability to soften to myself and respect my instincts in the same way I believe through my bones that you should respect yours.

One of the reviews on the back of The Inkblots says, “who knew? the founding lions of psychoanalysis often seem as petty as they were (at times) brilliant. But to hear Damion Searls tell it in this absorbing new biography, Herman Rorschach was a different sort altogether: humane, empathetic, loving, deeply sane, and possessed of a true artist soul. Searls’ account of Rorschach’s after life is no less fascinating as every culture that encountered his test seemed to project its own values onto it. In the end true to Rorschach, Searls locates the heart of being human at the endlessly unfurling intersection of vision and self-awareness.”

all of these seemingly disparate pieces.
all of these different books.
all of this.
all that.

I'm responding to what is me outside in the world.
Acquiring the breadcrumbs to be able to give myself the ability to wrap my mind around what I cannot yet name.

In the past I've felt insecure about it, as if learning something is just a lucky byproduct of a desperate quest for validation.
(ps there's nothing wrong with wanting to validate yourself AND validating your yourself through your art and your photographs is a really healthy, beautiful way to do it.)

It’s helpful and expansive to look outside of yourself to acquire knowledge and understanding of what's been done in the past and be able to formulate what is deeply pulling at you.

It's also an opportunity, in invitation, to love yourself.

I haven't even started this Inkblots book and already I think, what a fucking badass.

“The 20th century's most visionary synthesis of art and science.”

To be the thread pulling together seemingly different worlds into one incredible creation…incredible.

And then I think, how am I different?
How am I less than that?
WHY am I less than that?

I'm not.
I'm doing my own synthesis.
I'm just in it.
Inside the bottle trying to look at it from the outside.

Where are you?
What are you synthesizing?

It's a blind spot. The unforgiving glare of sun that stabs into your eyes the moment you try to look directly at it.

I'm sitting here believing to my core that when we trust our instinct and move with our impulse there's undeniable self-actualization available to us.
An understanding and reverence for our place in the world.

My craft is essential to my life.
It is also not the center of what I want to do.
And that feels a little strange, but also I know it.
I know it in the way I recoil when someone mis-assumes my focus is on making pictures.

My heart is in a slightly different place.
I don't actually know what I want someone to label me as but I know that it's not just about the pictures for me.
It's about the synthesizing of whatever I'm still uncovering.

An intersection of wellness
of love
of consciousness
of life.

Breaking down these boundaries and barriers and hierarchal bullshit of “good art”, “good pictures”.

Silently shaming myself for not creating in the “right” sphere is a disrespectful drain on what I am here to do.

I’ve taken billions of photographs and for some reason I don't feel an absolute urgency to make a book of them (yet).

I feel urgency around wrapping my brain around what I'm obsessed with.
And although I cannot yet define it neatly, it’s undeniable.
I am possessed by it.

What is that for you?

What is that silent or loud, “I should be doing this. Why am I not doing this?”

Where are you trying to pull yourself against your own current?

What is your current?

What is the natural flow of your energy/your love/your inspiration?

your life force.

Where does that carry you?

Close your eyes.

Just float with it.
Where does it carry you?

What if we get rid of that narrative of “MUST WORK HARD. MUST COMMIT. MUST MAKE THIS WORK.”

Where does your natural current of enthusiasm take you?

My natural current took me to a book store.

"I don't feel like recording a podcast. I don't have anything to say right now."

Tapped into what I naturally wanted to do. Went to book store, got books, read books- decided i had something to say and ended up recording podcast anyway- in a way that felt like truth & not forced.

Going with your natural current doesn’t have to mean sacrificing an end goal- it could mean getting there in a way that feels so much better.

The magical person that wrote the notes in my used book…the admiration and the love I have for this person because of the few random scribbles and underlines. Those of which were a natural current of instinctually action as they read. A natural result of taking in what they felt was important in what they read.

Look at your photos.
Look at what you deemed important that came across your life.
Get curious about the most ease filled, instinctually efforts of marking your life.

Where you naturally drift?
What does that tell you?

Through photographs and writing, journal on this:

What is my life force current?
That feeling of like natural, effortless enthusiasm and energy and glowy, warm love?

What is that?
Where does it take you?

In what ways are you questioning/resisting that?

How can you eliminate that energy drain?

This episode/post is healing evidence in the power of trusting my natural current.

A deepening of trust and conviction in myself.

This is about exact what it needed to be about.

Not forced for the sake of consistency,
and yet- consistent nonetheless.

Every single time I get behind this mic and talk about something, there's this place that I go to in my soul, where I just feel-

“I have to say this. I HAVE TO SAY THIS. I don't care if I'm just saying it to myself, if one person hears it, a hundred people hear it- I don't care, I have to see this. Not saying this feels like a betrayal of my soul.”

What is the part of you that hears this conversation and feels relief?

When I pick up a book that says something that I so deeply resonate with, I feel relief. And then after the relief, an unbearable itch.
I must make something.

contagious inspiration.

yes…Yes….YES.

Now what?

So I ask you...now what?