No answers, nothing perfect, nothing fully seen

#99: Mulling the artistic and spiritual path — plus links, laughs, and books

Dining table peonies, 2023

Those of you who’ve been here a while are familiar with some of my spiritual journey. The newer of you may be in the dark. The span of my audience is now the span of multiple me’s. There is a strange and layered vulnerability in writing directly to the inboxes of those who knew me at personal lows, those I’m just getting to know, and the many of you I have never spoken to.

When I began writing publicly as a teenager, I’d bare it all — far too much, without boundary and with no regard for my relationships. It was wholly self-centered, though pure-intentioned. When you’re learning to be vulnerable, nobody walks you through the nuances of self-expression. I wrote about this privately in February:

What began with pure intentions quickly became muddied by the beginnings of influencer-culture: a stats-based ranking number called ‘Tumblarity’. The better your posts performed, the higher your Tumblarity. It quickly revealed my vulnerabilities as a young and open teenager — I realized that the more real I was on my blog, the more interaction I’d get. It went hand-in-hand with being completely engulfed in early 2000s non-denomination church culture, and the pressure to confess anything and everything at every turn to everyone. This is how we make it to heaven! And conveniently for me, it was how I gained Tumblarity as well.

It was all so fucked up, and ultimately [over time] took away from my joy for writing. I’ve been trying to regain that joy ever since. Trying to balance the desire to be open and the wisdom of restraint and subtlety; it’s all made me wonder why I ever started to write in the first place — why I’ve come back to it over and over, disjointed as it’s been.

When I began writing there was a freedom to the way I’d arrange words. There was a joy in finding the right ones and a particular delight in alliteration. There was a fascination with the rhythmic nature of it all.

Somewhere along the way I’ve reconciled the fact that [writing] is as much personal as it is performative. There is a certain feeling in blending those two modes that is unique to being an artist. Writing a song, penning an essay, and making a photograph all share this feeling — this desire that the work be seen, that I am seen.

These days I find myself thinking much about the relationships between these things, and what it means for my life and how I’d like to live it. The truth is, I’ve known myself to be an artist since those early days of blogging. And since then, naïve as I was, my path has been inseparable from a sense of spirituality.

In a spiritual sense, my beliefs have evolved over and over — and believing that change is the only real constant, this fact is most encouraging. Perhaps the belief I hold most deeply is this: any real spirituality must be in constant evolution, spiraling and discovering itself again and forever.

Searching for what feel to be spiritual truths and creating artistic works that represent this search — this is the core of what it means for me to grow as an artist, and so to grow as a person. I must maintain that there are no answers, nothing perfect, nothing fully seen. The art cannot be if we begin to know.

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Real miscellanea

Best of 2023 🎶 (Apple Music | Spotify)
Been holding out on you, but this year’s installment of my favorite tracks is now a hefty 6 hours long. Shuffle away!

Words for living 📝
A growing collection of words to live by; one of several Are.na channels I continually add to. For me there is comfort in the simplicity of wisdom and how it cuts through the noise.

Paul McCartney and Rick Rubin listen to Smash Mouth All Star stems 😉
I will admit that watching this before I knew it was a parody was hilarious and amazing and yes I am the most gullible person in the world.

The only light that matters is “WET LIGHT” 💡
One of the goofier gospels of the internet,

FOR SCALE

, breaks down the aesthetics of lamps and lighting at home.

Currently reading 📚

To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die, by Tim Carpenter
A book-length essay about the essential usefulness of the practice of making photographs.

When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron
Drawing from traditional Buddhist wisdom, [Pema] offers life-changing tools for transforming suffering and negative patterns into habitual ease and boundless joy.

Make Time For Creativity, by Brandon Stosuy
Posing a series of questions on the themes of defining work-life balance, forming daily rituals, setting intentions, meeting goals, and taking time off from creativity, this book provides an inspiring framework for building your own creative process and using your time meaningfully.

The World-Ending Fire, by Wendell Berry
These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.

ICYMI 📸

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”I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me.”

RALPH WALDO EMERSON