As Slow As We Need To
Every day, a little more simplicity
In the morning, I drink hot water with lemon in the garden. I get back to myself slowly.
I spent the weekend in a rental house in Marin County, watching the light move across purposely distressed brick walls. I browsed a strangers’ collection of leather bound books, and looked out at their kitchen’s lush view.
I sat on a leather couch from the ‘70s and wrote a list of what makes me feel alive: I feel alive when I ride my bike in the morning. I feel alive when I am in beautiful places. I feel alive learning the names of plants and their medicinal uses. I feel alive with the sun on my face.
That night, standing beside my sister and her fiancee, I watched fireworks burst over a silent, distant San Francisco. Life felt quieter then, like a blanket had been draped over it. I didn’t want to return to parts of it.
After a long season of making, both in school and with different opportunities (a book, a tour, a fine art gallery show), I found myself apathetic and resigned towards making art. I did not feel like doing it. I am still feeling that resignation, though writing this is slowly peeling it back.
Part of this resignation, I’m sure, is a part of the natural cycle of making. After a period of being very external, I tend to pull inward. But part of this feels larger. I am no longer sure I want what I thought I did.
Plus, I’d grown tired of my up-and-down cycles of externalizing my self-worth and hoping for specific material outcomes. I’d been given opportunities, and my desire for security had wriggled in and exclaimed, “Finally, it’ll be easy now.”
Then, when things were still difficult financially, when money was still a question, when I still wondered how I’d pay rent and eat this month, I felt resentful. Wouldn’t it, couldn’t it, be different now?
Striving for material aims is a hindrance to the human spirit
- Spiritual concept of Barna Dilae
The truth is, things have been different. I have been lucky enough to pay my rent from selling merch online. I have been able to make it work before. But I am also not in the same circumstances I was then. Nor am I the same as I was. My rent, blessed be, is still affordable in the Bay Area, but it is more than it was in other times in my life. Also, the amount of financial security I desire now has also increased.
I see now, with only a few steps forward, that I was hoping these opportunities would change my life in very specific ways. And that was a lot of pressure to put on making.
Things must be what they are. A poetry book being published must be a poetry book being published. It can be an opportunity to share words, to hold a physical copy, and to perform with others. A fine art show can be an opportunity to push myself further, and to share work with others. But the exact material ways in which opportunities change my life are not things I have direct control over.
Besides, I want to leave space to be surprised by how opportunities change my life. I want financial stability—I want everyone to have financial stability—and still, I do not want to always know the ways change will come. I want to have trust, knowing that the gifts in my life have often come in unexpected ways.
The biggest gifts of my life have often come by tending to intention, community, generosity, trust, and luck, and by slowly moving–and stumbling–towards them.
I keep asking myself: What do I want to do if no one else cares?
At first, thinking Nobody else cares made me frown out the window, desperate for external validation and proof of my own worth. But as I sat with it, it began to feel like a freedom.
What if nobody else cares.
What if I can start over new, right now, in ways that are visible and invisible to others?
What if I do not have to live a life that appears cohesive to others?
What if I can make in the ways I wish to, and continue to find out what that means?
What if I can live with trust and intention, make room for luck, and be guided by the hope that I become wiser and more open in the process?
I keep moving away from, and then getting back to, the deeper quiet in me. This quiet knows that art making is best as an integrated part of life. That vitality lives in the details of life. That paintings, sculptures, videos, poems, are external expressions of creativity, but that it is unraveled in all the ways a life is lived.
The old ways will not do. I keep writing this because I keep finding new edges of it to integrate. The old ways will not do. This is not an abstraction. This is not simply a vague statement contained in my mind. The more I listen to my body, the less it wants to move like before.
My mind has been outward, searching for food which will never feed it. I am tired of my addiction to others’ opinions. I am tired of my desire for validation from people I’m not sure I like. I am tired of wanting proof from others of my own worth. I am tired of externalizing my sense of self, and my attention.
Some part of me convinced myself that I needed to be available to others or I would be forgotten. Some part of me began to believe that to always be visible to others was a necessity of what it meant to be an artist. That sentiment has a sharp edge to it. I prioritized a vision of myself that was cohesive to others, rather than attending to my own fluid needs–until I began to not hear the quiet voice anymore.
I am not sure which way I am going. But I ride my bike to a new job at a law firm in the morning, listening to Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?,” and feeling alive. I walk to the lake on my lunch break, and feel alive moving my body.
I’m reminded of two summers ago, when I came back from spending a month visiting family in Montréal. It was the first year of Mando and I’s relationship, and it felt strange to return and jump back into things just as before. I had missed him, but it felt weird to rush into touch. Things felt new all over again. I needed time to recalibrate. And he said, We can go as slow as we need to.
Thankfully, no matter how distant I may feel, I can come back to myself. Sit in the garden with a soul for a few quiet mornings, and it will sing.
Simplicity asks me to be here, right here, right now. It asks me to hear the birds chirp in the trees at 6:30 am. It reminds me it does not have to be so hard. That my vitality, and my sense of self, are never lost. I remember myself slowly. I come back first as sensation. Words follow with time.
A poem written using Beau Sia’s prompt
Expiration date
When I consider giving it up, relief sets in.
Tired of the comparison, the flit of faces,
The hours I’ve spent stuck on the floor,
Staring at images that move too fast
For me to take them in.
Still I have to learn.
It’s like how I reached for sugar,
Even though the day before it’d given me a migraine.
Or how it took me years to walk away from his house,
even though I often walked to my car crying.
Sometimes delusion wears the face of control.
Sometimes delusion presents itself as a strong house, and all I want are
Four walls, a soft bed, and windows to watch the world from.
Sometimes I cling to what isn’t working
because I don’t know
What else could replace it.
The whole world could.
Anything else could.
The empty space invites me to let go of all of my old ways.
It says nothing is reborn without dying first. It says
Nothing.
So often I have to remind myself that all I have to do is be here. To slow down.
"My mind has been outward, searching for food which will never feed it."
This line really hit close for me. Often I am looking for so many things while I do not need any of it, rather hearing water flow, seeing clouds, hearing the local birds and frogs accompany on my walks home in the evening.
Walking with the sun long enough to scoop clear water from its nobility and drink, and drink.
(Forgive me.)