Tag: artists

creative practitioners unite!

Other People’s Parties

Like clockwork, the first week of my new cycle has gone off plan. Client deadlines (and a side of electrical repair) quickly pushed any creative writing off my plate. I know what I want to say but typing takes time!

Also, choosing the right words, feeling the emotions, thinking through the ethics of writing about the living and the dead, and sometimes facing the dark mirror myself. Eating, walking, and showering, too.

All that, and tend to others?

Yes, this week I’m going to other people’s parties. Another useful mantra for the new year. Creative practice most definitely feeds on distraction. For me today, that’s writing in a different voice, another purpose, a reason beyond me. Tomorrow it’s studiously inquiring about cloth wiring.

And reading a lot. What a relief to get some space from the familiar voices. I am taking the pause on my own work as a break to listen to other stories unfold.

Peripatetic Pasts

Ambling past Dad once, I noticed him asleep in his chair and also deeply involved in a conversation. His eyes were open, alive, even expressive. Hand gestures in the air, shoulder shrugs — all from the recesses of his subconscious — accidentally revealed to me in daylight.

He was young in his dreams, and with youthful objectives. Actively reliving dances and dates in low lit memories, as he occasionally reported at the sunny breakfast table later. It must have been quite lucid. I saw grimaces and cowering to suggest that the fear and shame were real in his dreams, too.

Caring for him included mastering the art of not interfering in these moments. I did sit briefly to assess. Was he talking to God or an angel or his sister? No, just lucid time travel through the universal subconscious. Well, that was Tuesday, as they say. Also, not so different from the man muttering into his collar on the Metro.

I’ll be home for Christmas… if only in my dreams.

Why do we go places (even in our dreams) to feel connected, get centered, and move on to the next chapter?

Some part of that question is answered as I walk through the studio door. There’s always plenty to do. For me, ‘writing’ includes walking, dishes, gardening, and pacing (as discussed). Am I writing a book, or not?

That requires sitting down. It is soooo hard to sit down in the middle of laundry. Better to go to the park or the patio. Of course, it’s fun and full of distraction there, too. But, also somehow a portal as real as my Dad’s dreams.

The social studio has become that space, too. Camera off, no one looking. Like the weirdness of waiting room productivity–answering mundane emails right before an oncology visit. Or worse, leaving for an errand and coming home with a puppy. You definitely accomplished something.

Leaving the familiar. Setting conditions for the unusual to occur. Old findings in new light. New facts mixed with well-worn memories. Listening for sacred signals amidst noxious noise.

What a strange path to arrive in the present with presence, and find history only now taking shape. What will set my waking dreams alight thirty years on? A new year to discover ancestral constellations in a not-so-distant inky night sky.

Geographic Pragmagics

Driving south from Tempe to Tucson on a familiar road, I noticed for the first time two of my sisters’ names on street signs. They weren’t placed there for me, per se. But, any reminder to call my sisters is a clue. Universal or coincidental, it serves.

Later in Tucson, I found myself wandering around the precise location of my brother’s Bike Church brick memorial. I stumbled upon it on my way out of town. Lingering in the last hours of my visit and looking for breakfast, I landed in a local neighborhood where stores were closed and streets haunted by living ghosts, the kind of folks at the center of Paul’s mission.

I walked for a while looking for a broom to brush silt and sticks off the named bricks at the Church, all here to remember but looking a bit forgotten. I saw a school nearby, but I didn’t dare breach the daunting fence or cause a confusing concern with my presence or request. No people were out in yards or welcoming doors open. I had a chat with the shop owner, but alas, no burrito to buy or broom to borrow.

I managed to clean my brother’s space with a tissue and tears. Years of missing him melting into memories, inside jokes, and a celestial conversation nearing on two decades.

All logics are not analytical. Patterns and memories make internal architectures and neural topologies. Maps of a terrain that projects before, now, and hereafter on the people and landscapes around us. The internal connected to the external and situated at intersections of magic, matter, and meaning.

Moving in pragmagic flow is an embodied and integrated experience. I accomplished the practical efforts of my days (Tucson trip very productive!) and ticked them off the list. I also inevitably encountered unmissable magic that improves my perception and experience, sometimes transformatively.

We’re just about to start another loop in the creative cycle. Conversations and quiet parallel play pointing in all the sacred directions and expanding the circle.

One way to locate in abundance is to turn the senses appreciatively to what was, is, and is becoming. Then, walk around a bit.

On the Tucson trip, I called my sisters, had a chat with the divine folks upstairs, cleaned up around me, and left 20 bucks under a rock at the church. Driving north, like magic, the coordinates for this next loop and lap in the journey appeared on the horizon ahead.