The first entry / Becoming the both-between

My first attempt at just throwing all the stuff received in my ceremony at the wall—can we call this a “work”?!?

This is one of my great struggles. Things come pouring into me from the astral and spewing out all over my journal, sketchbooks, notepad app, and voice memos, then sit unopened, dissolving into the electronic aether. I am constantly tortured by collecting these things that are demanding to be shared, and not knowing what to do with them. The thought that haunts me is: How do I make these things I’m doing, this art and writing and practice and praxis, into WORKS, that someone will see, and hopefully see themselves in; that can help someone.

If I don’t, and if it doesn’t, what the fuck am I doing?

And what is work, anyway? Why must one be produced for someone to be an artist? If it isn’t, did the thing even happen?

Of course it did, this is something I feel to my bones. The ceremony is so beautiful because it’s the space free from the tyranny of words: a cruel mistress I increasingly yearn to escape.

So of course, this only makes her draw the noose tighter. Learn not to fight it…

…but also to allow the words to pass like clouds or waves, as the meditators always say, somewhat annoyingly, as if it’s that easy. Oh, sure, I’ll just turn 40 years of neuroses off and sit here in almost-half-lotus, which I couldn’t even do before I broke my pelvis—and there it is right there, the inner critic that has to cut me down for everything, and I do mean everything. It’s a lifetime of conditioning, developed as a coping mechanism, and the work is to remember that I didn’t start doing this to hurt me, but protect me. We don’t actually act against our own self-interest, that’s a Western myth created to keep us dependent on pills and institutions and gurus of all sorts; at one point, this thing we’re doing saved our lives. Otherwise, we’d have never started.

The problem comes when it becomes maladaptive to the current circumstances, and we keep doing it anyway. But the key is to treat it with understanding and compassion.

It’s okay, kid. That was now; this is then.

So, I will try to let this work speak for itself, and see if it has something to say that makes sense and brings something to somebody who sees it.

Hilarious AI summary of the below audio—software that, fascinatingly, always detects my solo notes as at least two different people speaking…

Today’s altar, with the card Kit drew for me on the ofrenda.