Thursday, September 13, 2018

the practice


   

                        (this is what i tell myself when i have trouble starting- writing that is)


This week I returned to a practice I've had but then often abandon. Not sure if abandon is the correct word more like get lazy and just don't do it. The practice I'm talking about is morning pages, from the Artist's Way book. 3 pages every morning write. Not every morning produces magical writing that I want to share or ever read again. 99% of it is random word associations, filling up lines with inky scribble script, watching the pen move just to move, but then sometimes like this morning the writing surprises me. It brings me to a place I didn't know I could go. It makes me feel. Yes Feel. When I was in graduate school for art, a professor who was a painter asked me, "What are you after?" My response then was, "I'm after not being after." Clever for the zen buddha in me but not completely accurate. Perhaps I did think that then. Yet now if i were to be asked that same question, it would be different. Actually I'm after something. And it's huge but tiny and invisible and lifts me by the armpits dangling feathers on my cheek. It's a fragment between seconds that almost slips by unnoticed.  It speaks a star spun language and gallops garden air on my tongue. It wants me to sit here and I want to sit with it wanting me to sit here.  Damn it...I am after something. It is real because I feel it. I feel it telling me in it's own feeling way, this is why I am here. I am after more then I can say I am after for I'm afraid it will sound too bold or kind of insane.  I am after the grace of one line, one mark, one image, one tiny action step leading to the next without my knowing what it is before I reach it. I am after the body that bows with thank you, this this this. I am after having what I am after every day to know, grow, and share. I am after filling what I am after into books and art and whatever shape makes me more awake to who I am and what I continue to be after.

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