To NOT

To NOT be yourself is expensive!

On Writing

Writing is a place I go -- to hold myself!

Belonging

Art belongs to all of us. It is thorugh Art we discover who we really are.

Rolling Stones Wisdom

You can't always get what you want...but, did you get what you needed?....

Moving IN

Creating works of writing art is hard, discipined work. Writing is a personal, devotional practice. How can I not turn my full attention into its embracing arms when it contains the totality of Me?

Writing has become this place for me. Thank you, Art, for living and breathing in me so I can aspire to create life art for all to enjoy.

Process II

No one values Process more than the artist. The artist knows it is the spine of Process where discovery transforms into joy. Long live Process. There is no greater wonder than this to the ever-evolving being called the artist.

Process

Accept everything in Process. Great art is created when Process is honored because everything in Process serves the final art called Form.

Stand-Alone

Enjoy the singular beauty of each day. Refrain the need to impose repetition. Let each day stand-alone. You will come to understand the true meaning of beauty. Each day contains its own flow, its own breath, its own power. Glory unflowers daily onto anyone who cares to listen.

Places & Spaces - Negotiation 101

We all need places and spaces in our lives where we can go and find the rhythm of our voice. It is our responsibility, and ours alone, to create our own unique portals of expression. Only we can ever truly know what it is that we need -- in what way, shape, size, quantity and volume that speaks to our growing spirit within.

Places & spaces vary to accommodate the ever-changing shifting seasons within. So, march on soldier, and create the places & spaces you hunger for. Fit them into your life, come hell or high water. You'll be glad you did.

Community

A community is Spirit, enlarged. That is, a community is any place or space that enlarges spirit.

Sprint Writer

I am a sprint writer. I write in the form of a 50-yard dash. I run to the end of a thought and call it writing. Well, it's feels more like a writing prayer than anything else. But let's just call it writing for now so I don't feel like a complete loser.

I've been feeling like it was time for me to a shot at a 100-yard dash. So, miraculously I just finished my first short story. Repeat -- finished! Not started and I'll get back to it later as 72 weeks go by and it's still sitting there while I have start several new ones. Actually D-O-N-E and gotta tell you, DONE feels rather good. I'm celebrating done - doesn't always come easy in creative process.

Feels like I've dropped 10 lbs (though I am actually struggling to drop 5) but that's a whole another story. For now, mission accomplished and I'm going to soak in the aura of my own done-ness for a seriously short possibly seriously long while....

Thirst4Me

Heaven knows we are strangers unto ourselves.

Thirst4writing is a place I go to hear the sound of myself. Through myself I can hear right through to the other side. All sides point to the thirst within. The sound that holds the echoes of my own voice, is like a path, leading me back to Self - the silent place that holds all my selves.

Space Called Art

Art + writing = Sanity. 'nuff said.

Pores

As writers and artists, our pores are always open. Sometimes we have to shut them down...for our own good so we can practice our art. As we learn more of who we are through the practice of practicing MORE of who we are, more or less now appears as our NEW practice.

Solo Artist

Biking this morning, enjoying a picture postcard day. Spotted a bird beauty perched high atop high wire. Solo Artist -- singing her song. She didn't seem to care whether anyone was listening. I was the lucky one who stumbled on her song. Decided right then and there, we all need to be like our little bird - solo artists carrying on. Doesn't matter if anyone is listening. Should anyone happen to eavesdrop on our song, then THEY are the lucky ones ...

Writing above all is a spiritual practice.

Sitting Out for Awhile

After awhile, everything seems redundant. Spells of excitement, follow a natural pattern of redundancy. Boredom is part of life. As a kid, I couldn't stand to be bored. Now, as an adult I crave boredom -- a true sign of liberation. Sitting out for awhile is more engaging that I ever recall...

Winding Road

Life is a winding road, sometimes with no particular destination in mind. It's a nice way to live, until life gets in the way. Being free is no easy path -- takes every bit of muscle and twitching to boot, to get it right if there ever is such a thing. Getting it right is as much about getting it wrong. Crack open mistakes and really look to see what you find inside. Guaranteed it's more interesting than the doors you sail through...

Creative Dance

Creative writing is about making ideas dance on paper -- so lonely ideas can meet one another, and share a dance ...

Filling our Lives...

...with what matters is no easy task. This assumes you know what matters before you fill up. Sometimes as experience would have it, you fill up only to realise what you thought what matters and its expectations don't always line up so neatly. Then, it is back to the filling up drawing board. But maybe that's what make life so fun and adventurous -- to hold everything lightly, not tightly, and to move with new freshness into each new adventure and let it reveal what it has in store for us. I could easily live with that kind of fill-up strategy...

Exhaling Studio

Writing is my teacher. From this wise teacher, I am learning I and things do not necessarily follow a logical order. At best, I am a varied set of moving parts. Sometimes in concert, other times not so much. Having to live inside my sense and sensibility (or lack thereof) is part of the moving picture lesson I am learning to grasp. While I grasp this, I realise at the same time it is best to even let this go. The moving picture will keeps moving, whether I am awake or asleep. When I try to make sense of life, I know it's time to write. Writing is my pause -- the narrow passage I consciously enter to bare myself. The more I bare, more I can bear. It's then I realise I don't disappear; rather, I appear in new forms I didn't know existed. Writing helps to soothe the edges, hold the fragment and filaments together in certain and uncertain times.

From writing I am finally learning to exhale. Long live the exhaling studio!

Shaper

Writing is a consternation of individual links looking to hook into a larger chain link. Ideas create themselves and then look for the masseuse to work out the knots and kinks. The artist massages them until they become something pliable and form able. What the artist seems to enjoy most is process, while an audience much prefers the "product." It is in process where artists feel most united, to focus and shape the end product to represent and express symbolism and constraints that fueled its creation in the first place. This circle called process, the giving of life to the product, is where I feel most useful, abundant and glorified and united as a writer|artist. I think if it as my private place in this greater chain link of life called the ever-evolving artist-self.

Writing NewsBits

Writing is a relationship with ideas that like to talk back.

Each time I write, I discover how much I love it. I am even making peace with knowing that no one may ever "hear" my writing, but so long as the writing is there to hear me, all is good. Writing gives back in ways that are difficult to put into words. Words don't lie. They speak what is on the surface, ready to align with the news, that connects the surface to something far deeper, unseen beneath.

Writing makes me so happy. It is at once an empty place I get to fill with the contents of myself and in a strange way, I discover it is myself who I have been thirsting for all along.

Writing Talk

Write when your heart aches. Write when you mind aches. From this, good writing appears all by itself.

Talking to The Box

It scares me we are becoming more and more comfortable talking to The Box, e.g. the computer. Will we ever remember how to connect to people again? I wonder if it is just me or are we becoming more and more isolated as a whole society ...because of The Box? Shared interaction is taking on a whole new meaning. We seem to be perfectly comfortable sharing ourselves with perfect strangers, hoping they drop in to our lives through The Box, while those whom we already share lives with are becoming perfect strangers? I don't know ... you tell me....

Defending...and Defining Spirituality

What if we lived in an inverted world where spirituality gets relegated to the role of money worship and money returns to more spiritual roots? How would we function...would be be better off as a society -- happier maybe, more free to be ourselves? I suspect we are all a long way away from letting go of idolizing our obsession of money worship (despite what we say). Entrusting a whole society to a world "unseen" involves a collective surrender. Defending spirituality is a highly personal matter and defining is yet a whole another different kind of matter...

Spiritual Maturity

Spiritual maturity brings a certain sense of quiet detachment that holds nothing and everything with equal endearment. It is a strange yet comforting place to be. Old thinking called mistakes is none other than "spiritual immaturity." Growing, discovering, wondering and moving with the all disparaging pieces of yourself is awakening. Spiritual maturity fights nothing, does not stand in the way of anything, and is fully accepting without "giving up."

Inhabiting a single quiet morning, I discover a new rhythm called Self. Here I discover Time masquerading as Grace, ever so gently turning silence into creation, one moment and then another and another. In this ever presence, I find a kinder, more gentler rediscovery or shall I say "recovery" of my very own existence. I think I shall stay and recover in this place for awhile simply because I am rather enjoying this new founded place. I will sit and wait, to see what new "I" rolls to the shores...

"To be someone, as an artist, means: to be able to speak one's self." - Rilke

The Allure

The constancy of inhabiting new spaces draws me in like nothing else. Spaces foreshadow lives drawn, behind a curtain of a living cocoon. Like beehives, houses inhabit worker bees, hidden away in between acts of living. I am fascinated with space -- architecture, composition, interior marriage to exterior. The whole thing has some kind of magnetizing hold over me. Why -- I have no idea? My curiosity is the only staple, guided by an unquenchable thirst to know who lives inside the bare threads of spaces, behind walls that can't talk.

Writing Therapy

I write for myself. I am discovering writing for myself is enough. Making sense of all our selves is hard work. Getting to know our own layers is a process -- of choices, of understanding but most of all, it is a process of acknowledgement for all that we are -- and all that we are not!

Raw Artist

Raw art speaks - artist responds -- listens -- observes -- records. Observation analysis: raw-artist-in-progress. Proceed with abandon full speed ahead.

Artist Filter

It is the job of the artist to filter emotions, in order to arrive at what is absolute necessary, once the unnecessary is shed with absolute certainty.

A Long Journey

It takes a very long time to find a resting place, where we at once believe we belong...

Private Lives

There was a wonderful store in Chicago called Private Lives. It was purveyor of fine bed linens. I loved the store name, and the simple way in which the logo design captured my imagination. I bought my first set of sheets there. Gleefully giddy to pick from a wide array of already finely selected merchandise, my first boutique experience signaled the arrival of married life. Who knew shopping for bed sheets could be such a grown-up fun. Never mind that I picked black and white checkered sheets -- marvelous and horrible at the same time. Of all things I could choose from, this is what I came up with? I would like to think I was ahead of my time. I'd like to think I had some design sensibility back then when I didn't know any better! Without black and white, we would be lost...in our own private lives.

Our art...

..belongs to us, and those with whom we choose to share it.

Art Smart

When we remain fully open, the Miraculous can speak into our art. As we speak with It, the art creates us, as its creating Itself.

Thirst

Do we ever know what it is EXACTLY we thirst for? With each changing day, it seems our thirst changes. So how is one to proceed through life when moments "breeze in and breeze out?" so we can hardly "catch" anything anymore? Anchoring ourselves in our changing nature is one way to stay connected...

On The Process

We need to love the road we are on. As with all roads, there are challenges once we step on. Writing is a slipper slope. When you begin, writing can be crystal clear. But the more time you spend in it, the waters start to get muddy from all the motion. Sometime, it is best to let the sediments settle and return back to writing with fresh, new eyes. Then you can see what needs moving...and what needs to stay put.

On Writing

When I write, time disappears and I disappear into it. Why can't I disappear more often?

Resplendent

Why is it that we search far and away when the beauty of Life speaks directly into us in every moment?

Urge

The urge to create is fundamental to our nature. Don't block creativity. Instead, encourage it to flow, like breathe. When we block, we limit our own capacities to breath in and out what is possible.

No Expectations

Expectations come with writing; writing comes with expectations. Exploratory writing helps move flow where to where it wants to go. Not interferring takes discipline. Drop expectations during writing and allow writing to direct the course of itself.

Poeme

"Each one of us should speak of his roads, his cross-roads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows." - G. Bachelard

Le moutonnement des haies
C'est en moi que je l'ai

|the frothing of the hedges
I keep inside me|

Poe'me by Jean Whal

Togetherness

Perfect Beauty. Step-in-step, we

march towards our own

innocence.

Thunderstruck

Reading an excerpt from T.E. Hulme's classic essay, "Romanticism & Classicism," I watched the rain and lightening duke it out in the early morning playground sky. Nestled cozily in bed, my mind seemed to trailed off with the wise words before me. I wrote the following passage below, deeply inspired from the words ..."freshness convinces you, you feel at once when you read something, the artist in a physical state...."

A level of sincerity that speaks in an alerted state is the first experience of creation. Everything I, as an artist see, touch, feel, and romanticize about is first grounded in my-now-moment, the experience that arrests the beauty before me. This creates movement towards language, to capture the just-experienced reality. I have always believed anything felt with sincerity is the beginning point of art. The deep sound of the artist's emotional exuberance felt first, alone in a moment is the inspiration that invites the artist to "turn-around" the experience, from private art to public rendering. The arrest is a pause, often unexpected where the artist withholds judgement of the experience but holds onto to it just long enough to extract the substance of experience. This is the catalyst for art to emerge from within the artist.

Fiber of Life, Tension & Other Discord

Art loves tension. The rubberband of creativity loves the springboard of discord. Without tension, there is no momentum towards resolution. Embrace the agitation in your life! It is the fiber of life that moves creativity!

Free Fall into Art

Let art and language die into each other, uniting and untying, what lives in both.

The Art of Encouragement

We need not always "understand" someone else's art. So long as the art speaks to its creator, our job is to encourage its growth. Movement towards supports our own art so it, too, one day can flower its own blooms.

Negotiating Art & Life

Make room for your art. With practice, you will discover art and life are a single movement. Writing, like all art, teaches one how to breathe life from Life.

god of emptiness

The god of emptiness cometh,

to fill the rapture of our season;

rising ever so close

to meet the depths of our ashes;

worn torn silence once held the broken-ness of our soul,

now moving into the great Circle within." -t4w

Virtual Writer's Studio

My blog serves as a "virtual writer's studio," to reflect on changing elements of current works in progress. Best part - studio is two- step commute from my bedroom. I can go "in to work" anytime and stay as late as I want. The blog-studio contains changing bites, bit-n-pieces, along with "gallery space." Drafts live in the edit workroom until they are ready. Everything is contained in one space, good for tracking. My blog-studio feels like any other workplace. I come here to work, work on work, gather with and around things whose current and future common purpose I am exploring. The virtual workplace invites others with common passion, to join in the conversation, without having to leave their own workrooms! May be technology has a redeeming value after all...

"When art is good, it invites a private conversation." - T4W

The Art of Honesty


In art, honesty is best
Art is the Best Honesty

Honesty is the Best Art

the best is honest

All Art Is Honesty

Honesty is Art

The Gift

I am always amazed at how process appears in "clusters." The reason -- because process seeks relationship to something or someone - ideas cluster together to better help us make new connections. My friend Lisa dropped off a book she felt I MUST read. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde offers a theory of gift exchange and the language around the life of the artist. Art and artists share. A gift he says, is "something that must always move" - it must be passed on. Two economies exist in our culture - the market economy and the gift economy. Art originates in the latter and struggles in the former. Check it out. Not a light or playful read, but thoughtful in the most original way...

"If art acts as an agent of transformation then we may correctly speak of it as a gift." - The Gift, Lewis Hyde

Live in the Questions

"Try to love the questions themselves..don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke

Speaking Into Machine

Speaking into a machine is not easy. Sometimes its too easy. Speakingintoamachinesishorrible?where is the human being?

Artist's Voice

Pablo Casals, the great cellist once said, "inside every artist are two people -- the technician and the interpreter." Nicholas Loren, our daughter's voice teacher, shared this great quote with me. He added, "to the degree the technician is in control, the interpreter can live." The instrument of voice, whether in writing or singing are "both incredibly personal and highly vulnerable." I get it. Writing, not unlike singing, involves deep work before any "interpreter" can emerge.

Nicholas's website, http://www.nicholasloren.com/

On the Writing Life

Writing exists in relationship. As the writing flows, write alongside it. As it informs you, you inform it. Let the new relationship speak to you. As you move towards your writing, let the writing respond, and allow it to move closer towards you.

"To say the same with same words does not constitute progress." - Rilke