In and out, like a haltingly hesitant breath. That’s what my art and in some ways my personality has felt like lately. I step into what is me—I inhale it—it feeds me, the clarity comes… Eyes open, glance around, and…I compare. I don’t SOUND like her. I don’t LOOK like her. The colors are wrong. The perspective is too strong. Too loud. Too sharp. Not strong enough. Too lazy. Get some direction. What are we doing here??—I step out.
And then there’s the inner struggle. The comparisons not of me and other people, but me as is and me as ideal me—my art; my voice; my character; my… everything. ::Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero plays in the background:: That’s a whole different conversation that’s always going on. It’s not what it’s supposed to be… what IS it supposed to be? A mother raising humans to find and believe in and become their best selves. A mother-woman-artist simultaneously raising herself.
Second guessing. I do a lot of second guessing. And I wish, at the very heart of me, to get back to the very heart of me—where I just feel and make and know. The poems used to come like that. The pictures too. Before I started to think too much.
Unhappy with my feed lately but working on it. A little hand on a canyon wall. A wall that is millions of years old, standing in the desert in a historic drought. But somehow here the water flows down—trace amounts, but enough. Enough for moss and ferns to thrive. Enough to carve a canyon wall of stone. The hand reaches, anchors itself to the wall, the moss, the earth, the story, and the water flows over us all.
Exhale.
#am_nationalparks #mangosdozion
