I’m trying to find my pulse now. I keep pressing two fingers against the opposite wrist, trying to locate proof of life, trying to get a sense of my natural rhythm. I’ve started and stopped a handful of projects in the studio. The inspiration only lasts for a couple of days or hours before it fizzles out and I toss the project aside — out of sight, out of mind, into the scrap heap. I’ve never needed to cleanse my palate so repeatedly. So redundantly. So obsessively. I’m like a person who needs to wash their hands every five minutes.
My soul wants to gargle salt water, spit and repeat.
I need something deeper burning. I need something longer lasting. I need a fine fire instead of bursts of untamable sparks.
I talked to a creative friend about idea making, about dreaming up ideas, choosing from those ideas and how to actually go about following through and making good the commitment to a project — for me, seeing an idea through to the end, to completion, is one of the greatest and most terrible aspects of creative work. I want to commit myself and my hands to the ideas that sink the deepest and plague me the most, the ideas that keep me awake at night, torn between the indolence of sleep and the loud, blank pages of my sketchbook where it sits on the travel table in the front of the Airstream. Those are the ideas that need to be exorcized, exercised, pulled out like thin threads from the silk of my mind and released into thin air.
Ideas need freedom.
In this in-between time when my own pulse seems lost to me (or rather, misplaced), it’s a time for dreaming and taking stock and building thoughtful momentum. I grow impatient with that kind of work, I want to see the tangible fruit of my labor and I want to see it now. I act spoilt. I rebel against the notion that there are creative chores that hold hands with the beauty and bounty and productivity of creative work. I cannot have one without the other.
It takes work and concentration to rise up into a space of clarity.
This week, I find myself wondering if my ideas come out of me as victims of over-gestation due to the long breaks from the studio I have been forced to take over the past couple of years. I have a sense of being ridden under tight rein, constrained by a tight cinch. I’m desperate to take the bit in my teeth.
Can an idea be over-mature, past a point where I can intuitively muddle my way through it, step by step, rabbit trail by rabbit trail? Do ideas have expiration dates? I sometimes imagine that by the time I make it into the studio my ideas are falling from me like over-ripe, wasp-bitten pears from lofty tree branches…like babies born with size fourteen feet and wisdom teeth. The bright birth of idea and concept can seem, at times, delayed, wizened, too-grown-up.
When I tinker, play, grow and create, I want to toy with seeds that are thirsty for sunlight and rain, tiny things that hold promises of aliveness, fullness and the story of growth, development and evolution.
Perhaps the thing to do here is to step out in faith, over and over again, fight my way to the new surface of things, kick and pull past the old rot and up into the lively place of thrumming and gusting possibility.
