March 31, 2009

  • I have always felt a need for permanence.  I saved everything I ever created.  There are many moments during my day when I wish I had a video camera to record what's happening.  I write things so that they will exist forever.  I always hated sandcastles because they wouldn't stay. 
    What I want is for everything I see and create and experience to last forever.  As a result, I have clutter.  In my rooms, in my closets, in my mind, in my heart.  I can't feel clean because everything is cluttered.

    But yet, I fear impermanence.  Entropy.  The fact that everything I know and am will dissolve away into nothing.

    It's not death I fear, not exactly.  I fear not my death, but the death of my ideas.

    And so lately, I have been embracing this fear.  Some may call it facing a fear, but to me, fear is something natural.  You can never challenge fear and completely win.  I am not staring down fear.  I am embracing its existence (its permanence in my life?) and doing things in spite of it.  I accept my fear.  I know that it will always exist, so I am not allowing it to be secret anymore.  Recognizing, accepting, embracing fear.

    I am embracing impermanence.

    I am drawing and writing on tables that do not belong to me, putting a lot of work into something that I know will be gone by the time I get back.  I am writing anonymous notes, folding them up, writing READ ME on the outside (how very Wonderland of me!), and leaving them in public places (thanks, you-know-who-you-are, for the idea).  I am doing the things I need, and then giving them away.

    I am a response to my world.  OF COURSE I am a response!  I will always be a response to my world.  The difference is that I am not whispering anymore.  I am interrupting my surroundings, and allowing them to interrupt me.

    I was angry today.  Angrier than I have allowed myself to feel for a very long time.  I was full of fuck yous: fuck your impatience, fuck your interruption of my silence, fuck your inability to see past your own eyes.  No one was welcome here.  Everyone was getting a secret fuck you.

    The result is I got a lot done.

    I am still feeling a need for solitude and silence, but there are no fuck yous.  Or, at least, they've been diluted.
    I am satisfied with my day, yet I feel no satisfaction.
    This is good for me.  It keeps me working.  Toward ... impermanence.  Which I would achieve anyway, work or no.