Harbinger of Nothing in Particular

"To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception. The act of art is a tool for extended consciousness..." --Robert Irwin

I seem to be on some kind of all-work sabbatical. Not a dull girl at all, but I'm picking expectations off me like ticks. Toiling with my mind and not getting my hands dirty is frustrating - especially when I set my sights on some particular subtle outcome involving a "feeling" about the results of these hours of concentration. What a hair-shirt!

When I gather knowledge it makes me happy to soak it up greedily, for it never seems like a bad thing at the time. My penchant for excitement and drama strips from it any idealistic appeal. I'm a realist at heart. I know that a generalist like me can never hope to approach perfection in any one thing. Not anything that can be demonstrated or that comes with a piece of parchment that proves mastery. I am condemned to an almost exclusively subjective inner experience. And this is what I attempt to record here.

I don't want anything from you. I'm not trying to be funny. I don't have anything to sell you. I do not have the latest breaking news on stocks, stars or technology. There is no-thing, no trick I can try to offer here that isn't duplicated around this web-world in a thousand other ways (nicer looking, better prose, more effective allusions/metaphors and more lofty conclusions).

My hands are empty and I love this feeling at this time of year. I am not Christian, but I celebrate Christmas. Not for the birth of a son of God, but for the rebirth of the light of Spiritus Mundi. Every year when darkness falls it seems a poignant commentary on something in my life and everything around me! It is indeed darkest before the dawn. I find it lovely how the dawn occurs each year whether one is in need of a rebirth of faith in one's life or not. The allegory is not lost on me (just the literal facts).

I am entertained by the way that I can see beauty all around me and not be able to express it to my satisfaction. I love that I find some people's soul so beautiful it pains me... and how I say nothing about it to them or of them. I like the secret. I like the juiciness of that one clear connection that remains unsaid. It is a fully actualized thought that neither whores itself, nor hides itself like a hermit. It's not up to me to draw conclusions, but to let these thoughts fly, unencumbered by judgment.

I'm writing this for me in the way I would trace my name into the sand at East Beach. I heart me. I heart this spicy existence and this imperfect blog. I heart the way I love the darkness of a mind in turmoil, an ordinary day full of ordinary experiences, and the way my reaction to events irks me to craziness. I heart the way I burn bridges, the ruthless way I reject. I heart my unfinished projects (and my ridiculous lust for world domination). And the effort it takes to hit publish. It's not that deep, not that exciting. It's not for anyone's pleasure, this secret post. But that is at the heart of creation: faith in the process.

In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
~from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound