Artist Daily Journal
The life of my things. Something new, something orange, something green, something pink. Something is the something that fulfills the desire to butterfly from the cocoon of stale feeling. Waking up the day. Black and white lines etch detail. The right lip gloss, the right hand creme, razor, bathing suit. Facing outwards, my self a full length book cover. What's inside? Striving. Having desire beyond those you serve and protect, having desire for something "out there." I know my style, I know the shape that I take, I know I can't change from myself, but I can improve, etch into what I am, bulge out from the bones I've got.
My shoes are stacked in a box and I can't decide if their time with me is over. Maybe there will be a day when they aren't over for me. Really, it's about the closet space: Do I want to look at the closet and see too much or see just enough so that the choice is clear - one pair of choose?
You let them go when there's no charge, says Marie Kondo, helping us towards minimalist organization. But "mood," whatever that thing is, that declares YELLOW, declares "more!" really. Medium Green Bright! Robins Egg Blue. Periwinkle. Hot Pink. Warm Bright Yellow. Soft Orange Pink. Did you know that so many light pinks are really soft corals, in the orange family? Did you know that a warm gray is made of green and red (and black and white), or a touch of red? Gray is not one color, it's decidedly a choice.
I feel a tension between the desire to be complete in the moment, without need of things, and the clear connection between my self-expression and the acquiring of new things. Also, the fact that what will be important and worth keeping, in the closet and in the experiences we have, is not known beforehand. When I learn a new thing, it may not become important in my life. Though sometimes it does. If I learn how to bead a ring, or weave a blanket, or if I sign up for German classes, which will be important? The closest I can come is the charge Marie Kondo talks about, that I can feel it, especially in the resistance to a thing, as expressed by rejection of it. Once I say I don't like white pants, pilates, Tolstoy, you can bet I'll be wearing it, doing it, and reading it soon. You need something to lean in against to push forward.
There's a resistance to moving forward, and letting go of the known entity. I know someone who worships themselves (a supreme expert in her profession, she believes, a seer, best at x, who "knows" because she meditates on a question). I love the contagiousness of this as I'm more a plant constantly tipping over from the wind - I may believe in my work, but it doesn't hold me upright all the time - that would be a relief from my perpetual moody tipping. However, this person can't bind to another, because that would repeat an intentional relationship. And oddly, without lasting connection, there is not possibility to become again, snake shedding its skin but still that snake. We cycle out and through our old choices, we want to rise through the relationships that affect us positively, making us feel held as we go to the next and more.
The mantra I hear in advertising today, meaning also then in the self-talk we are meant to repeat as affirmation to ourselves, is that we are the only thing that is real and that context serves as the backdrop to our "true essence," something by the way, that is not mind, but heart and soul (what are those?), something invisible only known to ourselves.
Well, that's not a fair proof! And besides, the opposite is true. The context, and usually the tangible, is what we choose, and what we are. We choose to go right or left, east or west, to sit or stand; we become into the place we choose. We become into the objects we carry with us. This is not a chicken and egg question of wearing red to be confident, no. But when we want to feel confident, we bring in some red. Need? Maybe not, but we feel it, we feel red. I usually find a token, a lip gloss, a ring, something that winks back, a glint in the eye murmuring "yes, yes, yes, that's it." I am here, in this red. Only outside of my self can I see what's real, only in the reaching for the other can I connect in the world and become. There is no self without breath hitting the air, we are not here when gone, and logically, there is no invisible thing.
So, as to the desire to scratch off the stuff that is from before, that seems that it may not be for the today and tomorrow whim, better to put those things, those shoes away from yourself so that you can see them, reach for them. This is a cycle built by literal distance, so that we may reach out and take to us what makes us new to the day. The fact that we have to leave our home to go to a shop where someone else has something that we don't have, this is what makes us feel we have travelled towards a new realization. We have had to shoes the choose we will walk in today.
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