Dear Reader,
Make the thing, share the thing, breathe, repeat. That’s the artists life I signed up for. I just want to make stuff, share stuff, rest appropriately in between projects and then start over again. Lately I have been relearning the simplicity and profundity of choosing to live that way. It’s simply about reducing and reclaiming your locus of control. I can’t control how my art, my music or my writing is going to be received by the world. All I can control is how deeply I choose to honour my desire to make things.
It’s easy to get a little bitter as you get older. Having decades behind you where your creativity has been repeatedly ignored does not do the ego any wonders. Singing to empty rooms is fun in your twenties, it hits different as you get older. I spoke before about the damage it did to me to keep showing up to a space that increasingly felt like it wanted me dead. That’s why I stopped making or even sharing what I made for over 10 years. The mistake I made in that decade was that I thought that being ignored meant I shouldn’t make art at all. I let other people dictate my relationship to my own creativity. Yet, when things in my life went wrong over the years the first thing I wanted to do was make. So I did. Slowly I returned. To the canvas, to the piano, to the page.
The rules I have for my relationship to creativity now are different. The first is that I have to be rooted in joy. If I’m not having fun then what the hell am I even doing? The second is that I give myself mercy when I need to. To avoid burnout or veering off in the wrong direction I have full permission to put down what I’m doing and take as long a break as I need. This helps me avoid getting stuck in perpetual business or getting too abstract and thought heavy. All artists are dreamers and as one I can hand on heart say that I want my work to be loved and shared and part of the unfolding of art itself. I am a dreamer and I dream with such ferocity that the dream itself can sometimes uproot from the practice of art. I can be so busy lost in the “what if’s” that I forget about the “what now.”. I have to kill my dreams almost daily so that I can show up and do what needs to be done in front of me.
This last mercury retrograde has reminded me of all the times in my life that I had to scrub my existence down to the bones. The daily routines. The hundred and one small tasks that require me to show up. The grind. I am reorienting lately...a lot. Refining my goals has always been very challenging for me but I am making way. Slow and steady at the moment and I feel soon that a push will begin. The next ebb and flow. Im excited, appropriately scared but I am choosing to answer the call.
I’ll let you know what happens next!
Big Love
Ryan x