The process involved in moving across the country gave me a choice, when it came to continuing to write and post here, which was: keep doing that or don’t. I chose not to!
There’s far too much personal processing happening in real time when you do big life changes, everything seems monumental and symbolic and very insignificant at once. I will say I did not have many big feels about leaving the place I’d lived for twenty years, where I became a whole adult (!!), which shaped everything I am now. I was tired. I was working a lot, plagued with restlessness, eating too many baked goods and not sleeping well. The weights began to lift as soon as I moved out of my house, but the damn saga wasn’t over until July 3rd and I’m still dealing with the hangover. What is, where is, my creative practice?
Our surroundings inform so much of what gets churned out of us, yet I have held on to dreams of things I still haven’t begun to make real. Before I moved, there was a hopelessness attached to their non-completion, like I could never catch up to where I needed to be in service to them. Now it feels like purely a matter of time. And not “just” or “only,” as though time is a sweet thing I can sit patiently with. Time is what it is. I believe things will happen whenever they do.
Things that have returned:
My eroticism: felt like a flattened cardboard box for two months but doing some floral arranging and going for walks and the light in my bedroom and some other things (😏) fixed that
My patience: no explanation. Especially since I’m done living on savings and in a mad rush to get bags
Sleep: I sleep very well in my new home. It is surrounded by birds and their song from dawn til dusk. This is especially important since without 9 hours a night and some semblance of nature right next to me I die
Hedonism: this is the one of the best cities to be someone who needs the culturally enabled love of food, wine, people, beauty, spontaneity, humanity, and lack of pretense in order to live
Eyes: I’ve taken my camera out a few times and I now have the reason and the rhythm for making images
Because of a nice alignment of my normie world work with my spicy world work, I’ve been confronted again, more forcefully, with the erotics of clothing, commercially, and privately versus the unclothed body. I’m realizing that for me, the body in clothing has always held more powers, plural because they are vast and unknown until you find them; as singular as each and every ripple in a shirt, and they are as fleeting, too. This motion of the unstatic body with the even more dynamic covering has obviously coded what a gaze searches for or longs to imagine.
But anyway, I spent a lot of time reading and looking at my books today. I made a delicious pink cocktail and enjoyed my own company. That’s another thing; being anonymous in a new place has its upsides, I have no pressure to be anything for anyone and my identity is exactly whatever I am at this time. I am just myself. Maybe I’ll pick up where I left off. Maybe not. There is too much to do and I’m not trying to be cool about it.