Engine swamp

I think I was holding my breath most of today. Not so as to turn blue, but definitely enough to feel that tight, irritated, impatience return and, as the day wore on, that feeling of losing certainty of bearing--whether I was tired, hungry, dangerous, whether in the next moment I would be able to imagine something I would actually want to do--I couldn't tell. In the relative peace after dinner I sat and breathed. I needed to be upstairs with the door shut so the cats wouldn't find me, no stereo up there, so I sat with myself for the first time since meditation class started. No cd, no teacher present.

After 15 minutes I realized I had been starved for oxygen and breathing felt so good. Every inhalation an exponential increase in possibility, I am ready for anything, every exhalation a smoothing, a preparation, I am not in control. So funny to think the first few times I sat I had the feeling of not being able to breathe. I started to lose my despair in the kid's bickering and the reasons that Steve had been in the wrong and the feeling that perhaps I didn't so detest having to find new ways to eat the most expensively procured many vacuum sealed packs of fish Steve and Theo brought back from their little jaunt to Alaska last summer . . .

Yesterday at the end of yoga while we were still in savasana Jen opened the door to the studio and we heard the rain. It was so beautiful. I would be oversimplifying my emotional reaction to write briefly about it here. But I collected that appreciation together (as Steve says, I instinctively group like objects) with the visual memory from a few days before of light streaky marks of rain falling in a wash of low-angled sunlight as I drove home, also completely, well, convincing, if you know what I mean. I haven't felt this positive about rain since I was in elementary school and living in the tropics, ready to strip to my underwear and run or ride my bike through deep inches of standing, flowing, and pooling water.

Last spring I went to a monoprinting workshop that gave me so much hope. The workshop instructor, a printmaker named Kevin Fletcher, talked about staying in the abstract, working with the grid, leaving ideas of images you wanted to appear to be hypothetical conceits, locked in a safe. In a way, he was saying that coming to creativity the back way can hold you, can find you while you are humming a few rhymes and dibbling your toes in the water . . . every line, every mark you make is still true, isn't it, it's just that you are letting it tell it's own story, instead of making something up for it to be. Make yourself available.

Anyway what I'm trying to convey is my great relief and astonishment when I heard someone (successful and interesting) saying "don't have a goal. Just make the motions." Now to be sure, it was clear he had an immense catalog of images in his head, just stacks and stacks of memories and references to architectural, natural, and every other kind of shape or structure. That must be very helpful. When he saw the print above, which I had in spite of his directives to resist naming or identifying any part of our work before it was done started thinking of as a reedy swamp, he said "fabulous! (that's a good teacher, eh? first thing he says is encouraging) that makes me think of the engine block of a Chevy Impala." My college literature professor said memory was a useful critical tool . . . what an understatement. Its a creative tool as well.

I hope that I can start returning to art in this way, around the back, not with an irrational goal or self-conscious expectations but with a few hummable riffs and some water on the way.