division
The maker lives a divided existence. The outer world of living and the inner realm of making.
On one side of the divide there is pain and ache and longing. Schedules and responsibility. The world that takes and keeps on taking.
And on the other there is solitude and control. Time suspended and expanding. The world that restores everything stolen, in dividends.
Even the maker’s gaze arrives as a division. A juxtaposition. It is a standing back. An objective attention. An exile from experience. And yet, it is also a leaning in. A looking closely. A full absorption into the present-tense of being.
The maker is a citizen of neither space entirely, but lives upon the border. Ever restless, never settled. Always arriving. An inhabitant of the line between things.
The divide isn’t something that needs to be healed, closed, or sutured. It is the condition that feeds the very act of making.
You move through the world that breaks you and return to the silent space of working. You use the hurt as material and you turn it into something tender and honest and beautiful.
It becomes a place of at-one-ment and redemption. Wholeness and completion. And when the work is finished you put your tools down and return to the outer world. A pilgrim, always beginning at the line of division.
May you always find peace at the periphery.
May the restless division keep you making.
May the line between worlds become a place of refuge.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
Such a beautiful description of making as ritual.
This is spectacular, Duane. “You move through the world that breaks you and return to the silent space of working. You use the hurt as material and you turn it into something tender and honest and beautiful.” I think a lot about this…is it the maker’s instinct to do this? Is it something they fall into as a way to simply process experience? At the very least, not everyone has the awareness that this process is even possible…that connection and beauty rise out of the muck. No matter what, it reminds me of the gift that it is to be able to walk between the boundaries of beauty and brokenness. Thank you for sharing, sir.