pulses
There’s a moment in the making when your fingers start to tingle. When the work is alive with the hum of possibility. When you feel two pulses simultaneously. Two hearts pumping unanimously. The one in your chest and the one in the work as it finds its rhythm, when nothing becomes something and starts breathing. It’s why you came here. It’s why you do it. It’s what you’re always pursuing. It’s everything.
And then it’s finished.
The paint dries. The music fades. The last line quiets. The glue stiffens. And something leaves. Something’s different.
The shift is neither dramatic, climactic, nor paradigmatic. It’s just something that happens. A silent withdrawing. A quiet exiting. You captured the thing you were chasing. It became what it was becoming. And now it’s stopped moving.
It’s a paradox that arrives without warning. You are pulled towards the glowing vitality of making things, and yet there is a vibrancy dulled and dulling in the very act of finishing.
The aliveness was never pinned to completion. It was in the reaching. In the not-yet of opening possibilities. In the space between nothing and something. In two pulses meeting.
And so you watch, wait, and listen. You return to the beginning. Back to the chase. Back to the tingling. Back to the moment when two hearts find each other in the darkness and start speaking.
May your fingers always tingle with possibility.
May the darkness hold two hearts in unison.
May you always find your way back to the chasing.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
Thoughtful, Duane. I'm drawn to collages, because they really make you think. I love the idea of layering materials, to emulate human psychology, to evoke deeper meaning to thoughts and actions, whether your prose leads or follows, or simply depends on how it flows, to create an emotional synergy you seem to have mastered. Thanks for sharing.
Yes I did just turn my laptop upside down to read the handwriting on that amazing little scrap of old paper!
Gorgeous words, gorgeous collages. As usual.