trying
What if it’s the Post-It notes, the scraps of paper, the unseemly assortment of uncured ideas, that are more important than the completed essay?
What if it’s the sketches, the rough drawings, the drafts, that are of greater value than the finished painting?
What if the practice, the process, the iterating, are the real ground of all making?
What if we blessed the mess? Honored and embraced it? The hesitation and the stumbling. The scribbled-out words and sentences. Half-formed. Half-fashioned. Half-written. The marks that missed. The colors that dimmed and diminished. The mole-hill that becomes a mountain in the waste-bin. The false starts and the unhappy endings. What if these are our truest galleries and our most honest exhibitions?
There’s a farce in our finished pieces. A falsity. They present themselves as inevitable. As if they arrived fully formed and draped in clarity. They hide the fits, foibles, and misgivings. The wrong turns that brought them into being.
The real art of making isn’t the shiny object hanging on a white wall or on a polished surface. It’s the doubt and the wandering. The scratches, fragments, and revisions. The debris and detritus.
It’s the trying.
May you trust the unfinished.
May you honor the work that betrays what you’re expecting.
May you always be found revising.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
Lovely Duane, maybe this is applicable to the creative forces in relationships and in living too. Something in The Marginalian today mentioned rising like a mountain from a fault line to change the landscape of our lives. Red hot joy from dead grey rock.
Courageously in art and in living, we might surrender to the beauty in the mess of it.
Experimenting, bothering to keep trying. It's the calling.
This is, more or less, my ethos. For better or worse 😅