If Only One Thing Is True In Life & Art, It’s This…
Even though I have a somewhat religious way of wanting to do the same thing every day, I can only handle it so long before I crave escape from the confines. Limitations are helpful for a while creatively. Linear codes, like systems on a grid and writing the same number of pages every day, no matter what, showing up.
Or wearing something bizarre and walking down the street to practice discomfort. Or standing out. Strengthening the muscle of being yourself- whoever that is. An imperfectly personified human of His perfect Holy Spirit breathed into you...Now, if that's not enough to take you on an existential rollercoaster, I don't know what is.
I'm ready for a new season, a new expression of being as close to who God created me to be as possible. Because I can only stay put so long before something starts stirring. Starts making me feel frantic inside. Swirling. Anxious. Desperate for the surge of remembering who I am with God. And it's only when I come back into that perfect dance with Him, the source of all creation, including me, as his creation- I guess I just want to give Him a good show to watch.
Life is a curious and confusing and beautiful and sometimes torturous series of events of forgetting and remembering yourself. And though I want to ride that captivating ocean-side route of creativity and co-creation with the Big Man upstairs, God, as much as possible, after a while, I can't help but want to say, 'Man, can you believe we made out of there?'
If only one thing is sure in art and life, it's the inherent requirement for structure and chaos. Known and mysterious. Certainty and risk. Seen and felt. As a writer, you need both equally. A wild life worth writing about and the militant, ritualistic routine of sitting down in the same place, at the same time, every. Single. Day. You have to eat, sleep, and breathe it. Only one step below God Himself in your hierarchy of needs.