“I get distracted by the sunlight.” Yesterday was my birthday and we are on the second five-day quarantine stint in two weeks due to close COVID contact. We hiked Asylum Lake and walked through two snowstorms of wildly different expression. Without fail every year I wish for a snowstorm on my birthday. Two is an embarrassment of riches, but to honor my dear ones who no longer celebrate birthdays in the corporeal form I don’t second-guess the goodness or my worthiness of it. For a full day plus whatever half life that day offers, I am receptive.
Last night we watched hours of the Beatles collaborating in songwriting flow, meeting each other on a riff and riding it until a song bubbled up out of it. Watching Paul fish the vocal line for “Get Back” out of the river of collective unconscious I begin to wonder what if I don’t question the sudden onset of creating but instead trust the time and mode of delivery. Too often I let I-me-mine get in the way of flow. Flow is a localized tributary of the universe’s constant expansion. Flow will always win in the end because there isn’t an end.
I couldn’t care a lick if it’s boring to love the Beatles. I also love pizza and dogs. I will take joy in whatever form it’s offered. Yesterday I walked in two different styles of snow storms and my fifteen-year-old-terrier got a dashing new plaid sweater.
And then today on my walk my adult kid called and talked for an hour — about the creative process and how it applies everywhere always, about how to be responsible to one another, about what kind of world and relationships they are intentionally creating — and I’m reminded how when we lived together we had an ongoing conversation winding in and out of our brains. To feel in the dark is only to love light. This is what it is to be alive together. While we talked the winds dusted me with last night’s snow off the ancient eastern white pines. “This is how good it can be.”
Like every other day I have been alive I’m conscious of the gift that is making stuff, my throughline, my seacraft, my artery. Art won’t save us, but only because nothing will.
