Spiral

“Sometimes things go too fast and too slow all at once.” – July 19th

I found this note today while tidying up my studio and realized I hadn’t sat down to look through pictures or even think much about this past weekend in Corner Brook. So much of my life the past couple of years has felt slow in a way I’ve never experienced, like wading through molasses. I’ve had a sense that I’m moving because logically I know the world spins around the sun and those rotations are logged on the calendars littering my home and technical spaces and my body does appear to be moving and yet nothing seems to be moving and I feel painfully stuck, exhausted by it all. At the same time the good feels compressed, minor joys, fleeting happiness.

This past weekend as I sat with my art and held space and needle felted and engaged with so many I barely had time to consider anything but being. In the hours leading up to and the following day as I drove home with my art tucked neatly in boxes in the back I cried and sat in the feelings. Niether one of those things would have been possible a few years ago, not because I’m a better person but because suffering has placed me here.

I spoke with a friend, a listener, a while back and when I told her I no longer felt tethered to the ‘collective reality’ because I couldn’t see a future, and I’ve carved the past from my memory she told me I had unintentionally arrived in a place of now most people work tirelessly to exist in. My bodies response to trauma has apparently been to grip tightly to my existence by ignoring everything except for what is currently happening. I felt that Saturday night, I feel that now as I sit on the rug in my studio. So much of the pomp and circumstance, the shoulds of the first 36 years of my life are just gone. I know they didn’t all leave at once but recently I realized so much of the bullshit baggage I spent years trying to exorcise evaporated while I focused on just existing.

This is not advice for becoming one with yourself. I have no idea how one would go about doing that. I also don’t give advice. What this is is a recording of now so a future me who has the tools to venture into the darkness of their past can see what was once the now.

Participating in CB Nuit has been a fundamental aspect of my 2024 but way more importantly it has been a catalyst into a new world where I can do more than just exist. I still don’t see a future but I can feel it, I think because of all the people around me I can feel the future they hold not just for themselves but for me. My relationships with everyone in my life are complicated, because that’s what trauma does but luckily I do have people and though I constantly question how close and solid my relationships are I know they hold space for me. When we can’t invision our own futures we must allow those around us to hold the potentiality of our personhood for us.

Meeting, embracing, and engaging with people around a table of my own creation was a beautiful and cathartic experience. I hope so much for all of you!

This is very much just the beginning and I look forward to many more good conversations and good art.