I am currently listening to Karen O-worried shoes. And it is morning too. The coffee that I just picked up has not quite taken its effect and I am left wondering if it will. On my way back from the coffee shop I found a trash pile full of cardboard, something I have been looking for a few days now. I chose a healthy size piece of cardboard, probably from IKEA, now I am about ready to work. The elements are in place: bold black coffee, the morning sun, my phone is off and then there is this piece of cardboard.
I like how Steven Pressfield says it, “when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly , heaven comes to our aid.” I would add that when we run day after day and listen day after day and love day after day something mysterious happens. And maybe it isn’t even that mysterious, as much as it is beautiful, to take the pulse of reality from within its veins. Speaking of veins I can feel the coffee now. I am going to need I thicker marker to draw on this cardboard, this thin Sharpie fine point just won’t due. It won’t due because nothing will quite fulfill the creative rush that comes like the tides every morning.
It is like what I imagine sex to be like. We are at our core creative beings but in the very acts of creation our longing for connection is exposed. And even at the apex of human creativity we rest in beautiful moments hoping that this isn’t the last. A new day, another morning’s tide and expressions that reveal the unending God that chooses to rest in the dusty vessels of ourselves. Jesus paints new worlds with this dust. And it is not that he is using us it is that our very being is being loved. It is the nature of any project to first assume that coming into existence, being, is what must happen before it is used. God calls us into being, everyday.
Now most of the time I want people to get what I am saying without having to say it. There is an assumed narrative or to barrow the words of Owen Wilson there is a “ness” to the thing, it is present and resolutely clear even if it is unspoken. It is the way the trees speak of God; with out words their message goes forward. Trees are a great metaphor from what I am describing, they have a “ness” to them. You can’t describe a tree without first seeing and coming to the all-to-present truth that it is a tree that stands before you, its existence is assumed. So it is when one reaches for an arch to package what they are trying to say. The frustrating thing about arcs is that to be true and hum with beatific kind of enlightenment they must emerge from the anarchy. If they are not born out of the creative process I fear that they will not catch the rhythm of reality. They will not be aligned with the way things truly are. They will tell a narrative devoid of the mundane happenings and as an effect be devoid of life.
I’m not sure what will happen as I allow cardboard to be the medium to process collected and connected chunks regarding the interrelation of four ideas but I am praying for heaven to come to my aid. For something true to be drawn out of these dusty sheets of cardboard. And for expression that evokes longing.
