I am blank
I think I have a disease.Is there such a thing as having too much meaning in life?
Symptoms:
- Every.single.action is examined, masticated, swallowed, regurgitated, liquefied, vaporized, breathed out, breathed in, poisoned.
- Every.single.person is loved, hated, obsessed over, known, isolated, overly-familiar, a complete stranger, misunderstands*
- Every.single.challenge is never challenge enough.
- Every.single.relationship is never intimate nor safe enough.
- Every.single.ounce of life cannot pass without analysis and question.
- Every.single.emotion is simultaneously numbing and painful.
- Every.single.minute is accompanied by an intense desire to retreat from others but hurt when they feel the need to retreat from you.
- Every.single.family gathering carries immense weight because we all die...and it will someday no longer be like this. "Must take it all in, don't miss a moment."
- Every.single.word of both encouragement and criticism takes deep root in a garden long ignored and forgotten.
This, as you may have guessed, is too much pressure on one little life.
In these last few months, I have made very little sense to myself...why would I expect to make sense to anyone else? [and if someone assures me they do know me, why is this such a unpalatable affront?] I don't want to be known so much as left alone. Yet being abandoned in this pursuit is one of my deepest fears.
I am blank, barren, white, unoccupied. I am a me I don't recognize.
The me I want to be is a great artist.
But in my terror, I see
no
art.
~crm
*"Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."— Ralph Waldo Emerson
6 comments:
I would very much like to give you a hug. So would Steve. A delicious Candi/Dunlap sandwhich.
I see you, artist.
I'm caught between wanting to run over and pull you physically out and into the night air, and knowing that maybe all you want is rest.
I would let you use my brushes, so that you could paint a song on that barren whiteness, infuse the dichotomy of choking analysis and empty solitude with a dance of all the color I know you own.
I love you. Even in this place.
Karen and Steven,
A dunlap hug sounds divine. I love how being with you both quiets me so...
Dovely,
Rest...I wish I could find this.
A run in the night wind...I wish I could find this.
Brushes and talent...where art thou?
Friend of the most tender kind. I find in you.
i love your distance.
you're the star i gaze at and wish upon with my childhood lullaby. you're also my 2am book light, my car make-up mirror luminary, my bathtub candle.
you're tender and fearful, nestling and awesome.
i love your paradox.
if you chase a fawn with food, it will run. but, if you have the patience, the gentleness, the quite of spirit, to sit and wait with palm open, maybe, just maybe, it'll glide to your side as you with muffled breath watch this magnificently fierce and fragile creature receive your nourishment.
i love your disease.
jmg,
i love this picture.
thank you for equating this time for me to a time of feirce fragility...like a doe.
like a doe...
To be misunderstood is to try and communicate a point and have it be taken the opposite way. You are a beautiful enchanting mystery. There is something inside you that is not of us - some fierce desire that humans cannot understand. To feel the way you feel - some wish for a glimpse of that their entire life. Although your blessing may come as sometimes a curse, it is still firstly your blessing. You are otherly. And it is magnificent.
And your photos - I would call those nothing BUT fantastic art!
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