This is Notes from the Wilderness.
Written notes, visual notes, musical notes: it is space for my purposeful meandering in paint and ink, word and image, verse and song.
Notes from the Wilderness is creative space for exploration and curiosity, for deconstruction and reconstruction, for grieving and delighting. It is space for asking lofty questions, for unapologetic unlearning while leaning in to that which is unresolved and unclear. It is where living in alignment with one’s values and stepping more fully into wholeheartedness is the goal. It is for showing up imperfectly and clumsily. It is space to breathe - where being is more important than the doing.
This certainly isn’t the beginning of my story - it might even be mid-chapter. There is an immense pressure I feel to catch you up, fill you in - to help you figure out who I am and what I’m about. I fear my verbosity and that you may still have no idea what it is that I actually do. It’s supposed to be 250 words or less. I’m supposed to be 250 words or less. Couldn’t I edit and whittle this down to a sentence or two?
Why do we do that to one another - reduce the beauty and complexity of our wild selves to elevator pitches? We’re expected to know exactly where the story is going and live our lives as consumable, easily branded products. I’m supposed to convince you I have value to offer and am worthy of having the audacity to share anything.
*big exhale*
I need space to be a human in process - to give myself that permission in a world that largely tells me that is not okay. My creative work - my artistry - is how I navigate the wild spaces of myself and this life. I need to keep practicing how to exist in a world that tells me I’m not allowed to breathe mid-sentence. But I am. You are too.
It is not a finished story but the process of writing that matters more to me. And that story is a collection of notes along the way, notes that will be expressed in any manner and medium they so choose to work themselves out.
Welcome, fellow wanderers, into the wonder of it all.
