who do you believe in?

do the people you believe in,
believe in you?

friends, community leaders, colleagues, bosses, family, your fave celebs, politicians, mentors, role models, coaches.

they out here batting for you, for real? or just themselves and their circle?

scarcity, competition, hyper-individualism, and ego have narrowed our perceptions of power, potential, and community.

kinship and leadership will continue to be redefined in favor of true humility and interdependence.

true power is grounded, peaceful, creative, fluid, open-hearted; it does not fear the luminosity of others and instead seeks it, revealing it at every opportunity.

when you rise, i rise.

when i rise, you rise.

best/worst.

your worst and best work

have more in common with each other

than with everything in between.

best/worst. two sides of the same coin. passion and truth expressed are often met with polarity. we make that polarity mean a lot and often allow it to fracture us.

the content of the polarity does not necessarily matter. that polarity occurred is what to note. it means you have stirred souls. your work has met its vibrational directive in helping shift the collective— whether or not people are aware or accept this.

creativity is so subjective, so personal, spiritual. yet we judge it, critique it, categorize it. who and what is the decider? what determines the worth and veracity of our work?

can “bad” work be good? be truth? be actually not bad and instead great in its badness? who is it bad to and why? are you bad? did you do bad? did you fail? i think you won because you created.

creation is a statement to the universe. creation is presence. it is a striving and an aliveness that is unlike any other human experience. creation is saying yes, being yes. being. how is that bad?

how is everything that we put ourselves into not valuable and important? all shades of subjectivity are moot if creativity and work are proof of our aliveness and our truth striving to be expressed.

each output, each iteration is information; a window into ourselves, our connectivity, and the world around us. in creating, we are learning to know ourselves and everything more. is there a worst knowing? to me, knowing is always best— even when it hurts.
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“good” and “bad” might not be as different as we thought; both are subject to being distilled to the is-ness of everything. in creating, i am here. in creating, i am.

i am. i am. i am.

synchronicity in artistic thought

i texted the above phrase to my new friend joel about a week ago. days later, he retweeted his year old tweet with the exact same words. what a gift to so precisely share a wavelength with someone. joel concurred.

creativity is an interesting thing. i think because it can feel so personal, emotional, and intimate, we sometimes presume a rather rigid ownership over our works by believing that we have singularly created them.

though my creativity manifests via many paths, i've found that much of my short-form writing comes from ideas, thoughts, or phrases just “popping” into my head. over the last few years, it’s got me thinking about musicians who say that the music ‘just comes through them.’ i get it now and recognize these phenomena as a channeling of sorts;

whether consciously or not, i believe we are channeling from our interweb of mass consciousness, which i believe to ultimately be a single, unitary thing. in this way, i’m understanding that when we really get down to it, creative works don’t really belong to anyone; if anything, they belong to all of us. creativity, i believe, is the process of going into our collective psyche and materially illuminating truths that already exist inside our shared energetic body.

obviously, this act of channeling, expressing, and materializing is still a labor and an immeasurable service to our society. artists should still be paid well and credited for their work, boundaries should be respected. and while there is certainly exploitation and intentional plagiarism, all this does make me wonder about our often automatic insistence that duplicate works must imply an intentional “copying” and a necessary villain.

that two or more people can come to similar ideas or even the exact same one, for me, goes beyond a shared inspiration or someone's subconscious drawing from previous exposure; i believe people can independently come to the exact same point simply and purely because we are drawing from the same place that we all equally “own” and all equally are— our collective consciousness.

i’ll continue percolating on what i think this means for the creative industry. until then, i think we could be nicer to each other sometimes.

so— open hearts, y’all? <3

i said nothing

there is so much i can say when i don’t say. do you hear me? i said nothing nothing nothing. it was something. did you hear it? silence. could you feel it or did you turn the other way because it made you uncomfortable? i am speaking to you. i am here. do you see me even when you do not see me? because i see you. heaving.