begin again.

beginning again is an act of love;

start over as many times as you need.

picking yourself up off the floor, whether for the first time or the hundredth, is a significant victory. every. single. time.

self-compassion, self-forgiveness, self-regard, self-belief, self-worth. betting on you, honoring you. beginning again is all these things. it is reinvesting in yourself.

i will not give up on myself, no matter the road ahead, because i love me in a way that transcends understanding of the mind. i don’t need to get it all right now to know that i am supposed to be here and that my light is important.

starting from scratch. honoring failure and adjusting course. throwing out the thousandth draft and hitting pen to paper once more. a new outlook on romance. reinvention. giving that talk another try in the morning. one more treatment. another application. a clean slate. giving yourself permission. forgiveness. choosing to wake up each day. tearing down the system and building a new one. iteration. perspective. divorce. the seventh business. a new city. blowing it up and starting over. a reimagined friendship. a new, totally different dream. ending the hiatus. digging through the archives. remembering who you were. who you are. trusting them, even though it stings.

we begin again in so many ways. love you love you.

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

rude ass people

i’ve been trying a thing. when i come across stank people in real life, i take pause after my initial feeling of offense. i create space for the possibility that they may be going through something or that the only way they know how to cope with their trauma is by being an ass.

doesn’t make it “right” but it’s also their very real reality + ultimately has nothing to do with me. their choices are their own business. their capacity might be less than mine, so i also count my blessings. i try to have compassion instead of taking it personally. within reason, i think it’s better for all involved.