It’s All Art
It’s mid-September y’all! Thanks for joining me on my little adventure. I went on a roadtrip to Elizabeth, CO today, which is about an hour away from Denver. My precious friend allowed me to borrow their car, and off I went to gather pounds and pounds of petrified wood and other peculiar gemstones and rock specimens. I, of course, was overly ambitious with the bounty I was fit to carry. It took me 6 trips between me and the car to carry everything back up to my apartment. As I stare at the hard pieces of earth that are now scattered around my living room, I am wondering why I chose to take so many home with me. As I was collecting them from a sweet friend’s home, it made sense to take as many as I could (perhaps all of them). She said that the city had purchased her lot and was likely to pave over the whole thing. I was aghast at the thought of all of the precious stones being rolled over with asphalt. It is most certainly my aversion to grief that has led me here. Ah yes, letting things go. I would rather literally move the earth than leave something behind. Denver is full of beautiful, mountainous rocks that are probably just fine being compressed into the cyclical, archaic layers that the earth compresses into over time anyway.
the drive there was so beautiful, but i took shit pictures because it seemed fruitless to try to capture the fleeting beauty of it all anyway
I think I see consciousness in everything, and that’s why it’s so difficult to let things go. I have an emotional attachment to even the memory or thought of something. The other reason, I believe, is because I am afraid of making the wrong choice. Very briefly, I worked at a butcher shoppe; it was the first and only back of house job that I have held. There, I learned a very visceral lesson about making choices. One of the butchers was a young, 20-something year old, and he was just learning how to make the proper cuts. But as he had been a cook for several years, he had experience that gave him confidence and quite a bit of knowledge. He was also a bit of a hothead, which I found endearing only because of the earnestness of his youth. Watching him butcher parts of a cow was like watching some kind of extreme sport I didn’t understand. He made decisions swiftly and sometimes abruptly, but always with a sort of confidence that was completely startling to me. I learned later that he frequently made mistakes, and the juxtaposition of his ability to make choices and fuck all the consequences was a total revelation to me. He was a true artist in every way, and it didn’t seem to matter that he was wrong. He was just making choices, and that’s all anyone cared about. Sometimes the brutish way he threw himself around the space (literally bumping into people, pushing past others, etc) was completely aggravating, but it was also inspiring as I was mostly afraid to make any decisions at all.
I remember having this realization one day after working with him that “art is making choices.” That’s it. It’s exactly like butchering a cow. Every cow is unique; every cut of meat is different than the last; each fiber, muscle, and bone growing relative to diet, exercise, and environment. We aimed for percentages at the butcher shoppe, not absolutes, e.g. get 70% of the breast of the chicken. It’s probably impossible to cut 100% straight off the bone, also who has the time to precariously and delicately cut off every last fiber of meat from every small bone that exists in an animal. Percentages it is. And it’s for this reason that butchering is an art. Over time, you get better at making more graceful and refined cut. It is a craft that is honed with practice. There is no perfectionism when it comes to the flesh. Everything is woven tightly together because it’s supposed to be. Veins and fat and bone and muscle latch together to become something greater than the sum of its parts.
When we cut it apart, we create something new, something different than what we started with. And that’s the point.
This past Friday, I cut my own hair into a new style for the first time (outside of the times I’ve buzzed it all down, I don’t count those times). I have been growing it out as an experiment, allowing myself to take my time and get a little unkempt. This is a theme I’m noticing within myself as of late. I’m just making choices and learning from them. It occurs to me how many times I’ve stopped myself from doing something because I thought I was doing it wrong, or someone else was supposed to do it right. When people used to tell me “we’re all just making this up, no one knows what they’re doing,” I really didn’t understand it. But this shifting perspective is starting a fire inside of me that is changing the way I see the entire world. If we’re all making this up, I can cut my hair any way that I want to. I can cut up a chicken in whatever way makes sense for me. I can create the life I want to. And suddenly a world of possibilities opens up before me, and even more, it opens up for view of humanity. We’re all making this shit up together. What kind of wonderful, incredible things do you think we can do? I can see a blurry outline of something beautiful in the void of the unknown.
i am sharing this image with you because hopefully some of you can relate…i might not even do these dishes tonight….
I look at my sink full of dishes and my armchair full of laundry and let out a heavy sigh. There is no perfection, just an endless cycle of doing my dishes and putting away my laundry. I attempt to squeeze out more love and affection for myself and my inability (and general resistance) to doing my chores every day. There is always something to do, always more to learn, always waves to ride. We are on a giant, magnificent, abundant rock, and we keep picking up rocks, moving them around, making cuts, and setting them down again. I guess it’s kinda funny when you think about it like that. But to me, it’s all art.
