1

Artist Guilt

You will want to chase your creativity but you will feel guilty for not spending time with your family, doing the laundry, making dinner, applying for another job…. So you spend time doing those things and at the same time you feel guilty about letting that creative passion dissolve and drain away.

Opportunities lost and heavy in your boots.

Secure your environment. Prioritize yourself.

4

Be Empty

It’s okay to be empty, it can be empowering. I’m sad, overcooked, disappointed, broke and anxious. I’m not full of those things, but neither do they empty easily from me. Sticky.

I am working on empty.

2

Meditation or just some STFU time

Even if it means you are lying on the floor, slumped against the wall in the stairwell or locked in the car - 5 minutes for yourself, 5 minutes to STFU. It’s good for you.

Everyday.

5

Two poems:

Philip Larkin’s “The Mower”

“I had seen it before, even fed it, once.” This is bigger than you think.

Charles Bukowski’s “Gertrude up the stairway”

“…before she wearied of the trick, and we of each other.” Stripped and seen.

Bukowski added a stanza 42 years later that also reflects time passing in the story he tells in the actual poem.

3

tactile

Touch the brick wall next time you pass it, run your hands along the lavender and boxwood bushes. Smell your hands. Lean your weight against the earth and feel your feet there. Touch a wet leaf and get some water on your hands, look at your skin in the drops.

Recognize what you carry. Your are rarely the one in the mirror. Look in the mirror and you are not there.

6

HAYIF

How are you? I’m Fine.

Maybe. It’s a complicated multitude. A lava flow - silent and screaming, flowing with an unconcerned, geological pace, unapologetic and entirely destructive.