4 - The Ontology of Joy

To speak of joy in ontological terms is to approach it not as an emotion, but as a mode of being. It is not something we feel about the world, but the way the world feels itself through us. Joy belongs to the essence of existence, a spontaneous affirmation that life, despite its sorrows, desires to continue.

In this sense, joy is not the decoration of being but its signature. It is the shimmer by which life recognizes its own presence. Even in its faintest trace, joy reveals that being is not a flat fact but a luminous event - something that wants to express, to unfold, to become.

When one touches joy, one is briefly relieved of the burden of separateness. The self loosens. The inner and outer fuse into one seamless movement. There is no subject enjoying an object; there is only the flowing act of being joyfully. In that moment, perception and participation are one.

Philosophically, this differs from happiness, which is teleological - it depends on reaching an end deemed desirable. Joy is non-teleological. It has no purpose beyond itself. It is the revelation that the present moment is sufficient, and that existence, by simply being, fulfills its own reason for being.

If we follow this thread deeper, we discover that joy is evidence of coherence. It is the felt recognition that the universe, however chaotic in appearance, holds a secret order that includes us. This is why joy can arise even amid grief: it is not denial, but the knowing that what dies returns, what breaks becomes part of the larger music.

In mystical language, joy is the resonance of the One recognizing itself within the many. It is the vibration that runs through all things when being contemplates itself and says, “I am.” Thus joy is ontological proof - not in logic but in experience - that life is not meaningless, but meaning itself in motion.

To cultivate joy, then, is to align with reality’s own pulse. Not to add something new, but to remove what separates us from what already is. When the veil of resistance drops, when we cease arguing with existence, joy floods in like light through a door left ajar.

In that openness, we discover a paradox: joy does not belong to us, yet we are made of it. It is not something we possess, but something that possesses us when we remember our place in the living whole.

The Myth of the Effortless Genius: How Shortcuts Kill the Creative Lifestyle

We have all seen the archetype. The romanticized, cinematic image of the artist: cigarette dangling, brooding in a chaotic studio, suddenly struck by a lightning bolt of divine inspiration. They slash a brilliant stroke across a canvas, step back, and effortlessly capture the zeitgeist. It looks grand. It looks heroic.

Above all, it looks incredibly cool.

But behind the studio doors of a long-term, self-sustaining practice, that myth is a trap. It is a seductive fiction that captures the imagination of young creators and seasoned dreamers alike, tempting them to fall in love with the image of being an artist while completely evading the reality of the creative lifestyle.

When an artist buys into the myth of the effortless genius, the first casualty is patience.

The Panic of the Headless Chicken

When a creative mind is firing on all cylinders, the energy inside the studio can be brilliant but blinding. Ideas rush in like a torrent. An artist working on a series of raw, abstract expressionist paintings might find themselves darting from one corner of the room to another - throwing down a mark here, grabbing a new tool there, chasing five different intuitive impulses at once.

From the outside, it looks like pure, unadulterated passion. But if that frenetic energy isn’t anchored by a deeper discipline, it quickly degenerates into what I call the “headless chicken” loop.

You spend days running around in circles, exhausted by your own momentum, yet accomplished very little of substance. Why? Because darting from one exciting idea to another is often a subconscious defense mechanism. It is an escape hatch. Following a new spark is easy and fun; sticking with the difficult slow steady persistance of the an unglamorous, daily grind is another story.

When impatience wins, the artist begins looking for shortcuts. They want a silver bullet - a sudden viral breakthrough, a heroic sprint that solves everything, or a massive, dramatic deal that vaults them to the top without the climb. They mistake a brief, chaotic burst of short-term energy for true long term commitment.

The “Heroic” Escape Hatch

The trap of the shortcut is that it always dresses itself up as heroism. A creator will proclaim, with absolute sincerity, that they are willing to do “whatever it takes” to make their vision a reality. They will pull all-night sessions, talk in grand terms about their upcoming masterworks, and map out sprawling, ambitious projects.

But watch closely where that energy goes. Usually, it is poured exclusively into the things that feel exciting, high-stakes, or socially validated - the things that makes one “look cool.”

When it comes to the stark, boring, completely uncool foundations of a sustainable life, that heroic willingness suddenly vanishes. There is absolutely nothing romantic about setting up a Single-Member LLC, organizing bookkeeping spreadsheets, managing inventory numbers, or researching publishing and digital distribution portals. It doesn’t look cool. It doesn’t impress anyone at a party.

Yet, those exact unglamorous tasks form the invisible scaffolding that protects creative freedom.

Sprinting is easy because it is dramatic. True adventurousness, however, is a quiet, daily discipline. It is the creative equivalent of putting on your shoes and walking 10,000 steps a day, every day, rain or shine, regardless of whether the muse showed up or not.

Becoming a Wholesale Manufacturer

If you want to build a stable, self-sustaining creative life that lasts for decades, you have to completely invert how you view your practice. You have to strip away the ego of the lone genius and adopt the mindset of a wholesale manufacturer.

Your studio is not a temple of unpredictable lightning bolts; it is a high-volume production line. You are the manufacturer, and your job is steady, disciplined output. The art galleries, digital platforms, and newsletter spaces are simply your storefronts and your sales staff. They are there to handle the retail interface so that you can focus entirely on your trade.

If the manufacturer only steps onto the factory floor when they “feel like it” or when a shortcut presents itself, the storefront sits empty. The business dries up.

To survive the traps of impatience and the desire to take shortcuts, a creative must build systems that remove choice from the operational process. When your mind is darting in a thousand directions, choices are a paralysis tool. “Figuring things out” becomes an elegant excuse to avoid doing the heavy lifting.

By establishing strict physical constraints, clear digital administrative routines, and automated business frameworks, you shut out the noise. You force yourself to commit entirely to the exact next step right in front of you. You stop trying to look heroic, you stop trying to take a shortcut, and you finally dig in to do the work.

3 - On the Distinctions of Joy

We often confuse joy with its many cousins - satisfaction, pleasure, happiness, contentment, gratification, amusement, and enjoyment - but each belongs to a different register of being. To know joy clearly, one must hear its unique tone among the choir of human feeling.

Satisfaction arises when desire completes its circuit. It depends upon the meeting of goal and outcome, task and reward. It is an exhale that follows achievement, but it fades once the next hunger appears. Joy, by contrast, has no object. It does not wait for results. It springs from being itself, not from what being accomplishes.

Pleasure is sensory, rooted in the body’s immediacy - the taste of ripe fruit, the warmth of sunlight, the touch of another’s hand. It is fleeting and often cyclical, bound to contrast: one feels it because one once felt its absence. Joy may inhabit pleasure, but it outlasts it, remaining even when the fruit is gone and the light has changed.

Happiness tends to move with circumstance. It depends on fortune, on alignment between our wishes and the world’s behavior. Joy, on the other hand, can coexist with sorrow. It is not the opposite of suffering, but the glimmer that endures within it, the quiet knowing that life itself is still holy.

Contentment is the peace of sufficiency - the gentle satisfaction of “enough.” It is stillness after striving. Joy may blossom from this soil, but it also transcends it, for joy can burst forth even when one has not yet arrived at sufficiency. It does not ask for “enough”; it recognizes that being alive already is.

Gratification is immediate reward, the small coin of satisfaction paid by the senses or the ego for getting its way. Joy pays no such wages. It belongs to a larger economy, one without transaction. Where gratification ends, joy begins.

Amusement is lighthearted distraction. It entertains but rarely transforms. Joy is never mere diversion; it draws one deeper into presence, not away from it. Amusement escapes reality, joy enlarges it.

Enjoyment stands somewhere between pleasure and participation. One enjoys when one is engaged, attuned, receptive to experience. Joy can infuse enjoyment, turning a simple act - drinking tea, walking through dusk - into revelation. But enjoyment remains an activity, while joy is a condition of being.

Joy is not one feeling among others. It is the subtle field in which all feelings arise and dissolve. It is spacious, luminous, resilient - the still center that remains when every other emotion has played its note and fallen silent.

2 - On What Obscures Joy

Joy is not fragile, yet it is easily obscured. It never truly leaves us, but becomes hidden beneath layers of distraction, fear, and self-concern, like sunlight veiled by thick clouds. To rediscover joy, we must learn what dims its light.

Noise and haste are the first veils. When life moves too quickly, attention fractures. We skim the surface of our own existence, never touching the depths where joy dwells. Joy moves at the speed of stillness. It cannot be caught in the flutter of constant doing.

Comparison is another thief. When we measure our lives against others, we exile ourselves from our own unfolding. Joy requires presence, not measurement. The moment we judge our portion against another’s, we step out of the eternal and into the marketplace of illusions.

Expectation builds its own cage. The mind says, “I will be joyful when…” and thereby postpones the possibility of joy into an imaginary future. True joy is unconditioned; it arises not because life meets our demands, but because we finally meet life as it is.

Attachment to narrative also clouds the view. We become entranced by the story we tell about ourselves - our successes, our failures, our wounds - and forget to feel the living pulse beneath the story. Joy does not require a plot. It arises in the gap between sentences.

Emotional self-absorption - even in the name of sensitivity - can distort joy’s frequency. When our awareness bends inward without openness, sensitivity hardens into fragility. Joy cannot breathe in the closed chamber of the self.

And of course, fear: fear of loss, of uncertainty, of change. Fear contracts what joy expands. But the strange truth is that joy and fear share the same threshold. Each asks us to open to what is beyond our control. The difference lies in trust.

Forgetting our belonging may be the deepest shadow. When we feel separate - from nature, from one another, from the sacred texture of being - joy fades. But even then, it waits beneath the surface, patient as the roots of a tree beneath winter ground.

To clear the obscurations is not to chase joy, but to remove what blocks its light. The work is inward but gentle: slow down, unclench, return to presence, return to gratitude. Then joy, like the sun after fog, will reveal that it had never departed.

Hi everyone.
Ok we made it back to Albuquerque about a week ago with 27 banker’s boxes full of Fluxus box assemblges and mail art from Picasso Gaglione for the museum archives. This pick up in Knoxville, TN was the prime initiative for going out on the trip. It is going to take a while to document all of that, probably a year at least.

We also returned with many great memories of experiences from along the trail as well as newly developed relationships with people we met along the way.

Zach and I also captured four video conversations with artists along the way related to the Creative Life which we will start releasing when they have been edited by Zach and ready for release.

As usually happens when I go out on trips, various things go wrong on the homefront while I am out and there seems to always be a week of stuff to do to try to get everything back on track and get back into my routines.

While out, we explored the idea of producing a country album. Once back, we decided that right now that may not be the right plan of attack for the moment from a business point of view. So we have been brain storming other ideas this past week for how an artist achieves a self-sustaining lifestyle.

I have achieved that myself since in my 50’s (I am currently 70) now the experiment is to try to apply that wisdom to Zach’s creative life which for me should be a rich environment for new Creatve Lifestyle articles and should prompt me to get busy publishing the actual series of books on the topic based on these articles here on the Touchonian.

Meanwhile, this post is me sitting back down at the computer to try to get back to writing stuff and my own general routines as we prep for the next new adventure.

But I do have a cheat. There is a series of articles I developed about one year ago for this time of year and never posted becuase I got busy at that time with other things I was writing. This is a series of about 10 articles on the contemplation of joy. Here is article #1…

1 - On the Development of Joy

Joy is not a goal to be achieved, nor a reward for good behavior. It is more like the fragrance released when life is crushed gently between our fingers. To develop joy is to become more permeable, to let the pulse of the world move through us without always trying to name or control it.

When we begin to pay true attention, the smallest things reveal their music. A beam of sunlight resting on the table. The sound of rain tracing its patient ripples. The laughter of someone we love in another room. These moments, when received without haste, become portals through which joy enters.

Gratitude is the breath that keeps joy alive. Not the bright forced kind that insists on silver linings, but the quiet recognition that this too belongs. Even the difficult, the uncertain, the unfinished - all are participants in the same mysterious whole. Gratitude does not decorate life; it roots us more deeply within it.

Joy also asks for simplicity. It hides beneath excess. When we pare down - possessions, ambitions, the noise of the mind - joy returns as naturally as birds to a cleaned fountain. What remains is not emptiness, but a clear space where being can be felt again.

There is a form of joy that only blossoms through others: in generosity, in conversation, in the subtle exchange of warmth between companions. We learn that joy is not private. It ripples outward, enlarging the world wherever it lands.

And there is another form, quieter still, that arises from acceptance. When we cease dividing our experience into good and bad, joy weaves itself through everything. It becomes the shimmer within sorrow, the grace inside imperfection, in the recognition of a perfect moment.

To create is also to commune with this hidden current. The artist, the gardener, the cook, the builder - each, in their attentive making, touches the living rhythm of the cosmos. In that alignment, joy appears unannounced, as though the universe momentarily recognized itself through our hands.

In the end, joy develops not through effort, but through attunement. It grows in us like light through a window cleaned of its dust. What we call joy is simply the natural brightness of being, once we’ve stopped turning away from it.

The following is a more fleshed out essay from a responce I made to a Reg Grant comment on the article about Creative Immersion: When the Work Makes Itself

The Inner Committee

We hear a great deal about the inner critic.

Artists are advised to silence it, ignore it, overcome it, make friends with it, or simply keep working until it gets bored and goes away. And certainly the inner critic can be troublesome. It can stand over the shoulder while we work, questioning every decision before we have had time to discover where that decision might lead.

But the critic is not alone.

Sitting beside the inner critic are several other characters who can quietly interfere with the creative process. They are less obvious because they often sound perfectly reasonable.

There is the inner assumer.
There is the inner expecter.
And there is the inner comparer.

Each has a useful function. Each can also become a problem when we mistake its provisional judgment for reality. Who else might be on that committee?

The Inner Assumer

We make assumptions constantly. We have to. We could hardly begin anything otherwise.

When I start a piece, particularly because much of my work is process oriented, I often begin by taking a stance. I establish certain boundaries. I might determine a size, choose a limited group of materials, establish a particular procedure, select a vocabulary of forms, or decide that I will work according to a certain set of rules.

These are assumptions about what the work might be.

There is nothing wrong with that.

In fact, constraints can be enormously productive. A boundary gives us somewhere to begin. Faced with absolutely infinite possibility, we might never make the first move. So we temporarily reduce infinity to something manageable.

This canvas.
These materials.
This procedure.
This afternoon.
Begin here.

The difficulty comes when the assumption becomes a prediction.

The original premise was only supposed to get the process moving. It becomes troublesome when we begin insisting that the work remain faithful to what we thought it was going to be before it existed.

There is an important difference between saying, I will begin here, and saying, I already know where this must end.

I want the first and distrust the second.

The boundary establishes the playing field. Inside that field, anything might happen.

Indeed, that is precisely why I am interested in making the work.

If I already knew what the finished work was going to be, making it would become largely an act of execution. I would simply be manufacturing something I had already completed mentally.

The creative process becomes much more interesting when the initial assumption is understood as provisional. We take a stance so that we can begin, then allow the work itself to challenge that stance.

The work begins talking back.

The Inner Expecter

Then there is the inner expecter.

Expectation is slightly different from assumption. The assumer thinks it knows what the work is. The expecter thinks it knows what the work ought to become.

We begin wanting something from it.

We expect it to be beautiful. Important. Successful. Original. Saleable. Profound. Better than the last one. Worth the materials. Worth the time. Worth showing someone.

Perhaps we simply expect it to be good.

And almost immediately we have created the possibility of disappointment.

The work has barely begun and already it is being measured against an imaginary finished object.

That imaginary object can become remarkably oppressive because it has an unfair advantage over the actual work: it does not have to exist.

The imagined painting has no awkward passages. The imagined poem contains no clumsy sentences. The imagined song arrives perfectly formed. The imagined project has never encountered the resistance of actual materials.

Reality has to contend with gravity, paint, language, time, mistakes, interruptions, limitations, accidents and our own changing attention.

Imagination does not.

Perhaps one of the most useful things an artist can do is temporarily put aside the categories of success and failure.

Instead, think in terms of experiment.

An experiment asks a different question.

Not: Will this succeed?

But: What happens if I do this?

That small change can completely alter the atmosphere of the studio.

A work that does not become what we hoped it would become has not necessarily failed. It may have shown us something we could not have discovered otherwise. It may contain one passage, one gesture, one relationship, one accident that opens the door to the next ten works.

In a sustained creative practice, what appears unsuccessful today may become essential information tomorrow.

The experiment continues.

The Inner Comparer

And then there is the inner comparer.

This one is particularly difficult because comparison is built into the way we understand things. We recognize differences by comparing one thing with another. Artists study other artists. Writers read other writers. Musicians listen to other musicians.

This is part of education.

The trouble begins when observation becomes self-measurement.

Someone else has a larger exhibition.
Someone else sells more work.
Someone else seems more original.
Someone else has received recognition we have not received.
Someone else is younger yet further along.
Someone else is older and has accomplished more.
Someone else appears to know exactly what they are doing.

Comparison can manufacture disappointment almost indefinitely because there will always be someone against whom we can construct an unfavorable measurement.

But there is an even more fundamental problem. Often there really cannot be a meaningful comparison.

A mature creative practice becomes increasingly particular. It accumulates its own history, vocabulary, obsessions, mistakes, discoveries, methods and questions. The longer an artist works, the more the work becomes the record of a particular consciousness moving through a particular life.

How exactly should that be compared?

We can study another artist’s decisions. We can admire their work. We can learn techniques from them. We can observe how they have organized a career or solved particular formal problems.

But their trajectory cannot be ours. Comparison is useful when it provides information. It becomes destructive when it provides a unrealistic verdict.

From Judgment to Curiosity

The inner critic, assumer, expecter and comparer are not enemies that need to be defeated. They simply need different jobs.

The assumer can establish the initial conditions.
The expecter can propose possibilities.
The comparer can gather information.
Even the critic can eventually help us evaluate what has happened.

But none of them needs to govern the studio.

During the actual making, something else can take precedence: curiosity.

What happens if I move this?
What happens if I remove that?
What happens if I repeat this form fifty times?
What happens if I violate the rule I established yesterday?
What happens if the accident is more interesting than the intention?
What happens if I follow the work instead of forcing it to follow me?

This is the great freedom of thinking experimentally.

An experiment does not require us to know the answer before we begin. In fact, if we already know the answer, there is little reason to conduct the experiment.

We establish conditions and then pay attention.

That may be one of the deepest disciplines of creative practice: learning to begin with enough intention to enter the work while remaining sufficiently available to be surprised by it.

Set the boundaries. Take a stance. Make the first move.

Then see what happens.

Taking that approach, anything might happen.

Life Is an Adventure for the Adventurous

Back in the Spring I got a phone call from my old friend Picasso Gaglione.

Picasso is an artist, a Fluxus artist, mail artist, rubber stamp artist, assemblage artist and general practitioner of the sort of art that has always had difficulty staying politely inside the boundaries assigned to it. He has been at it for decades.

He is also getting older.

The reason for his call was twofold; to invite me to participate in QuickKopy Conceptualism: Bay Area Dada to Bay Area Punk and that he had decided to contribute a significant body of his work to the archives of the Collage Museum. As I understand it, we are talking about quite a few bankers boxes filled with his Fluxus box assemblages.

Picasso’s boxes are in Knoxville, Tennessee.

So there was the practical question of how to get them from Knoxville to Albuquerque. I could probably have figured out some way to have them packed and shipped. Instead I thought:

We’ll go get them.

And with that, something changed. A shipment became a trip.

Picasso had called me while I was preparing for a 49-day collage expedition through Europe and the UK. During the conversation about the QuickKopy Conceptualism exhibition in Geneva.

As it turned out Geneva was already going to be part of my journey. I was planning to meet the collage artist Berni Stephanus there after Berlin.

Then we compared dates. As it turned out, through no planning on my part, I was going to be in Geneva at exactly the time Picasso’s exhibition was opening.

So Berni, his wife and I attended.

And because I went to the opening, I also had the opportunity to meet the curator, Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Columbia University, New York.

None of this was part of some carefully constructed master plan. One thing simply followed another thing. I happened to be going somewhere. Picasso happened to call. He happened to mention an exhibition. The dates happened to coincide.

But coincidence alone doesn’t get you through the door.

You still have to show up and I’ve been thinking about that lately.

We tend to imagine adventures as things we set out deliberately to have. We book the flight to some exotic place. We climb the mountain. We sail across the ocean. We make the grand plan and then execute it.

But I’m not sure most of the interesting adventures of my life have happened that way. In fact, I tend to prefer not planning things out too certainly becuase the future is so uncertain. Still, some planning must be involved and I am usually not too good at that part.

More often something appears. A person calls. Someone makes a suggestion. A door opens. Two unrelated things suddenly turn out to be related.

Something you weren’t looking for crosses the path of something you were already doing. And for a moment there is a little opening. You can walk past it. Or you can say, Well, let’s see where this goes.

My son Zach and I had already been talking about doing some traveling together. He invited me along to Thailand when I was in Los Angeles last December and I decided to go on the spur of the moment. We had a great time.

Zach has spent most of his life bouncing around among creative forms: acting, dancing, filmmaking, writing, painting and music. Lately music has moved to the foreground. He has been writing songs at an astonishing rate and is putting together a country album.

We have also decided to work together more deliberately. Zach is the talent. I have been appointed Executive Producer, which sounds considerably more impressive than my current qualifications would suggest for producing a country album of which I know utterly nothing.

I know how to build a life around making art. The music publishing business… hum... This seems to me like an excellent reason to learn something about it.

So now we have an artist in Knoxville with a collection of work that needs to come to Albuquerque, a father and son looking for an excuse to get out into the world together, a country songwriter with a guitar, a collage artist who has never required much encouragement to turn travel into an expedition, and a vehicle with room for a considerable number of bankers boxes.

That seems like enough ingredients to begin with.

There is one more thing.

Picasso hosts an annual Fluxfest in Knoxville, and our timing happens to coincide with it. Of course it does.

So we’ll attend the Fluxfest. We’ll interview Picasso for the YouTube channel we’re developing. I’ll bring along some basic collage materials and collect more along the way. Zach will bring his guitar. We’ll have cameras and recording equipment.

What we don’t have is a tour. No string of venues. No performances booked. No elaborate itinerary designed to make us appear more organized than we actually are. In fact, we have no idea how to go about setting up a tour.

We’ve decided to call it our practice tour. Practice Tour #1.

The idea is to practice getting out there. Practice traveling together. Practice documenting what happens. Practice making things along the way. Practice recognizing an opportunity when it appears. And perhaps most importantly, practice leaving enough empty space in the plan for something we haven’t imagined yet.

I am reminded of the recent article:

The Best Use of the Will is to be Willing.

I’m suspect that willingness has a great deal to do with adventure. But I’ll leave that thought alone for the moment.

Right now there are some bankers boxes in Knoxville that need to be picked up and a Fluxfest to attend.

We have a guitar and some sound equipment
I have my collage tools.
We’re taking the cameras.
And we’re going to see what happens.

Life is an adventure for the adventurous.

Stay tuned for Practice Tour #1
We are heading out imminently and will be reporting from the road.

And hey, send us some gas money! It’s a long way to Knoxville, TN and back.

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This is a continuation from the last article: When the Work Makes Itself

How to Disappear Without Becoming Lost

There is, however, another side to this move from rational intelligence to intuitive intelligence and that is to return back to rational intelligence.

I have spent countless hours in this state of creative absorption. Sometimes an entire day can disappear. Sometimes several days seem to collapse into one continuous period of working, sleeping, waking and returning to the work. I have missed appointments. I have forgotten what day it was. I have become so completely unaware of the clock that I once forgot to pick up my children from school. Ok, more than once.

At some point, what sounds like a wonderful description of artistic flow becomes a practical problem.

My son Zach has the same capacity for deep creative immersion. He sometimes calls it a “condition,” almost as if it were a psychological disorder. There is humor in the word, but also genuine apprehension. He knows how completely he can disappear into something he is making, and he recognizes the danger that accompanies it: while the creative life is flourishing, the rest of life can begin falling apart.

The bills still arrive. People are waiting. Appointments have been made. The body needs food and sleep. Someone has to remember what day it is.

Perhaps the artist therefore needs to develop two complementary abilities: the ability to disappear into the creative wilderness and the ability to return from it.

We talk a great deal about the first. We cultivate concentration. We seek solitude. We arrange studios. We silence phones. We meditate. We develop rituals for beginning. We try to quiet the internal critic so that we can enter that place where self-consciousness diminishes and the work seems to make itself.

We speak much less about how to come back from that state.

Yet reentry may be an equally important artistic discipline.

If I know that my internal sense of time becomes unreliable when I am deeply immersed, then I cannot reasonably depend upon that internal sense of time to bring me back. The boundary has to exist somewhere outside the deep intuitive state itself.

The clock must be outside the dream.

That might mean an alarm, a calendar notification, a written stopping time, another person expecting a call, or some other external interruption that cannot easily be absorbed into the creative process. These things may appear to be intrusions upon artistic freedom, but perhaps they are better understood as the structure that makes such freedom sustainable. Freedom requires discipline.

The deeper the freedom inside the container, the stronger the container needs to be.

We accept this principle everywhere else in art. A canvas has edges. A poem has a final line. A piece of music begins and ends. Even improvisation occurs within some kind of structure. Boundaries do not necessarily diminish freedom. Very often they make freedom possible by allowing us to work unfettered and unworried within that space.

Creative time needs boundaries as well.

I can disappear into the studio from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon. Within those hours I can stop watching the clock altogether. I can forget myself. I can follow the work wherever it wants to go. But at two o’clock an alarm sounds from another world.

It says: Come back.

And perhaps returning requires its own little ritual.

Save the document. Photograph the painting. Put down the brush. Write a sentence to your future self: This is where I stopped. This is what I was about to do next.

That last gesture may be particularly important. Sometimes we resist stopping because we are afraid of losing the thread of inspiration we are following. We have finally arrived somewhere, and we don’t know whether the door will still be open when we return. Leaving ourselves a marker is a way of tying a rope around the tree before descending back into everyday life.

Then we can leave.

We wash our hands. We look at the calendar. We remember the hour. We remember the day. We remember the people who inhabit our lives.

The ordinary rational self returns. And the ordinary self has important work to do. It remembers appointments. It buys groceries. It answers messages. It pays bills. It notices that someone else has needs we must attend to. It takes care of the body through which all of this creativity is happening. It remembers that there is a world beyond the studio.

This is why the disappearance of the self should never become the disappearance of responsibility.

There is nothing particularly enlightened about forgetting that someone is waiting for or depending on you.

The selflessness of creative immersion is valuable precisely because it is temporary. We enter it and emerge from it. We surrender ourselves to the work and then reclaim ourselves for the rest of life.

Over a lifetime of making things, one begins to recognize this rhythm.

Disappear into the creative wilderness.
Return.
Disappear again.
Return again.

The mature artist may therefore be neither the person who maintains perfect control nor the person who abandons themselves entirely to inspiration. The mature artist becomes a traveler between these conditions.

You learn where the entrance is. You learn how far you can wander. And eventually you learn to leave markers along the way.

Because the artist must learn how to disappear without becoming lost.

Head in the clouds, then feet on the ground.

Creative freedom is a discipline.

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When the Work Makes Itself

Artists have often described a peculiar moment in the making of a work when they seem to stop being the one who is making it.

The painter has been working for hours and suddenly looks up to discover that the painting is finished. The writer reads a passage afterward and wonders where it came from. The musician stops playing and realizes that an hour has disappeared. Decisions have been made, problems solved, passages negotiated, yet there is strangely little memory of having consciously made any of those decisions.

Something took over.

We have many names for this condition. We say we were in the groove. We were in the zone. We entered a state of flow. Older traditions might describe the person as an empty vessel or a hollow reed, something through which the music, the poem, the gesture, the idea, or the image passes.

These descriptions differ, but they point toward a remarkably similar experience: the temporary disappearance of the feeling that I am doing this.

This does not mean that nobody is doing anything. Quite the opposite. The artist may be extraordinarily active. The hand is moving. The eye is judging. Choices are being made constantly. Years of experience are being brought to bear on every gesture. Yet the internal commentator who is ordinarily announcing, evaluating, questioning, congratulating, worrying and criticizing has gone quiet.

The work continues without requiring a narrator.

Consciousness in such moments can be imagined as a luminous mirror.

A mirror does not have to struggle to produce a reflection. If it is clear and unobstructed, it simply reflects whatever appears before it. Nor does the reflection belong to the mirror. The mirror cannot possess it. It cannot store yesterday’s reflection and insist that today’s resemble it. It cannot reach out and hold what passes across its surface.

The image appears. The image disappears. The mirror remains available.

For the artist, this availability may be more important than inspiration.

Much of what interferes with creative work is not an absence of ideas but the accumulation of ourselves around them. We feel the need to intervene. We want the work to be good. We want it to be original. We want it to look familiar to us. We wonder what the gallery will think, what the reader will think, what our friends will think, whether anyone will buy it, publish it, understand it, misunderstand it, praise it, dismiss it, remember it.

The mirror becomes covered with our mental fingerprints.

Then we are no longer simply seeing what is before us. We are seeing our anxieties about what is before us.

The peculiar selflessness of creative immersion clears some of that away.

This is one reason the word selflessness interests me more than the word flow. Flow describes what the experience feels like. Selflessness suggests an obstruction that has temporarily disappeared.

The self has not actually ceased to exist. We have not become unconscious. We may, in fact, have become unusually conscious. What recedes is the constant insistence upon ourselves as the center of the activity. That is when we are in our own way. When we are in our own way that is called creative block.

But when in a state of selfessness there is still seeing, but less of me seeing. There is simply seeing, painting, writing, listening, moving.

And then an interesting reversal becomes possible. Instead of imagining that I am making the painting, I begin to experience the painting as something that is happening, and I am participating in its happening if I even notice me at all.

Anyone who has worked seriously at an art form probably knows something about this reversal. A work reaches a certain point where it begins making demands of its own. A color requires another color. A sentence changes the sentence that must follow it. A shape creates a problem elsewhere in the composition. Something is removed and suddenly an entirely different possibility becomes visible.

At that point, imposing one’s original intention upon the work can actually interfere with it.

This is when the artist begins listening.

This is why creative work can sometimes feel less like invention than discovery. One begins with an intention, but somewhere along the way the work acquires enough internal relationships that it begins suggesting its own possibilities.

The artist’s task changes from intervening to attending.

What does the work need?
What is trying to happen here?
What happens if I move this?
What happens if I leave it alone?

Eventually even those questions disappear. Eye, hand, material, memory and imagination enter into a continuous conversation that happens too quickly and too intimately to require words or self awareness.

Then time disappears.

We often say that we “lost track of time,” but perhaps the phrase deserves closer attention. The clock has continued running. What has disappeared is our monitoring of ourselves moving through time.

For a while there is only the activity.

And this experience is hardly confined to artists.

A gardener can disappear into a garden. A carpenter can disappear into a piece of wood. A cook can disappear into preparing a meal. A person repairing an engine, walking through a forest, sewing a dress, solving a mathematical problem or playing with a child can enter the same condition.

The activity becomes sufficient unto itself.

This suggests that the state we associate with artistic creation may belong to a much larger human capacity: the ability to become so completely immersed in an encounter that the boundary between the observer and the observed becomes temporarily less important.

We become what we are attending to.

The painter becomes color, edge, interval and gesture. The musician becomes rhythm and tone. The writer becomes language. The gardener becomes soil, root, moisture and season. The walker becomes the path.

Perhaps this is why such experiences can feel restorative even when the activity itself is exhausting. For a little while we are relieved of the burden of continuously maintaining ourselves as a story.

We are simply present.

Of course, nobody can permanently live this way. The artist eventually steps back from the painting. The writer rereads the page. The musician listens to the recording. Judgment returns. Editing returns. Practical questions return. The self comes back and has useful work to do.

But the problem is not that the self returns. The problem comes when it never leaves.

An artist who cannot occasionally forget themselves may find it difficult to encounter anything that has not already been filtered through what they think they are supposed to be or do.

So one of the disciplines of an artistic life is learning how to become available. To be fully present in the present.

We prepare the studio. We sharpen the pencil. We tune the instrument. We arrange the materials. We develop our skills over years and decades. We show up repeatedly, whether inspired or not. All of this matters.

But underneath those practices is another practice that is harder to describe.

Keeping the mirror clean.

Not so that we can disappear forever, nor so that some mysterious outside force can take possession of us, but so that when something appears before the imagination, we are capable of receiving it without immediately trying to own it.

The reflection does not belong to the mirror. The music does not belong to the hollow reed. Even the work does not entirely belong to the artist.

We participate in its coming into being. We give it our experience, our skill, our memory, our hands, our attention and our time. But in the deepest periods of making, the distinction between maker and made can become surprisingly thin.

And then, every once in a while, we look up. Hours have passed. The room has changed and often we are surprised by what has just occurred.

We have moved from intuitive intelligence back to rational intelligence. To move back and forth between these two forms of intelligence is, at first difficult and disorienting.

Let’s move on to article #3

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Entering the Work

There is a moment in creative work when the ordinary world begins to fall away.

You may have been in the studio for twenty minutes or two hours. At first you are still carrying everything with you. There are emails to answer, groceries to buy, bills to pay, people to call. Something somebody said yesterday is still rattling around in your head. You wonder what time it is. You remember something you forgot to do. You reach for your phone.

You are physically in the studio, but you haven’t arrived yet.

Then, if you stay with the work long enough, something begins to change.

The distance between yourself and what you are doing starts to diminish. The conversation in your head becomes quieter. You stop wondering whether you feel like working. You stop evaluating every decision. One action suggests another. A piece of paper leads to another piece of paper. A color requires another color. One sentence opens a door into the next.

Eventually you stop noticing the room.

And then you stop noticing yourself.

How do we get there?

That may be one of the most important practical questions in an artist’s life.

We often speak about inspiration as though the artist must wait for something extraordinary to arrive. My experience has been almost the reverse. The important thing is to make oneself available.

You cannot demand immersion.

You can prepare a place for it.

Crossing the Threshold

Every artist eventually develops ways of crossing from ordinary consciousness into creative consciousness, whether they recognize them as such or not.

The studio itself can become one of these devices.

When I enter the studio, the materials are already waiting. There are paintings at various stages, collages underway, scraps of language, images, books, brushes, paper and unfinished possibilities. I do not necessarily have to know what I am going to make.

I only have to begin interacting with something. It is a call and response action. Something calls to me and I respond. That is a low stakes threshold. Do one thing and that leads to the next thing.

This is important because waiting on inspiration to know what you are going to do can prevent you from ever discovering what you are doing.

Pick something up.
Move something.
Make a mark.
Read yesterday’s paragraph.
Mix a color.
Cut a piece of paper.

The first action does not have to be important. Its purpose may simply be to lead to the second action. Then the second leads to the third. Eventually intention gives way to momentum.

Give the Mind Somewhere to Go

The distracted mind is not necessarily an undisciplined mind. It may simply be a mind presented with too many possible objects of attention.

A phone is an extraordinary machine for providing possible objects of attention. So is a computer connected to the internet. So, for that matter, is everyday life.

The artist therefore has to create a temporary narrowing of possibilities.

For this period of time, I am here. This is what I am doing. Everything else can wait. That doesn’t require hostility toward the outside world. It requires a temporary agreement with it. I will come back later. Then clear your mind. Be present.

This is where ritual becomes useful. Coffee made a certain way. Particular music. Silence. Sweeping the studio. Sharpening pencils. Laying out brushes. Reading what was written yesterday. Taking a walk before beginning.

The ritual itself has no magical power. Its power lies in repetition. Eventually the mind recognizes the sequence. Ah. We are going there now.

Stay Long Enough

The most difficult part is remaining through the period when nothing much seems to be happening.

We sit down to work and immediately encounter resistance. The painting seems uninteresting. The sentence feels dead. We are restless. Suddenly cleaning the refrigerator seems unusually important. This may be precisely the moment when we need to remain.

Immersion often requires time to gather itself.

The surface agitation of everyday consciousness does not necessarily disappear the moment we enter the studio. It may take twenty minutes. It may take an hour. Some days it may never happen.

That is all right.

The practice is not entering the immersive state on command. The practice is remaining available long enough for it to become possible.

Protect the Threshold

This also means recognizing how fragile the transition can be.

A single interruption at the wrong moment can return us instantly to ordinary consciousness. The phone rings. A notification appears. Someone asks a question. We check an email “for just a second.” And suddenly we are back.

The problem isn’t simply the minute consumed by the interruption. We may have to travel the entire distance inward again.

This is why uninterrupted time is so valuable to creative work. An hour without interruption may be worth considerably more than three scattered twenty-minute periods.

We need enough time to forget about time. Enough silence to stop noticing silence. Enough solitude to stop noticing that we are alone. And enough engagement with the work that eventually there is no longer an artist standing outside it wondering what to do. There is only the doing.

That is the threshold we are trying to cross.

And once we cross it, something even stranger can happen. The person who entered the studio begins to disappear. The work seems to take over. Hours pass without notice.

And sometimes, when we finally look up, we have the peculiar feeling that whatever has appeared before us was not entirely made by us.

Which raises another question.

If I wasn’t consciously directing everything that happened, who exactly was making the work?

Stay tuned for #2

It has finally cooled off here in the high desert and it has been raining all day. Hooray! It was the hottest summer on record. Even the Rio Grande went dry this summer. Not hot like Texas thank goodness becuase Albuquerque is at 5,000 feet. It still cools off at night.
I was sitting here at the computer thinking I need to write a little something for my journal which I try to write into every day. I have noticed that I have gotten a little off track becuase I have gotten lost in my studio immersed in new artworks and have forgotten to sit down and write the most minimal entries:

• The date,

• what time I woke up

• and later; what time I went to bed

• and how many steps I walked that day.

Also I write my substack articles in my journal and was thinking I need to write about something or other. So I started writing a little something about this problem of creative immersion and it led me to this series of new articles.

This first article in an introduction to the series of three essays about Creative Immersion. So here we go…

The Cycle of Creative Immersion - Entering, Disappearing, Returning

There is a place artists sometimes go.

It is not exactly a physical place, although the studio, the writing desk, the rehearsal room, the workshop or even a particular chair may provide the entrance to it. It is a condition of attention in which the ordinary world begins to recede and the work moves toward the foreground until, eventually, there seems to be very little else.

Time behaves differently there.

Hours can pass unnoticed. Hunger can go unnoticed. The phone may ring without being heard. At some point the distinction between the artist and the activity begins to soften. Instead of thinking about making the work, one is simply making it.

Sometimes even that description feels inaccurate.

The work seems to be making itself.

Artists have described this experience in many ways. We speak of being in the groove, being in the zone, being carried along, losing ourselves in the work. Psychologists have given us the useful term flow. Older spiritual traditions have offered images such as the empty vessel, the hollow reed and the clear mirror.

These different descriptions circle around a common experience: for a period of time, the ordinary sense of ourselves as the person directing everything becomes quieter.

But there is more to creative immersion than what happens while we are inside it.

There is an entrance.
And there is an exit.

Those two thresholds may be just as important as the experience itself.

Over many years of working as an artist, I have come to think of creative immersion as a cycle with three movements:

Entering. Disappearing. Returning.

Each requires a somewhat different skill.

Entering

First we have to get there. This can be surprisingly difficult.

We arrive at the studio carrying the ordinary world with us. There are messages to answer, appointments to remember, things that need fixing, conversations still running through the mind, news from elsewhere, unfinished obligations and the endless invitation to look at a screen.

The body may have entered the studio while the attention remains scattered across twenty other places. So the first problem of creative work is not necessarily What should I make?

It may be: How do I become completely present enough to make anything?

Artists develop countless techniques for accomplishing this, sometimes without recognizing them as techniques.

We prepare the studio. We arrange our materials. We make coffee. We put on certain music or insist upon silence. We take a walk. We sharpen pencils. We clean the brushes. We reread yesterday’s pages. We sit in the same chair. We turn off the phone.

Then we begin.

Perhaps most importantly, we begin before inspiration arrives.

We make one mark. Move one object. Write one sentence. Play one chord. Cut one piece of paper.

The first action leads to another. Then another. Repetition gathers momentum. Attention begins to narrow. The noise of ordinary consciousness gradually becomes quieter.

We cannot necessarily command immersion to occur. But we can learn to make ourselves available to it. Every artist eventually discovers a particular doorway. The first task is learning how to find it.

Disappearing

Then something changes. We cross a threshold without necessarily noticing when it happened. The person who was wondering what to do has become absorbed in doing it.

The internal commentator becomes quieter. Decisions occur without requiring lengthy deliberation. The hand seems to know something before the conscious mind can explain it. One thing calls for another. The work develops an internal logic that begins suggesting where it wants to go. The artist moves from commanding to attending. Time begins to disappear.

There is an old metaphor that I find useful here: consciousness as a luminous mirror.

When the mirror is clouded by our anxieties, ambitions, expectations, judgments and self-consciousness, we see everything through them. When the mirror becomes clear, it simply reflects what appears before it.

The reflection does not belong to the mirror. The mirror does not need to possess what it reflects. It simply becomes completely available to what is there.

Something similar can happen during creative immersion.

For a while, we stop standing outside the work judging it. The separation between observer and observed becomes thinner. The painter becomes absorbed in color, edge, rhythm and gesture. The writer disappears into language. The musician disappears into sound.

The ordinary self has not ceased to exist. It has simply stopped insisting upon its presence. This is often where the work surprises us.

Something appears that we did not plan. We look at it afterward and wonder: Where did that come from?

This is what artists mean when they say that the work made itself.

Returning

But eventually we have to come back.

This is the part of creative immersion that interests me increasingly because it receives much less attention.

I know from experience how completely time can disappear while working. Hours can pass. Sometimes entire days seem to merge into one another. I have missed appointments, forgotten what day it was and become so absorbed in working that I once forgot to pick up my children from school. Well, OK more than once.

Creative immersion can be wonderful. It can also become a problem.

My son Zach, who has the same capacity for intense creative absorption, sometimes calls it a “condition,” almost as though it were a psychological disorder. There is humor in the word, but there is also apprehension behind it. He knows that when he becomes deeply engaged creatively, the rest of everyday life can begin falling apart.

That observation raises a question that belongs alongside all our celebrations of artistic flow:

How do we disappear without becoming lost?

Perhaps the ability to enter creative immersion requires a complementary ability to leave it. The artist needs to learn reentry. If our internal sense of time becomes unreliable while we are working, then the boundary has to come from somewhere outside the immersive state.

An alarm.
A calendar.
A stopping time.
Another person expecting us.
A ritual that says: save the document, photograph the painting, put down the brush, write yourself a note about what comes next.

The alarm clock must remain outside the dream.

External boundaries do not necessarily interfere with creative freedom. They may be what makes that freedom sustainable. A canvas has edges. Music occurs within time. A poem eventually reaches its final line.

Creative immersion may also need a container. Within that container we can disappear completely. Outside it, there are people waiting for us. There are promises we have made. There are bodies that need feeding and sleeping and moving. There is an ordinary life that must somehow coexist with the extraordinary life of making things.

The Complete Practice

This suggests to me that creative practice consists of something larger than learning how to make paintings, poems, songs, novels, films or anything else. We are also learning how to move between different states of attention.

We learn how to leave the distracted world without rejecting it. We learn how to surrender ourselves to the work without trying to control every moment of its becoming. And we learn how to return.

Entering.
Disappearing.
Returning.

These are three movements of a single creative practice.

The first requires preparation.
The second requires surrender.
The third requires responsibility.

Over the next three essays, I want to examine each of these movements separately.

First: how do we prepare ourselves to enter sustained creative attention?
Second: what actually happens when the ordinary sense of being the doer recedes and the work seems to begin making itself?
And finally: how do we come back without destroying the very capacity for immersion that we are trying to protect?

Because perhaps the goal of an artistic life is neither to remain safely on the shore nor to disappear permanently into the depths. It is to become increasingly accomplished at making the crossing.

To know how to enter.
To know how to disappear.
And to know the way back home.

The next three articles to look more closely at each of these three stages.

OK, what am I going to wrtite about today… what’s on my mind?

Naturally, since it is close to an election in the USA and since there has been such an assault on the arts by the current administration, that is on my mind as it should be on yours. The Arts are always underrated, undervalued and under attack in Washington, DC.

A Quick Review

The current administration is reshaping federal arts policy through major budget cuts, ideological content reviews, and leadership changes at national cultural institutions. [1, 2, 3]

Federal Funding and Agencies

• Budget and Staff Cuts: The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) faced staff layoffs and canceled grant programs under administration pressure. [1]

• New Rules: Federal agencies began asking grant applicants to avoid using funds to promote certain topics, such as gender ideology. Civil rights groups challenged these rules in court and won favorable rulings. [1]

• Chilling Effect: Arts groups report that federal changes create fear and uncertainty for local and state culture programs that rely on federal money. [1]

Changes at the Kennedy Center

• New Name and Leadership: The board at the Kennedy Center added President Trump’s name to the building facade after replacing most board members with political allies.

• Renovation Battles: Plans for a sudden two-year closing of the building led to legal fights and temporary blocks by judges.

• Artist Withdrawals: Many scheduled musicians and performers canceled their appearances at venue events, citing political disagreements. [1, 2]

Smithsonian and History Museums

• Content Reviews: The White House issued strict content reviews for the Smithsonian Institution to remove items or exhibits it considers anti-American or biased. [1, 2]

• Executive Orders: New directives order museums to present a single, uplifting view of American history and to remove race-centered frameworks. [1, 2]

Artist and Public Reactions

• Protests and Art: Some individual artists use their work to protest social issues like police violence and immigration raids.

• Cautious Response: Many large museums and groups choose to stay quiet and avoid direct fights with the White House to protect their operations. [1]

An analysis from the Brookings Institution titled Defending American Arts, Culture, and Democracy offers a critical review of recent cultural policy shifts. [1]

The commentary examines how federal administrative actions alter the creative landscape and affect the broader democratic framework.

The Role of Arts in a Democracy

• Preserving Freedoms: The analysis highlights that independent cultural and artistic institutions—such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Kennedy Center, and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH)—play an essential role in safeguarding critical freedoms and maintaining a functioning democracy. [1]

• Cultural Tightening: Brookings notes that tightening control over these platforms often coincides with other democratic pressures, such as restrictions on independent media and book bans in federally operated systems. [1]

The “Chilling Effect” on Communities

• Trickle-Down Funding: The study explains that federal arts restrictions create a severe “chilling effect” that reaches far beyond Washington, D.C.. Because federal funding structures are highly decentralized, changes at the top rapidly impact local communities. [1]

• State Impact: By law, 40% of all annual NEA and NEH funding is distributed directly through a network of state, jurisdictional, and regional arts organizations. Consequently, federal spending cuts or content restrictions immediately destabilize the 56 humanities councils and local arts groups that rely on those public grants to survive. [1]

See a running account of the damage at The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council

Read Trump’s Executive Order 14253: RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY

Be sure to VOTE!

The Artist as an Expeditionary Animal

We tend to imagine the artist in the studio.

I have spent most of my working life in studios and have always regarded the studio as one of the great inventions of civilization: a place specifically set aside for taking the time for paying attention to things. I really think of my studio as my hermitage.

But the studio is only half of the equation.

Before anything can be brought into the studio, something has to be encountered.

The collage artist is an expeditionary, hunter/gatherer animal by nature.

I use the word expeditionary deliberately. An expedition is different from a vacation and different from ordinary travel. An expedition sets out with an intention accepting that the territory itself will have something to say about what happens.

You know enough to begin. You do not know enough to know what you will find. That distinction seems fundamental to creative life.

Going Out to See What’s There

As a collage artist, I understand this quite literally.

I am constantly gathering things.

Printed fragments. Bits of typography. Packaging. Old books and magazines. Discarded papers. Photographs. Ephemera. Marks made for purposes having nothing to do with art. Pieces of the enormous visual conversation constantly taking place around us.

Most people walk past these things. I walk toward them.

I am not necessarily looking for anything in particular. In fact, looking for something too particular can be a disadvantage. If I decide beforehand what I am searching for, I become very good at overlooking everything else. Instead, I try to remain open and available.

Something catches my attention.

I pick it up.
I photograph it.
I put it in a folder.
I tear something out.
I make a note.
I carry it home.

Often I have no idea what I am going to do with it. That comes later. The gathering and the making are related activities, but they are not the same activity. Gathering requires a different state of mind. It asks me to suspend judgment long enough to recognize possibility before I know its use.

A fragment enters the studio because something about it attracted my attention enogugh to pick it up.

The Portable Studio

Years ago when we first moved to Cuernavaca in Central Mexico in 1998, not realizing it, I began thinking as an expeditionary collage artist. That is where I first began harvesting the city walls. It was also when I started observing and thinking of the local - to me foreign - environment. I began seeing new materials to work with, a new atmosphere to capture and new palettes, textures and compositional ideas to explore.

I went out on daily walks around the city and collected photographs, poster papers and antique papers at flea markets. I examined archetecture, walls, doors and pavement. All of it became new ways to work and eventually lead to the idea of turning the collages into compositions for paintings. I developed a method.

Over time the street became part of the studio. Railway stations became part of it. Museums, bookstores, cafés, flea markets and hotel rooms became temporary extensions of it. Conversations became part of the material. So did photographs, overheard language, printed matter, maps, tickets, packaging and whatever else crossed my path.

Once I began traveling more frequently I figured out how to make the studio mobile - something that would fit in a suitcase and set up temporarily in a hotel room.

On a recent 49-day collage expedition through Europe and the UK, for example, I could begin a day knowing where I was sleeping that night and perhaps whom I intended to meet, but I could not possibly know what I would encounter or what the actual material of the day would be.

That was the point.

There is a particular quality of attention that develops when you travel this way. You aren’t merely passing through a place taking selfies in tourist locations. You are ‘at work’ in it.

The distinction has very little to do with whether you produce an artwork that day.

The work may simply be looking.
And collecting.
And having a conversation.
And getting lost.
May be sitting somewhere for an hour watching people pass by.
May be noticing one peculiar piece of typography painted on the side of a delivery truck.

You don’t necessarily know which experiences matter while you are having them. But it creates a texture or an insight that you carry with you and synthesize.

Every Artist Is a Collector

Collage makes this gathering process unusually visible because the physical fragments eventually appear in the work. But I suspect almost every artist operates this way.

Writers collect language.
Musicians collect sounds.
Photographers collect moments.
Painters collect relationships of color and form.
Filmmakers collect gestures, faces, locations and situations.
Poets collect peculiar conjunctions of words.

We collect conversations, mistakes, disappointments, jokes, memories, arguments, dreams, accidents and things somebody said twenty years ago that suddenly become useful this afternoon.

The artist is continually converting experience into material.

This does not mean that everything must immediately become art. That would be exhausting. It means that creative people develop a peculiar permeability to experience. The world gets in.

An Expedition Does Not Require an Airplane

There is a danger in talking about artistic expeditions because the word immediately conjures distant places.

Paris.
Berlin.
Bangkok.
Rome.

Some romantic landscape involving a notebook, an old Land Rover and an unreasonable quantity of dust.

But distance has almost nothing to do with it.

An expedition can begin when you walk out your front door.

You could spend an afternoon exploring three streets in your own city that you have never walked before. You could visit the industrial district instead of the museum. You could walk along an arroyo and collect visual forms. You could spend two hours photographing hand-painted signs or graffiti. You could ride a city bus to the end of its route simply because you have never been there.

An expedition is not defined by mileage but rather by intention and defined by attention.

This may be one reason artists sometimes discover extraordinary things in places other people describe as boring. The artist isn’t necessarily experiencing a more interesting world. The artist may simply be cultivating a relationship with the world by paying attention and taking interest in it.

Curiosity changes the experience of reality. The more closely you look, the more there is.

Bringing Something Back

Historically, expeditions were expected to return with something.

Specimens.
Maps.
Drawings.
Measurements.
Stories.
Objects.
Information about the territory.

The artistic expedition has its own version of this.

We return with evidence.

A folder of paper.
A notebook filled with phrases.
Five hundred photographs.
A recording. (for instance of the subway to Heathrow in London)

A sketch.
An introduction to someone we didn’t know before.
A new question.
A changed opinion.

Sometimes we return with almost nothing tangible and discover months later that the expedition altered the direction of the work.

Leaving Room for the Territory

There is another reason I like the idea of the expedition.

An expedition requires a certain amount of preparation.

You need equipment. You need provisions. You need some idea where you are going. You need enough organization to keep practical problems from consuming all your attention.

But at the same time if everything has already been determined, there isn’t much left to discover. The creative expedition therefore occupies an interesting territory between intention and uncertainty. You prepare yourself thoroughly enough to participate and remain open enough to be surprised.

This is also how I think about making art.

A blank canvas contains infinite possibilities, which is another way of saying that it contains no particular possibility or direction. The work begins by making the first move. That move changes the situation. The changed situation suggests another move and the conversation begins.

Eventually something appears that could not have been completely envisioned at the beginning.

An expedition works much the same way. You begin somewhere.
You encounter something. That encounter changes what is possible.

You proceed from there. One step after the other.

The World as Studio

The home studio is a base camp. It is where we return.

We spread our findings across the tables. We look at the photographs. We reread the notes. We sort the fragments. We remember the conversations. We discover relationships between things that seemed unrelated when we first encountered them.

Then the transformation begins.

Something picked up on a sidewalk becomes part of a collage.
The collage becomes the basis for a painting.
A conversation becomes an essay.
An observation becomes a story.
A photograph becomes evidence of something we didn’t realize we were investigating.

And eventually the studio fills again with work derived from encounters that could never have happened inside it. Then, sooner or later, we have to go back out.

This rhythm seems increasingly important to me:

Go out. Pay attention. Gather. Return. Make. Go out again.

The studio gives us concentration.
The expedition gives us collision.
We need both.

Because the artist’s raw material is never merely paint, paper, words, photographs, sounds or objects. Ultimately, the raw material is direct experience. And experience has to be encountered.

By traveling now and then to ‘parts unknown’ an artist gets the experience of seeing the world in a fresh way over and over again and an opportuity be surprised and to bring that adventure back to the studio.

So the next time you go on a trip make it into an expedition.

The Contrast Trap:

Why Modern Politics is Thwarting the Creative Mind

We live in an era of cultural and political reductionism, where the expansive, multi-angle, full-color spectrum of human experience is systematically flattened. To understand why public discourse feels so exhausting - and why meaningful debate has largely vanished - we have to look at the conflict through the lens of art.

Consider the Mona Lisa.

When you stand before Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, (assuming you could get that close) you are looking at an intricate web of sfumato - deliberate, hazy layers of color, light, and shadow that blend seamlessly into one another. It is an exercise in subtlety. Leonardo da Vinci started the painting in 1503 and worked on it, off and on, till 1517. The human expression is notoriously ambiguous; the background shifts depending on your perspective. The artist thinks in multi-angle full color.

Now, imagine that image violently reduced. Strip away the rich pigments. Strip away the delicate brushwork. In fact, strip away the entire grayscale entirely. Do not allow for charcoal tones, soft shadows, or muted silver mid-tones. Reduce the Mona Lisa to a binary image: stark, harsh black and white.

The nuance is gone. The enigmatic smile becomes a jagged silhouette. The depth disappears.

Then, imagine two factions standing in front of this ruined canvas, arguing over its meaning from fierce political stances. That is our current political landscape.

The Geometry of a Two-Tone Mind

This is the exact crisis of modern debate. The political apparatus functions as a binary compressor. It takes the infinite, colorful complexities of human society - economics, culture, ethics, psychology - and forces them through a scanner that only registers two outputs - highly simplified black and white.

For the person trapped in this binary mindset, there is no gray area. There are no gradients. There is only the stark contrast of absolute black and absolute white to defend or attack.

When a person who thinks only in binary terms enters a debate, their entire rhetorical strategy is dictated by the limitations of their palette:

• Subtlety becomes invisible: Because their worldview doesn’t possess the vocabulary for nuance, any attempt to introduce context, history, or mixed motives is viewed as a threat or a distraction.

• Defense becomes aggressive: Without the cushioning mid-tones of compromise, every disagreement feels like an existential battle. If you aren’t completely ‘with us’, you must be entirely ‘against us’.

• The landscape is flattened: Complex systemic issues are reduced to simple, rigid dichotomies: Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil, Absolute Freedom vs. Total Control. President George W. Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001 said, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

The tragedy of this dynamic is that it forces the artist and the creative into a defensive crouch. Creatives natively operate in the spaces between these lines. They understand that two opposing truths can exist in the same frame, that human beings are deeply flawed but capable of grace, and that the beauty of life lies entirely in the details that cannot be easily categorized.

The Art of Political Flattening

When politics dominates a culture, it demands that we abandon our full-color palette and enlist in the binary army. We see this when books, movies, and paintings are judged purely by their ideological alignment rather than their aesthetic or emotional truth.

The binary debater looks at a full-color painting and asks only one question: Which side does this support?

If the art contains subtlety, the binary mind becomes suspicious. It demands clear, distinct outlines. It demands to know exactly where the black ends and the white begins. It demands an immediate YES or a NO, a FOR or AGAINST. But the world is much more nuanced and subtle than that for any intellegent thinker.

And now is the time for intellegent thoughtful consideration not quick to the draw, shoot from the hip bravado as we currently see happening.

True debate - the kind that moves societies forward rather than locking them in permanent, gridlocked warfare - requires us to step back from this false binary stance. It requires us to look at the canvas of public life and recognize that the vast majority of human existence takes place in the rich, messy, full-color space between the extremes. In fact, it could be said that to think in black and white terms defines you as an extremist.

Until we reject the stark, low-resolution contrast of modern political rhetoric, we will keep shouting at a ruined distorted image, completely blind to the masterpiece that is right in front of us.

De-escalating the Contrast: A Guide for the Individual Citizen

The binary scanner of modern politics is an intentional structural trap, but it is not an inevitability. While we cannot single-handedly rewrite the algorithms of social media platforms or retrain political strategists to embrace nuance, we can inoculate our own minds against the flattening effect.

To preserve the multi-angle, full-color capacity of our thinking, we must intentionally adopt a set of deliberate intellectual habits. Here is how the individual citizen can step away from the stark black-and-white canvas and reclaim the mid-tones and the hues of American life.

1. Audit Your Semantic Intake

If you feed your mind exclusively on a diet of political one-liners, you will eventually lose the capacity to process complex thoughts. Slogans act like intellectual fast food—highly compressed, heavily processed, and designed to trigger an immediate, unthinking reaction.

• The Fix: Force yourself to consume long-form, deeply reported material that intentionally refuses to offer easy answers. Read histories, dense policy analyses, and biographies where characters are messy and outcomes are mixed. If an article can be entirely summarized by its headline, it is likely reinforcing the binary trap. Seek out writing that leaves you sitting in the discomfort of unresolved questions.

2. Reclaim the Grayscale Vocabulary

The binary mind relies on a limited vocabulary of absolute terms: always, never, traitor, patriot, pure, corrupt. When we use these words, we actively strip the gray tones out of our own reality.

• The Fix: Introduce conditional language back into your speech and thought patterns. Practice using phrases like: “To a certain extent...”, “In this specific context...”, or “I agree with the general premise, but the implementation needs some rethinking.” By refusing to grant blanket statements absolute authority, you force your brain to evaluate the specific gradients of a given situation rather than sorting it instantly into a binary bucket.

3. Cultivate Cognitive Hospitality

The black-and-white debater views an opposing viewpoint as a hostile invasion that must be immediately repelled with a pre-packaged counter-slogan. Reclaiming full-color thinking requires a willingness to host an idea temporarily without immediately adopting it or attacking it.

• The Fix: Practice the art of “steel-manning” - the exact opposite of straw-manning. When confronted with an ideological opponent, try to articulate their argument so clearly and fairly that they would say, “Yes, that is exactly what I mean.” Only after you have accurately mapped their perspective in its full complexity can you meaningfully evaluate where it fails or succeeds. This doesn’t mean you must change your values; it means you refuse to fight a caricature of the issue.

4. Disconnect from the Audience Matrix

Performative debate thrives on the presence of an audience. When we post on social media, we are rarely engaged in an honest exchange of ideas; we are sending signals to show our tribe that we are defending the white and attacking the black. But everyone their’s their own side is the right side.

• The Fix: Move your most difficult conversations offline, away from the digital coliseums. Complex, nuanced human issues were never meant to be adjudicated in the public comments sections or via brief text threads. A face-to-face conversation over coffee reintroduces the visual and vocal mid-tones—tone of voice, facial expressions, and hesitation—that humanize the speaker and dismantle the binary illusion.

5. Protect the Creative Sector of Your Life

Ultimately, the most effective antidote to political reductionism is art itself. Creative expression—whether reading fiction, viewing complex paintings, listening to intricate music, or engaging in your own creative projects—acts as resistance.

• The Fix: Dedicate time to spaces where politics is explicitly banned from being the sole metric of value. Immerse yourself in stories where the protagonist makes terrible mistakes but remains sympathetic, or where the “villain” acts out of deeply human, understandable motives.

By insisting on seeing the world in its original, high-resolution, full-color state, you perform a radical act of civic sanity.

It took me a while to see the message but reader pointed me to this article in relation to the discussion on consciousness:

Next Level Human

They Deleted A Major Study On Consciousness…. Why?

**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade…

Read more

4 months ago · 1447 likes · 301 comments · Dr. Jade Teta

I wrote back to Kathryn, the reader, this comment:

I just now found this message! Thanks for that link Kathryn. Yes, I think there is a singular something or non-something that lives as unmanifest being and that this unmanifest singularity somehow manifests itself in the physical universe as constant uniqueness. All of it - the manifest state - is composed of consciouness particulating as matter/time/space in a whole decentralized way operating everywhere at once through everything to discover and experience itself from every angle in infinite manyhood while at the same time everything is in a state of unified interconnected self-communication and coordination so that to even move one’s finger the entire universe must adjust to it. Some sort of self-entanglement. But it seem to me that this unmanifest entity that is one without a second uses manifestation to dream of being many - in order to have companionship with itself. So to say such a thing in human language is to immediately be telling a falsehood since language at it’s structural roots is based on the misunderstanding that we are not all this one being. Only IT can know ITself but at the root of all beings is only IT. Is that consciousness? Kind of. If this is true (more or less) IT can’t really be studied with scientific methods. Only directly experienced in unique unrepeatable ways beyond measurement [or proof].

This page, compiling many different translations of the opening chapter of the Tao te Ching, suggests the impossibility to communicate the Ineffable in language or for that matter even study it except to dissolve into it.

https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tao-te-ching.htm

After writing the comment, I decided to develop it into the more formal article below.

The One Dreaming the Many

I propose, as a metaphysical intuition rather than a scientific claim, that behind or prior to the manifest universe there is a singular something, or perhaps non-something, that cannot properly be called a thing at all. It is unmanifest being, although even the word being may already say too much. It is one without a second, yet calling it “one” is misleading because one only has meaning where two is possible.

Manifestation may be understood as this undivided reality becoming apparent as multiplicity: matter, energy, space, time, life, thought, consciousness, and the innumerable forms and events of the universe. The remarkable characteristic of manifestation is constant uniqueness. Nothing occurs twice in precisely the same way. Every thing, being, event, perspective, and moment is a singular expression of the whole from a position that has never existed before and will never exist again.

In this sense, the One does not become many by dividing itself into genuinely separate pieces. It becomes many perspectivally, through infinite manyhood. Every manifestation is local and unique while remaining inseparable from the whole. What appears to us as a universe composed of separate entities might instead be understood as a decentralized field of self-relation, operating everywhere at once through everything. I think of this as a kind of self-entanglement, not in the technical sense used in physics, but as a philosophical image for an indivisible reality continually coordinating with itself.

Under such a view, even the smallest action is not entirely private. To move one’s finger is for the universe to be different than it was before. The universe does not contain an independent person who moves an independent finger. Rather, the whole universe is expressing itself locally as this person, this finger, this movement, at this particular moment.

Why should an undivided reality manifest at all? Here I can offer only a poetic speculation: perhaps the One dreams of being many in order to experience companionship with itself. A reality without a second has no Other to encounter. Manifestation creates the experience of otherness without requiring ultimate separation. Through multiplicity the One can encounter itself as stranger, lover, enemy, friend, animal, tree, stone, star, thought, and world. Separation may therefore be experientially real while not being ontologically final.

Is this underlying reality consciousness? Perhaps, but only if consciousness is understood as another inadequate word. Human consciousness involves memory, attention, perspective, subject and object, all of which already belong to manifestation. Our view, as humans, is necessarily human-centric anthropomorphism. What we call consciousness may instead be a local expression of something more fundamental for which language has no adequate term.

This leads to the central paradox. Language itself depends upon differentiation. Grammar divides reality into subjects and objects, actors and actions, this and that, self and other. To speak of the undivided therefore requires us to divide it. Even saying “IT knows ITself” creates a knower, an act of knowing, and something known. The statement contradicts what it attempts to describe.

The Tao Te Ching begins at precisely this threshold: what can be named is already not the nameless source itself. Language can point toward the ineffable, circle around it, contradict itself before it, or create conditions in which it might be intuited, but cannot contain it.

Nor do I present this view as something established by scientific evidence. Science depends upon observation, distinction, measurement, comparison, and reproducibility. If the reality proposed here precedes the distinction between observer and observed, then it cannot straightforwardly become an object of scientific investigation. This does not prove that such a reality exists. Neither does its resistance to measurement constitute evidence for it.

If it can be known at all, its appropriate mode of knowing may instead be direct and unrepeatable experience. Yet even “experience” implies an experiencer and something experienced. At the proposed limit, that distinction would also disappear.

One would not finally stand apart from IT and know IT.

There would only be IT.

And whatever was subsequently said about that encounter would already be a translation, necessarily unique and unrepeatable. The moment the encounter becomes an account of the encounter, something fundamental has changed. What may have been immediate has become memory. What may have been indivisible has entered a language built from divisions. What may have required no explanation has become a story told by one person to another.

From the standpoint of everyone who did not have such an experience, the account therefore amounts to inscrutable hearsay, rumor, innuendo, metaphor, and unsubstantiated speculation. It cannot carry the experience itself from one consciousness to another, nor can the testimony of the experiencer establish that their interpretation of what occurred is true.

Even the experiencer cannot escape this problem. In remembering and describing the encounter, the experiencer becomes an interpreter of an earlier version of themselves. The testimony is already one step removed from whatever happened.

This does not make such accounts meaningless. It places them in their proper category. They are not proofs. They are traces.

Perhaps this is why humanity has produced thousands of mystical philosophies, religions, poems, paintings, songs, rituals, and contradictory descriptions of what may be the same ineffable mystery. If there is an underlying unity, we should not expect uniform reports of it. Under the principle of constant uniqueness, every return to language must produce another singular translation.

There can therefore be no authoritative account of the Ineffable. There can only be reports from the vicinity.

Rumors of the One, told by the many.

And if the proposition developed here is in the neighborhood of correct, even these rumors are IT talking to ITself. Yet only IT could know the truth behind the rumor being spoken.

The speaker cannot know. The listener cannot know. Even the one who claims to have directly experienced IT cannot subsequently know with certainty what the experience meant, because the moment it is remembered, interpreted, or spoken, it has already become a unique and unrepeatable translation and not the experience itself.

Perhaps this is the final paradox: IT alone knows what is true, yet there is no one apart from IT to whom the truth could be told.

Everything else is rumor and innuendo.

The Eye Becomes the Performer

On Painting as Score

Cecil Touchon | September 3, 2026

I have long been interested in what happens when ideas belonging to one art form migrate into another. What happens when the theories of poetry are applied to painting? What happens when musical ideas such as rhythm, repetition, variation, counterpoint, harmony, dissonance, tempo, and silence are treated as visual problems? At what point does a painting cease to be simply an arrangement of forms and begin to behave like a score?

A painting presents a curious problem in relation to music. Music unfolds through time. We cannot hear a musical composition all at once. A note arrives, disappears, and remains in memory while another takes its place. Gradually, through repetition and variation, we recognize relationships. Something heard earlier returns in another form. A rhythm establishes itself and then shifts. An expectation is created, postponed, fulfilled, or abandoned.

A painting seems to operate differently because the entire object is continuously present. Yet our experience of it is not instantaneous. We may see the whole painting immediately, but we cannot attend to the whole painting simultaneously. The focal point of the eye must travel.

It moves from one form to another. It pauses. It doubles back. It notices something at the edge of vision and jumps across the canvas. It recognizes a form encountered earlier. It discovers that a shape has returned inverted, enlarged, compressed, interrupted, or partially concealed. What appeared initially to be a field of unrelated events gradually reveals itself as a system of relationships.

In that sense, a painting also unfolds in time.

The duration is supplied by the viewer.

This is where the idea of the painting as a score becomes useful to me. A musical score is an object that contains instructions or possibilities for an event. The notation itself is silent. Music occurs when someone performs it. Similarly, the painting remains physically still, yet the viewer activates it through looking. The movement occurs in consciousness as the eye travels through the work.

The eye becomes the performer and the painting becomes the score.

This way of thinking changes my relationship to abstract form. A shape no longer needs to represent an object. It can function as an event.

A pointed wedge can behave like an attack. A long curve can carry the eye like a sustained tone. A sequence of narrow vertical forms can establish a staccato rhythm. A spiral can slow the movement and turn attention inward. Overlapping translucent shapes can create something analogous to chords. Dark forms can operate as accents or interruptions. Open areas become intervals in which relatively little happens, something approaching the function of silence.

I work with a deliberately restricted vocabulary of forms. The limitation is important because recognition depends upon recurrence. A curve encountered in one part of a painting may appear elsewhere at another scale or orientation. Angular fragments migrate through the composition. Spirals return. Shapes reverse themselves. Forms overlap and combine into temporary structures before separating again.

The same few elements can produce an indefinite number of variations.

This brings the work close to musical composition, particularly forms of music constructed through repetition, variation, rhythmic displacement, layering, and counterpoint. I am interested in the way a composer can take a relatively modest motif and discover within it an enormous field of possibilities. Complexity does not necessarily require an ever-expanding vocabulary. It can arise through increasingly subtle relationships among a limited number of elements.

But these forms also occupy another territory that interests me: the territory of writing.

Human beings are extraordinarily sensitive to marks that resemble language. Put several abstract forms beside one another and, almost involuntarily, we begin wondering whether they can be read. A vertical becomes something like a letter. A curve suggests part of an alphabet. Repeated forms begin to imply syntax. Sequences suggest sentences even when no actual sentence exists.

This is where painting, writing, and musical notation begin to converge.

Writing transforms language into marks. Musical notation transforms sound into marks. Painting can make marks without requiring them to refer to anything outside themselves. All three depend upon distinctions, repetitions, intervals, sequences, densities, and relationships.

My forms sometimes resemble fragments of an unknown alphabet. At other moments they might appear to belong to a system of musical notation whose rules have been lost. They seem to promise legibility without ever surrendering themselves completely to reading.

That ambiguity is important.

If the forms became actual letters, the painting would begin directing the viewer toward words and their established meanings. If they became conventional musical notation, they would instruct a musician to produce particular sounds. Instead, they remain suspended between these systems. They possess the atmosphere of language without becoming language and the rhythmic potential of musical notation without prescribing a particular piece of music.

They are readable without being decipherable.

This is closely related to my interest in asemic writing, writing emptied of conventional semantic content while retaining the gesture, rhythm, structure, and expectation of written language. Asemic writing asks us to experience writing before meaning settles upon it. We encounter the movement of inscription itself.

The paintings extend that possibility into a larger visual field. Rather than reading from left to right toward a predetermined conclusion, the viewer can enter anywhere. There is no single correct sequence. One person might follow the spirals. Another might move among the darkest forms. Another might attend to the overlapping tonal passages. Each creates a different temporal experience from the same physical object.

This is where painting possesses an extraordinary freedom that neither conventional writing nor conventional musical notation allows. The score does not prescribe its own performance.

The viewer invents it.

The painting therefore exists in two states. There is the material object hanging silently on the wall, containing all of its forms simultaneously. And there is the painting as experienced, reconstructed moment by moment through attention, memory, anticipation, recognition, and return.

Every viewing becomes another performance.

And because no one follows exactly the same path twice, even the same viewer produces a slightly different version each time.

The painting does not make a sound, yet it can have rhythm. It contains no words, yet it can suggest language. It offers no instructions, yet it can behave like notation.

Somewhere among painting, writing, and music there is a territory where marks cease to belong exclusively to any one discipline. They become gestures waiting to be activated.

The canvas is silent.
The score is waiting.
The eye starts to move.
The performance begins.

This essay written for one of my collectors who is considering acquiring this painting.

Creation Finishes the Making of the Work. Publication Begins the Life of the Work.

There is a moment every artist knows.

You step back from the painting and realize there is nothing more to do. You write the final line of the poem. You listen to the final mix of the song. You type the last sentence of the manuscript.

It is finished.

Or so it seems.

For most of my life as an artist, I have thought a great deal about what it means to finish things. Artists are makers, after all, and making naturally gives us a very particular idea of completion. We begin with something that does not exist and work on it until it does. Eventually there comes a moment when we have to stop.

But I have increasingly come to think that this is only one kind of finishing.

Creation finishes the making of the work. Publication begins the life of the work.

That distinction has become especially vivid for me recently because I have teamed up with my son Zach to help him publish a country album and, more broadly, to begin developing a publishing company for our creative work.

Zach and I are very different artists. Our artistic visions occupy different territories, which is probably an advantage. My immediate interest is in helping him build the structure necessary to take his music all the way to the finish line.

But this has raised an interesting question.

Where exactly is the finish line?

The Seduction of Making

Creative people naturally want to create.

That sounds obvious, but it causes one of the central problems of the artistic life. Making things is exciting. Writing another song is exciting. So is recording another track, starting another painting, discovering an unexpected phrase in a poem.

On the other hand, entering information into a database, registering a copyright is not particularly exciting.

Photographing a painting, assigning an inventory number, organizing files, preparing metadata, maintaining a mailing list, creating a release schedule, checking contracts, uploading files, sending announcements and keeping track of income are not usually the activities that caused anyone to become an artist.

So artists tend to concentrate their energy where the pleasure is. They make things. Then they make more things. Before long they may have boxes of drawings, folders of poems, hard drives full of recordings, stacks of paintings, unfinished manuscripts and hundreds of photographs documenting works whose locations they can no longer remember.

I know this territory very well. The problem is not a lack of creativity. Quite the opposite. The problem is abundance and accumulation

The Other Half of the Creative Practice

If we want an artistic practice to become self-sustaining, however, we have to enlarge our idea of what making a work means.

There is the creative sequence:

Idea → Experiment → Development → Work

But then another sequence begins:

Documentation → Archive → Inventory → Publication → Distribution → Audience → Income → Reputation

And eventually that sequence circles back around:

Income → Time → Materials → Freedom → More Creation

Seen this way, publication and distribution are not unfortunate commercial chores attached to the end of the creative process.

They are part of the creative ecosystem.

The purpose is not merely to make money from art. The purpose is to create conditions under which the artist can continue making art.

That is a very different proposition.

Money becomes less interesting as a scorecard and more interesting as stored creative energy. It buys materials. It pays studio rent. It purchases equipment. It pays collaborators. It creates time. It allows experiments to fail. It permits the artist to undertake the next project.

A sustainable creative practice is a circulatory system.

If nothing leaves the studio, nothing returns to nourish it.

The Work Has Two Lives

This suggests that every artwork potentially has two lives.

The first is its studio life.

During this life the work belongs primarily to the artist. It is being invented, questioned, revised, destroyed, rebuilt, doubted and eventually accepted.

Then something important happens.

The artist releases it.

The work begins its social life.

Someone hears the song while driving home at night.
Someone encounters the painting in a gallery.
Someone reads the poem twenty years after it was written.
Someone sends the book to a friend.
Someone discovers a recording decades after the musician has died.

At that point the work is doing something the artist can no longer entirely control.

It is moving through other people’s lives.

That is what publication really means.

The word is related to making something public. Something private enters the shared world. Publication therefore isn’t simply printing a book or uploading a song. It is a threshold. Before publication, the artist is primarily responsible for the work. After publication, the work begins accumulating experiences of its own.

The Archive Is Part of This Life

This is also why documentation and archiving matter so much. I have spent many years thinking about artists’ archives, and I increasingly see the archive not as a storage facility for dead things but as part of the living infrastructure of an artistic practice.

An inventory number seems terribly mundane until someone needs to locate a work twenty years later. A date seems insignificant until someone tries to reconstruct the development of an artist’s thinking. A photograph seems routine until the original work disappears. A notebook seems private until it becomes the only surviving record of how an important idea developed.

Documentation allows the work to travel through time.
Publication allows it to travel through society.
The archive allows it to travel through history.

These are not peripheral activities. They are different forms of transmission.

Building the Machine

This is what interests me about the experiment Zach and I are beginning.

We are not simply trying to release an album.

We are trying to build a machine. Not a machine that manufactures art. The art must remain unpredictable, personal, strange and alive. The machine begins after creation. Its job is to catch the work.

A song gets written.

What happens next?

A system is set up made of a series of steps that must be practiced and followed routinely and uniformly. First documentation and archiving…

Where is it recorded? Where are the files stored? What is the definitive version? Who wrote it? Who owns what? Has it been registered? Has it been mastered? Does it have artwork? Does it have metadata? When will it be released? Where will it be distributed? How will anyone know it exists? How will income be tracked? Where will the master files be stored ten years from now?

None of these questions are as exciting as writing the song.

That is precisely why a system is necessary.

The artist should not have to reinvent the administrative process every time a work is completed.

The system should already be figured out, designed and waiting.

The artist creates.

The machine catches the creative work and brings it the rest of the way to publication.

An Experiment in the Creative Life

For me, this project has another dimension.

I have spent decades developing and practicing my own ideas about how artists might construct sustainable creative lives. I have done this in the visual arts ecosystem. Now I have an opportunity to test some of those ideas in a different artistic ecosystem.

Music has its own economy, institutions, technologies, traditions and problems. I expect we will have misunderstandings, make mistakes and miscalculations. I hope we make some interesting ones.

That is part of the experiment.

What actually happens when we try to move consistently from creation to publication?

Where do things get stuck?
What tasks do we continually avoid?
What procedures make those tasks easier?
What turns out to generate attention and income?
What turns out to generate attention but no income?
What creates long-term value?
What turns out to be a complete waste of time?

I don’t know yet.

That is why I am interested. I see it as part of the creative process.

A philosophy of the creative life should eventually survive contact with actual life and hopefully traverse from one ecosystem to another.

My Own Archive Suddenly Looks Different

There is another unexpected consequence of this experiment.

For approximately twenty-five years I have been working with collage poetry. I have accumulated a large body of fragments, poems, phrases, juxtapositions and textual experiments. Until recently I primarily thought of this material as poetry and visual language. Now I am beginning to look at it differently.

I find myself asking:

Could this be a song?

Sometimes the answer is clearly no.
Sometimes a single phrase suddenly sounds like a chorus or a strange collision of fragments begins suggesting a narrative or the gaps that seemed characteristic of collage poetry begin behaving like the ambiguities of song lyrics.

The archive changes when you ask it a new question. What appeared to be a repository of completed work becomes a reservoir for future work. That may be one of the great advantages of maintaining an archive in the first place. You do not know what your future self will need from it.

From Individual Works to a Body of Work

There is another reason publication matters.

Artists tend to think intensely about individual works.

Careers, however, are built from bodies of work.

One song is a song.
Twenty songs begin to reveal a voice.
Several albums begin to reveal a trajectory.
A decade of work begins to reveal a world.

The same is true of paintings, poems, films, photographs, novels or almost any sustained creative practice.

Recognition and reputation emerges gradually from accumulation.
People begin recognizing something. They hear a few seconds and know who made it.
They encounter a painting across a room and recognize the artist. They read a paragraph without seeing the author’s name and recognize the voice. That recognition cannot be manufactured quickly because it depends upon a body of work entering public consciousness over time.

Which means the artist has to keep finishing the job.
Not merely making the work.
Releasing it into the world.

The Finish Line Keeps Moving

Perhaps, then, we need two finish lines.

The first belongs to the maker.

The work is made.

The second belongs to the artistic life of the work.

The work has been prepared to leave home.

It has been documented.
It has been archived.
It has been inventoried.
It has been published.

It has been placed where another human being has the possibility of encountering it. After that, something wonderful happens. The artist loses control and the art takes on a life of its own.

Someone plays the song again.
Someone hangs the painting in a bedroom.
Someone copies a line from the poem into a notebook.
Someone discovers the work fifty years later in an archive.
Someone misunderstands it.
Someone understands it in a way the artist never imagined.
Someone loves or is influenced by it.

The work begins accumulating a history beyond the history of its making.

And perhaps that is the point at which the artist can finally turn back toward the studio and begin again.

Creation finishes the making of the work.

Publication begins the life of the work.

The Puzzle Exists in the Pieces

Reality only appears fragmented because we encounter the whole through the narrow aperture of being human.

Matthew Rose recently left a thoughtful comment on one of my essays about consciousness. He pointed out that consciousness is not some fixed instrument through which we objectively observe an equally fixed world. It is itself in flux.

The red we see on Monday morning may not be quite the same red we experience Monday evening. A collage that seems perfectly resolved on Tuesday may look completely wrong on Wednesday. The paper hasn’t necessarily changed. The composition hasn’t moved. Yet something has changed because the person looking at it has changed.

We tend to imagine ourselves standing still while reality passes before us. But there is no still point from which we are observing. We are in the stream ourselves.

Everything is in motion.

The light is changing. The temperature is changing. Our bodies are changing. Our memories are accumulating. Our attention is shifting. The world around us is reorganizing itself continuously, and the consciousness through which we experience that world is reorganizing itself as well.

So perhaps the great puzzle of existence is even stranger than we imagine.

Not only are the pieces constantly changing positions. We are one of the pieces.

And yet, behind all of this movement, I have long suspected that there is something that is not fragmented at all.

The Puzzle May Belong to Us

For us humans, everything seems to be a puzzle whose pieces are constantly changing positions in ways that maintain an infinite uniqueness.

No two moments are exactly alike.

No two people occupy precisely the same perceptual position.

Indeed, even the same person cannot occupy the same perceptual position twice because by the time we return to something, we have changed.

This is something every artist knows.
You make a painting and put it against the wall.
You look at it that afternoon.
You look at it the next morning.
You turn it around for three days.
You bring it back out.

Suddenly you see something that apparently wasn’t there before.
Except, of course, it was there.

What changed? You did.

This is one of the reasons artistic judgment is so mysterious. We like to imagine that we are gradually arriving at an objective assessment of the artwork. Perhaps sometimes we are. But we are also encountering the work through a constantly changing consciousness.

Tuesday’s artist is looking at Monday’s painting.

Wednesday’s artist is looking at Tuesday’s decisions.

Years later, another version of the artist may look at the same work and discover something entirely different.

The artwork becomes strangely stable compared with the person looking at it.

And yet even the artwork isn’t really stable. The paper ages. Pigments change. The surrounding culture changes. The historical context changes. The other artworks surrounding it change. The meanings attached to its forms change.

Everything participates in the movement.

We See the Flow as Particles

The difficulty may begin with perception itself. Reality appears to be continuous, but our sensory apparatus necessarily encounters it selectively.

We don’t see everything.
We don’t hear everything.
We don’t feel everything.

We receive tiny portions of an unimaginably large field of activity.

Our eyes acquire one bit of information and then another. Our ears receive changing vibrations. Our nervous system processes temperature, pressure, balance, movement, smell, pain, pleasure, and countless other signals. Somehow consciousness assembles this flood into what feels like a continuous world.

Then something else happens.

We name it.

Tree. Cloud. Person. Red. Table. Me. You. Past. Future.

The naming is extraordinarily useful. Without this ability to divide experience conceptually, ordinary human life would probably be impossible. Language allows us to distinguish, remember, communicate, plan, compare, and construct increasingly elaborate understandings of the world.

But there is a price.

The moment we name something, we draw an imaginary boundary around it.
We turn the flow into a thing. We begin to experience a continuous reality as a collection of separate objects. The river becomes water, bank, stone, reflection, tree, fish, sky.

And somewhere standing beside all of this is something called me.

Language has not necessarily discovered these boundaries. It has created a useful way of navigating them. The map is indispensable. But the map is not the landscape.

Before the Names

This is where art becomes particularly interesting. Art can operate very close to the territory that exists before naming.

A line doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything.
A rhythm doesn’t have to represent anything.
A sound doesn’t have to explain itself.
A gesture can simply be a gesture.

The experience came first. The naming of things comes afterward.

Artists often speak about intuition when describing the actual moment of making something. The intellect is certainly present. Knowledge, experience, technique, memory, judgment, and intention are all participating.

But something else seems to be operating upstream of them.

The hand sometimes knows before the mind knows what the hand knows.
The musician hears where the phrase must go.
The poet feels the next word approaching before knowing what it will be.
The painter senses that something must move three inches to the left.

Then afterward we explain ourselves - or try to.

We construct the conceptual framework.
We give the exhibition a title.
We write the artist statement.
We explain why the thing exists.

But the deepest part of the making may have happened before any of those explanations became available.

What If Consciousness Is Not in the Pieces?

This brings me to the suspicion I mentioned in my response to Matthew.

I suspect that behind all of this apparent fragmentation there may be a single consciousness for whom none of this is puzzling at all.

I don’t offer that as a scientific proposition. I have no experiment with which to prove it. I mean it as a metaphysical intuition arising from experience.

What if consciousness is not something produced separately inside billions of isolated creatures? What if individual consciousness is instead a localization of something much larger?

Imagine an ocean producing waves.

Each wave has a recognizable form. It arises at a particular place. It has a particular height, duration, velocity, and character. We can point to it and say, “There is a wave.”

And there certainly is.

But there is no substance called wave that is separate from the ocean. The wave is the ocean behaving locally.

Maybe we are something like that.
Perhaps what I call my consciousness is consciousness behaving locally as Cecil for a while.

And what you call your consciousness is that same mysterious field behaving locally as you.

From the perspective of the wave, everything seems separate. From the perspective of the ocean, nothing ever was.

The Lock, the Door and the Key

Matthew offered a wonderful image in his comment. He said consciousness is the lock hole, the door, and the key maker.

I would add that perhaps it is also whatever stands on both sides of the door.

This is the peculiar difficulty of investigating consciousness. We are using consciousness to investigate consciousness. The investigator and the thing being investigated cannot finally be separated.

Every scientific instrument, every mathematical equation, every philosophical argument, every mystical vision, every painting, poem and every doubt about all of the above ultimately appears within consciousness.

There is nowhere else for any of it to appear.

And so perhaps the mystery cannot finally be solved by standing outside it because there is no outside position available to us. We are trying to understand the river while being made of river.

Going With the Flow

This is where our frustration begins.

We keep trying to stop the flow long enough to understand it.

We isolate.
We categorize.
We measure.
We compare.
We name.

These are magnificent human abilities. Science depends upon them. Civilization depends upon them. Art itself frequently depends upon them.

But another possibility exists alongside them.

Instead of always trying to understand the flow, we can occasionally allow ourselves to experience being the flow.

This requires a different kind of attention - quiet attention. The sort of attention in which the machinery of naming becomes less insistent.

Anyone who has become completely absorbed in making something may recognize this. Musicians know it. Painters know it. Dancers know it. Athletes know it. People walking alone through forests know it. People sitting quietly watching sunlight move across a wall know it.

For a little while, the distinction between observer and observed becomes less important.

You are no longer thinking:
I am looking at the tree.
There is simply seeing.

You are no longer thinking:
I am making this drawing.
There is drawing.

The subject-object structure through which we ordinarily organize experience loosens slightly. And sometimes, very briefly, something astonishing becomes apparent. Nothing was separate in the first place.

The Glimpse

This is one of the great privileges of artistic practice. The artist spends a lifetime cultivating conditions in which such glimpses become more likely.

We arrange paper.
We draw lines.
We mix colors.
We listen.
We walk.

We repeat gestures thousands of times.

From the outside it may look as though we are making objects. And certainly we are. But something else is happening beneath the production of those objects.

We are practicing attention.

We are learning how to remain close to experience before experience hardens into explanation. We are occasionally slipping beneath the conceptual net we ordinarily throw across the world. And there, every once in a while, the puzzle disappears.

Not because we have solved it. Because for a moment we are no longer looking at reality as a pile of pieces requiring assembly. We glimpse the possibility that the pieces were never actually separate.

The endless changing, the paper, the light, Tuesday’s judgment, Wednesday’s doubt, the hand, the eye, the artwork, the viewer, the past, the future, the red becoming mauve in the evening sun - all of it belongs to one immeasurable movement.

It is flowing unendingly.

Our senses give us particulars.
Our language gives those particulars names.
Our minds arrange the names into worlds.

And all of that is necessary and beautiful.

But every once in a while, if we become quiet enough to see through the spaces between the names, to read between the lines, for one brief instant we encounter the whole.

Yet the whole has understood itself perfectly all along. It is the only thing here.

When Limitation Becomes a Microscope

There is a curious thing that happens when an artist voluntarily reduces the number of possibilities available.

The world gets bigger.

This seems contradictory. We ordinarily imagine that greater freedom means having more choices. More colors. More materials. More techniques. More space. More subjects. More possibilities.

Yet anyone who has worked seriously within a narrow range eventually discovers something surprising. Once the field has been sufficiently reduced, distinctions that were previously invisible begin to appear.

The limit has become a microscope.

Imagine deciding to make a hundred drawings using nothing more than a single kind of line. At first the proposition might seem absurdly restrictive. How much could possibly happen with one line?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

The line can move quickly or slowly. It can hesitate. It can accelerate. It can become heavy or faint. It can wander and return. It can repeat itself. It can reverse direction. It can bunch together into density or open outward into spaciousness. It can establish a rhythm and then violate it. It can become melodic, percussive, nervous, lyrical, awkward, graceful, mechanical or wildly eccentric.

None of these possibilities were created by the limitation. They were already there. The limitation simply made them visible.

This is an important distinction.

Creative limitation does not necessarily reduce possibility. It can increase our ability to perceive possibility. There is simply too much available to us otherwise.

The world presents an almost unbearable abundance of potential material. Every color, every shape, every image, every object, every technique, every historical reference, every conceivable combination of them. The contemporary artist stands before a nearly infinite warehouse with all the doors open.

That can certainly be exhilarating. It can also make us blind.

When everything is available, differences become coarse. We move rapidly between possibilities because there is always another possibility waiting nearby.

But choose one thing and stay with it long enough and perception begins to sharpen.

This is one of the secrets of the étude.

An étude says: For now, forget everything else. We are going to investigate this one particular thing.

A pianist might concentrate upon a technical or rhythmic problem of interst. A poet might adopt a restrictive form. A painter might work within an extremely limited palette. A collagist might use materials gathered from one location. A visual artist might investigate nothing more than a zigzag, a reversing zigzag, a loop and a few variations produced by combining them.

Initially we see the category.

Zigzag.

After prolonged attention we begin seeing individuals.
This zigzag is compressed.
This one breathes.
This one accelerates.
This one feels architectural.
This one seems agitated.
This one becomes almost calligraphic.
This one begins behaving like music.

The object has not necessarily become more complicated. Our seeing has become more precise.

This happens everywhere with all things.

Someone who knows little about wine might simply distinguish red from white. Someone who has devoted decades to wine detects grape varieties, regions, soils, weather, fermentation methods and years.

Someone unfamiliar with birds hears birdsong. An ornithologist hears individuals.

Someone unfamiliar with classical music hears an orchestra. A conductor hears relationships among dozens of simultaneous voices.

Expertise is partly the accumulation of knowledge, but it is also the refinement of discrimination. You learn to notice smaller more subtle differences.

The artist does the same thing through sustained practice.

At first we see line.
Then we see kinds of line.
Then qualities of line.
Then relationships among lines.
Then rhythms produced by those relationships.
Then variations within those rhythms.
Then interruptions of those variations.

Eventually an entire world emerges from something that once seemed almost impossibly simple. This is where limitation becomes an instrument of consciousness.

The microscope does not create microorganisms. It allows us to perceive a scale of reality that was already present but inaccessible to ordinary vision.

Creative limitation can function similarly. It reduces the field so that attention can penetrate more deeply into it.

Instead of asking, What else can I add? we begin asking, What haven’t I noticed yet?

That is an entirely different creative question. And often a much more interesting one.

There is a tendency, particularly early in one’s development, to associate creativity with invention. We imagine that the creative person must continually introduce something new.

But mature creative practice often involves something closer to excavation.

You return.
You reconsider.
You repeat.
You make another variation.
Then another.
And another.

Someone watching from outside might wonder why you haven’t moved on. But you have moved on. You have moved downward and inward. What appeared from the surface to be repetition has become penetration.

The first ten variations reveal obvious possibilities.
The next twenty exhaust the solutions you already knew.

Then the interesting territory begins. You have used up your habits. You have exhausted your first answers. You have done the clever things.

Now you must actually look and contemplate.

This may be one reason limitations can be so productive. They eventually force us beyond our own repertoire. If every time we become uncomfortable we introduce a new material, technique or subject, novelty can rescue us from having to go deeper. But if the rules remain in place, we eventually arrive at the edge of what we know how to do.

Then imagination has to work. The limitation begins exerting pressure. Under that pressure, subtler possibilities become perceptible. A slight change becomes significant.

A millimeter matters.
A pause matters.
The thickness of a line matters.
The interval between two forms matters.
The difference between repeating something seven times and eight times matters.

These are not trivial distinctions. They are the vocabulary through which the work develops its intelligence.

Music understands this beautifully.

A composer does not need an infinite number of notes to create an infinite variety of musical experiences. Much of Western music has been constructed from twelve tones. Entire traditions have emerged from highly constrained systems of rhythm, harmony, instrumentation and form.

The richness comes through relationship.

This may be one of the great lessons for visual artists as well.

Complexity does not necessarily require more elements.
Complexity can arise through increasingly subtle relationships among very few elements.

A line encounters another line.
A rhythm repeats and reverses.
A loop interrupts a zigzag.
A dense passage opens into silence.
A gesture returns altered by everything that has happened since we last encountered it.

Suddenly we are no longer dealing merely with shapes.

We are dealing with memory, expectation, rhythm, tension and time.

A visual language has begun to form. And this is how languages always deepen.

Not through endlessly accumulating vocabulary, but through discovering increasingly subtle ways of using what is already available.

Eventually the artist begins to understand that limitation and infinity are not opposites. A small territory can contain an inexhaustible world.

One could spend a lifetime studying light.
Or line.
Or the human face.
Or rectangles.
Or scraps of printed paper.
Or the movement of the hand.
Or the mysterious sensation that occurs when one mark follows another and the eye begins to experience rhythm.

There is no requirement that we exhaust the world. We cannot.

Our task might instead be to choose some small corner of it and pay sufficient attention that the apparently ordinary begins revealing its extraordinary complexity.

That requires patience.
It requires repetition.
It requires resisting the constant temptation to escape into novelty.
Most importantly, it requires faith that there is more here than we currently perceive.

So we narrow the field.
We choose a few elements.
We establish certain limits.
We return tomorrow.
And the next day.
And the next.

Gradually our perception becomes finer.

What once appeared to be one thing becomes ten things, then a hundred things, then a thousand subtle distinctions for which we may not even have names.

The territory has not expanded.

Our consciousness of it has.

The limit has begun to function like a microscope. And through it, we discover infinity hiding inside the smallest things.

The Best Use of the Will is to Be Willing

We live in a culture obsessed with the “triumph of the human will.” We are told to grit our teeth, manifest our destiny, and hustle until we bend reality to our liking. The underlying assumption is that if we just push hard enough, we can force the puzzle pieces of life into place.

I used to try that. But at some point, I had a realization that was both incredibly liberating and slightly embarrassing: Not only is it utterly futile to try and force outcomes, but I am also far too limited to even know what I should be forcing in the first place. And when I did pull off what I had imagined, I realized my imagination was too small.

The Illusion of Strength

If you think about it, we treat our personal “will” as our ultimate strength, but it is often our greatest weakness. It’s the stubborn part of us that demands a situation go exactly this way, totally blind to the fact that “this way” might actually be terrible for us. We are like toddlers screaming for ice cream for breakfast, completely oblivious to the impending stomach ache, furious at the universe for not cooperating.

That is when I coined a rule for myself: The best use of the will is to be willing.

We traditionally think of power in the Nietzschean sense - a “will to power” that demands we conquer our circumstances, dominate our environment, and bend the world to our desires. But true power is actually inverted. It is the strength required to master our own compulsion to control and to constantly intervene and to worry and fret.

This sounds like a paradox, or perhaps a lost Taoist proverb. Taoism talks a lot about Wu Wei - the art of effortless action, or swimming (or even just floating with the current rather than trying to push the river. True willingness means taking your hands off the controls. It means stepping back, refusing the temptation to intervene, and stopping the exhausting work of trying to shape every single outcome. Instead, you use your will for one specific thing: choosing to be open and available. Willing to see and try something new and unexpected. Willing to let go of control. Willing to let life itself work things out around you.

This is not to say there is not a place for the will, there certainly is. It is a matter of using the will for the right purpose - not to control everything outside of you but rather to take control of yourself.

The Will as Self-Discipline paired with the Willingness to Live with Ambiguity

• The Will (Self-Discipline): Choosing to sit down at the easel, studio desk or laptop every single morning at a set time, regardless of mood, inspiration, or how tired you feel. You use your will to govern your physical behavior, honor commitments, and keep promises to yourself.

• The Willingness (Accepting Ambiguity): Looking at the blank canvas, the empty page, or a messy pile of raw materials and accepting that you have absolutely no idea what the final result will be. You deliberately refuse to panic or force a premature structure, letting the composition stay unresolved and ambiguous until it naturally clarifies itself.

The Will to Set Intentions paired with the Willingness to Let Them Unfold

• The Will (Intentionality): Deciding exactly what you want to explore - such as setting a clear intention to compile a series of essays, organize an archival library, or build a new body of visual work. You use your will to draw a boundary, declare a direction, and point your compass forward.

• The Willingness (Non-Intervention): Resisting the urge to micromanage how that direction must manifest. If a project naturally veers down an unexpected path, or if an essay evolves into a completely different topic, you use your willingness to stop intervening or trying to force it back to your original script. You allow reality to improvise and shape the final result often leading you to a much better outcome than you had imagined.

The Will to Overcome Impatience paired with the Willingness to Wait for the Right Moment

• The Will (Delayed Gratification): Actively conquering the modern compulsion for instant results, quick validation, or immediate publication. You use your will as an internal anchor to restrain impulsive rushing, quiet your anxieties, and keep working steadily in private.

• The Willingness (Patience): Accepting the natural, slow growth timeline of the universe and your materials. You treat your unread archive, your raw papers, or your unfinished drafts like items in storage - completely at peace with the fact that they are waiting quietly, trusting that they will reveal exactly where they belong or where they are going only when the right moment arrives.

The Blank Canvas of Zero Expectations

But it is easy to misunderstand this approach. People hear “let go of control” and assume it means lying on the couch, doing absolutely nothing, and watching life pass you by. True willingness is actually active and attentive. You still show up. You still do the work. You just change how you handle the process.

To survive this shift, I had to pair my first rule with another saying I coined for myself: “Expect nothing and you will never be disappointed.”

At first glance, it sounds a bit cynical - like a pessimistic shield against reality. But in practice, it is pure freedom. When we approach a situation with high expectations, we are secretly trying to control the future. We write a script in our heads for how people should react, how a project should succeed, or how a day should go. When reality inevitably improvises, we get disappointed that our preconcieved expectations were not fulfilled as we had hoped. But maybe we were expecting the wrong thing.

By expecting nothing, you stop trying to force outcomes on the universe. You strip away the rigid demands of what should happen. This doesn’t mean you expect bad things; it means you leave the canvas blank and your mind neutral. If something great happens, it is a genuinely, pleasant surprise. If nothing happens, you lose nothing because you weren’t holding onto a fantasy in the first place. It turns out that zero expectation is the secret to total appreciation.

The Forensics of Daily Life

This isn’t just abstract philosophy; it is literally how we discover truth in the real world. Think about science or forensics.

If a forensic investigator walks into a crime scene with a predetermined theory of what happened, they are a terrible investigator. They will experience confirmation bias. They will only look for clues that fit their hunch, entirely blind to the muddy footprint or the stray hair that proves otherwise. To find the truth, an investigator has to walk into the room with zero expectations. They have to use their will to remain completely willing to see whatever is actually there, no matter how unexpected or inconvenient it might be to their original assumptions.

We need to treat our own lives less like a movie we are directing, and more like a laboratory in which we are investigating. When you stop trying to force a specific outcome, you stop blinding yourself to alternative paths. You give reality the space to show you something better than what you could have planned. By expecting nothing and remaining willing, you aren’t being passive - you are being a good scientist. You are letting the data of life guide your next move. You notice subtle patterns forming, motifs developing and see things taking shape that were not previously obvious. Our experience becomes conversational with Life.

The Mid-Career Crisis of Faith

We see the alternative to this investigative openness everywhere in our culture, particularly in the relentless drive to reach the “top of the heap.” It is a widely held, deeply problematic assumption that to succeed is to dominate - to force our world into submission so completely that those we admire have no choice but to applaud.

This trap is especially perilous for creatives, artists, and writers navigating their late thirties and forties. By this stage in life, the initial, romantic momentum of youth has often burned out. Many look at the traditional art world or institutional metrics of success and realize they haven’t achieved the total domination they or their peers expected. It is a threshold marked by a profound crisis of faith. The trail they have been walking for decades suddenly feels ambiguous, and they are left trying to figure out how to proceed forward - and more agonizingly, toward what?

When we obsess over dominating our environment or reaching an arbitrary summit to justify our creative calling, our will is entirely misdirected. We use it to manipulate external outcomes, chase market trends, and police the opinions of others. This is a structural guarantee of suffering. First, because the external art market and its gatekeepers refuse to be micromanaged. Second, because tying your peace of mind to the admiration of an audience means you have handed them the keys to your well-being. You aren’t actually king of the hill; you are a prisoner to their validation.

From Dictator to Observer

This is the ultimate irony of pure willfulness. It dresses itself up as supreme strength, leadership, and ambition. But because it is rooted in a rigid demand for a specific outcome - I must be seen as successful - it is completely fragile. When reality improvises and the creative trail winds through a dry valley, immense disappointment and exhaustion follow.

Ultimately, giving up control is not the same as giving up power. True power lies in adaptability, not rigidity. For an artist at mid-career, the shift from willfulness to willingness is the only way forward. When you stop fighting the universe to prove your own will, you finally free up your energy to cooperate with reality. By emptying your mind of expectations and unlocking your willingness, you cease being a frustrated dictator of your life and become its most fascinated observer - and that is exactly when life, and the work itself, finally begins to reveal itself.

Join the Conversation: For the artists and writers here, have you ever hit a wall where forcing a creative outcome completely exhausted you? How do you practice “willingness” in your studio or writing routine when the path forward feels ambiguous? Let’s discuss in the comments below.

Please share your thoughts about how you think about the trans-temporal conversation in the comments below.

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