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.
I have a task, science type, that can induce joy, want to try it?