Loved It More for the Strangeness

I have never actually worked alone even on the days when the room was empty and the only sounds were the ones I was making underneath the quiet,
I have never worked alone because everything I have ever read, heard, loved and lost was present in the room with me,
I have never worked alone and the understanding of this has sometimes felt like a relief but sometimes it’s more like a responsibility,
What would I make differently if I genuinely held the understanding that I am always in dialogue with something larger, the current version of myself sitting here right now,
I have never worked alone and the loneliness I have felt in the making has never been the loneliness of actual solitude before I even began...

I have put a frame around something ordinary before and felt it shift into something else, the thing itself had not already been holding quietly without one,
I have put a frame around an experience and called it finished, also a kind of collective decision that had nothing to do with the absolute truth of what the thing was,
I have put a frame around something and released it and had the frame dissolve in someone else's hands than my version would have and called-a work succeeding,
What is the thing I am holding right now that is waiting that would let other people see it as what it actually is but I am not sure it is ready or because I am not sure I am,
I have put a frame around things and watched the framing from the contradiction no longer troubles me because I have slowly accepted that both things are always true...

I have made something and awakened to it the next morning as a stranger and felt the distance between the person who made it and the person reading it,
I have made something and loved it and then looked at it again after the love had settled and found that the loving had not been capable of showing me,
I have made something and found that what it awakened in me was not what I had put into it but I had not been consciously excavating while I was building the surface,
What has the work I have already made been trying to tell me and am I actually listening to the pattern it is drawing or am I starting from scratch every time,
I have made something and woken to it as a stranger and loved it more for the strangeness in the making that my intention alone would never have had the courage...

I am in the middle of something that started before, this is either the most humbling or the most freeing thing I can hold depending on the hour and the day,
I am in the middle of a long conversation that has been running through every person, something real to put it into the world knowing that the world would do what it would regardless of what they intended,
I am in the middle where all the actual work happens and where the beginning's energy meets the end's clarity and I have stopped pretending I would rather be anywhere else,
What does it mean to be exactly here in the middle of the work, that I get to be part of for this small and unrepeatable window of all time,
I am in the middle of something I did not start alone and will not finish alone but the particularly less afraid from the inside than I was carrying it entirely by myself...

Watchwords:
The loneliness of forgetting the company already there,
The framing both the most important and most arbitrary,
The making drew out more than the intention put in,
Strangeness meant it went where intention wouldn't send it,
Less afraid once I stopped carrying it alone...