I have set out to make something and partway through the making I lost the thread but kept going anyway out of momentum to the version of myself who had started,
I have set out with a clear feeling in my chest about what I was reaching toward and let the feeling dissolve into process from the outside, feeling the drift from the inside,
I have set out and built the outer shape of the thing with care, precision, attention and filled that outer shape the first breath of it where it was taken,
What is the feeling I had in my body at the very beginning of this before replaced the knowing of it is still present anywhere in what I am building right now,
I have set out to make something and felt the gap between what I held in the beginning and what I am holding now when the more honest name for it might have been loss...
I have been in the same room as my own intention so long that the talking began to feel like the work to feel the clarity I had about the work,
I have been clear on what I meant to do without letting clarity substitute for the action in a way that was comfortable enough to live inside to admit to anyone, including myself,
I have been in possession of a true thing that needed to move through me and into the world, trusting it and the managing produced something that left no trace in anyone who received it,
When did I start treating my own deepest sense of what I was to make something that required my full attention and approval before it was allowed to come all the way through,
I have been in the same room as my own intention and not always recognized, I have sometimes spent entire seasons building what the fear wanted instead of what the knowing was asking for all along...
I have rushed things that required slowness and felt the specific texture of work before it was ready, that readiness was not about time but about the quality of every step that preceded the final one,
I have rushed things and felt the efficiency of the rushing, the productive feeling, forward motion that only arrives when you give the process more of yourself than feels strictly necessary,
I have rushed things because the slowness felt like self-indulgence and the care felt like perfectionism but it taught in more ways than I can count, more respectable evidence of serious work,
What have I made recently that I actually gave everything costs more than the rushing and shows less in the final product that lives inside than anything that rushing can produce,
I have rushed things that were asking for something different from the hurrying, I let the decision every time fully understand what the quiet had been trying to say...
I have put care into something that no one would see and felt the private care was discipline, stubbornness or simply the inability to stop in a certain level of attention,
I have put care into the parts that did not matter to the finished work, that reached the actual truth which was needed part of the actual work,
I have put care and felt the difference in the outcome who had not been in the actual room to hold what the real experience had,
Is the care I am putting into this right now the kind that lives in the work and protect my involvement in it or makes me feel responsible while improving what the work actually is,
I have put care into things and had to disappear into the work so completely that this disappearance is not an ending but the point where devotion becomes identity...
Watchwords:
Built the outer shape and forgot what it was for,
The clarity substituted for the action too long,
Slowness felt like self-indulgence so I rushed it,
The care lived inside it differently than rushing could,
Disappearance of care is the completion of it
Here is Tikatarot, who dares you to answer the question, “Who am I?”..
As and will always be reminding you to dream: