It's time for a formal introduction. I evade these — in my personal life and otherwise — for how am I to say what this is (or what I am)?
I suppose this question is at the heart of Notes on Practice. Jung had this idea that sits at the heart of all my inquiries — it's that art (& correspondingly, ideas) have a spirit of their own. Like our children, they arrive at us with their own life and inclinations, and as stewards, our role is to nurse and nurture them until they have enough feet to stand on their own.
My practice is tuning toward the body of the ideas that come to me — their lived presence and image within me — to give them the presence they require to come to life, to have external body.
Writing is a way that I offer them form. This capacity to breathe life into the non-material as a way to make matter is a gift we all hold.
I hope not so much to shape, but to listen and honor the shape the ideas that come to me want to take. My practice, then, is tuning in and responding.
Writing is just one strand of a thread, however. Language is not immediate; the experience is immediate. Language, then, comes slowly. To give form and express takes weaving many different languages together to inform a natural verbal language, something that becomes innate over time. My practice is a loom that layers movement, vocalization, embodied presence with the world around me, instrumentation, dream, divination, sound, and active imagination — my ideas emerge in form as a tapestry all this makes in my inner world. Synchronicity is important. What patterns begin to appear? And what do they point toward?
Don't go mistaking all this for a sense of meaning. No, a true practice of improvisation stays neutral. As soon as I decide what this means, I'm lost again. Meaning I've lost the thread. My practice is to continue holding the thread. And when it gets lost, to let it go, not to go seeking it. To allow it to come back to me. The moment it emerges again, it all makes sense. It has its own logic. My role is to keep offering it presence to reveal it.
Remember, not to understand it.
These notes — things like "remember" — are for me, as is my writing. I don't write for you, I write for me, to serve the creative impulse. To be authentic, then — a practice, "remember" — I must unravel where I am performing for you rather than performing as an actor of and for the image. So, in this sense, I suppose I write solely for the image.
I have to keep remembering that.
Performance is crucial, though. It is how I get out of the way: allow myself to embody something or someone else in service of the image.
And in the end, I do wonder where it all came from. It certainly doesn't come from me alone. Have you felt this before?
Although I don't write for you, I do invite you here with warm welcome. Join me in this experiment, share your thoughts with me. And if you feel inclined to support this work by way of a free or paid subscription, I thank you!