This website is being born out of a desire to have a "physical" space where I can collect and gather the things I've made through the years and will continue to make. The nature of being a writer and an artist is that my words and paint splatters are strewn about all over the place - Books lined with my thoughts under ghostwriter aliases for international clients stand on shelves that I will never see; Pictures I sketched as a student live in frames in the houses of people I cannot remember; Kids might remember my face or a story I told them but I won't see them grow up or what comes from it.
I see myself as sowing seeds.
I don't often get to see what it grows into.
I've heard it said in a podcast by the Atlantic that we, modern people, cling to things. That's why we take photos of everything and have to post online that we've been somewhere - or else, did it even really happen? Of course, such an obsession with holding (clasping) onto time as it's slipping through our fingers cannot be healthy...
But I've always had the opposite problem. Don't get me wrong, it's no better. I don't cling to anything. A self-proclaimed minimalist, I value a certain kind of detachment from things. Yet I've often mistakenly thrown out the baby with the bathwater...
I remember this one sepia-colored photograph that I discovered as a young teenager. The corners were rounded and the paper glossy. It was a photo that my mom had taken on some holiday abroad when she was my age. There was nothing particularly amazing about the photo, I think it was just the sea and a boat and some people. But I remember staring into that image and feeling transported to a time long gone. I don't know what happened to that photo or why I decided to part ways with it some day, but I think about it often.
In my twenty-seven years there have been countless creative endeavours that suffered the same fate.
Yet, before I reminisce on them, I do want to mention that I don't feel like I was wrong for letting go. I believe strongly that our best qualities are also our worst. Say, someone is perfectionistic - It might mean they do things with excellence, but it also means that it takes them much longer to get something done.
Even though all of these endeavours inevitably ended, I feel like I am carrying pieces of them with me and I kind of have a weird inkling that they are all going to find new breath sometime somehow somewhere. Like terrazzo tile, I am made up of lots of pieces of different things...
One day, when I was about twenty, I had the whole morning to myself in a coffee shop with my laptop. By the end of the morning I had brainstormed a whole NGO, called Seeds of Hope, designed the website, contacted possible networking opportunities, and had a brand identity and a few blog posts.
When I was a student, I started a creative community of artists, photographers and writers who had one thing in common: the love of stories. It was called Sonder, based on the term by the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that means "the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk."
At another point I had a successful watercolor business. I took on commissions and many paintings were made, framed and sent off to people I never met.
I'm currently working as an editor and illustrator for Christian content and also children's content with clients from all over the world. My words and paint splatters travel the globe (I'm only slightly jealous of them).
My hope and desire is that all of these forgotten things can kind of come and gather here... That this website, or blog, or portfolio, or gallery, or library, or whatever you want to call it - That this might become a collection, like a treasure chest, of the new and the old and the outdated and the too modern thoughts that fill my mind.
But even more than that - I hope that through this beautiful mess, something might connect with you, stir your heart, make you feel connected to the Divine, or just breathe a little deeper as you settle into your skin.
At this point, who knows? This might become a museum or a place of ministry. Why not both?
I'll try to hold it loosely, with open palms, and see what He wants to do. I hope you stick around to find out too.
Comentarios