Impoverishing the Self
I've had The Hanged Man come up for me in a big way recently.
I'm not really a spiritual one1 - yet who am I to deny the pull of an archetype my subconscious relates to? I think it's less the card pulling me to it, more my mind pulling the card to me, recognising myself and the truths one must face.
This is not about the revelation - such business is a private realm. It has left me thoughtful, pensive. Reflecting on myself, and my self. To what ends does one seek content? Is it power, wealth, gregariousness, the lure of vice and plunder, or simply a better way to live? I'm unsure, and continue to be. All life has taught me so far sums up to the knowledge that surety will never quite be so. The emotional wandering endures perpetually. Is this the right path? It is the only one. Journey before destination.
I am keen on self-assessment, now; on growth, living, asserting my dreams, and all the beauty that comes along with it. I have self-limited for much of my life, out of reluctance, embarrassment, fear, futility, an unwillingness to realise myself. I am eager for this to change. I suppose this is the most diary-like writing I have written for gaiden. A stream-of-consciousness self-reflective diatribe. Perhaps to usher in a new artistic openness? Writing is the greatest act of voyeurism, and a certain shyness has kept me from it, I think.
Yet what course does that way of thinking take but to impoverishing the self? To restrain the seeds of one's own growth will only stunt artistic, even personal development, and leave you no better off than before, worse, in fact, the mind a plant pot with no room for roots to grow. Most plants do not like their seed planted underneath, preferring them to be carried away by the birds or the bees or the breeze, and I'm beginning to feel we should treat the garden of our mind no differently. Let me cast a million seeds to the gardens of others' minds - or some like adage.
I any case that boils down to: create more. I don't simply mean to write more, paint or sketch or play or make more, it ends up, I suppose, a simple order to live. Creation can be in spaces, in moments, in days and months and years, in conversations and company, crafting a personal experience of life. Approaching art as a part of life and oneself the canvas, the finest work of art we can ever know and things born of that are just extensions of the tapestry, offshoots torn off and lost in the wind. You are the greatest work of art you will ever create. Embrace that, perhaps.
Poetry is a summation of me, it distils my emotion into intangible somethings, for language frees the soul.2 Literature, theatre, video games, music, art, stories, cascade bubbling out of us like treasure troves from the belly of a greedy dragon, a celebration of the wondrous varieties of experience, knowledge, and feeling. Words, to my mind, are the closest thing there is to true magic: by proxy of the text, I have known the thoughts of those thousands of years my elder. To read Sophocles, Confucius, Herodotus, Virgil, Hammurabi, Homer? Witchcraft, most certainly. Do I expect my words to be read in millennia? That's hardly the point - the river is the same, yet ever changing. Make a splash.