One of the things I deeply desire is a flow of artistry in my life. I don’t want to have to force myself to write or make art, I want it to be an impulse. I want the work to call to me. It’s such a strange feeling to have a calling, but to have an overwhelming desire to do nothing but rest. Or to feel that the calling is demanding things of you, but not backing up the demand with the desire to engage with the work or the commitment to see the work through.

I keep thinking of Countee Cullen’s last two lines in his poem Yet Do I Marvel:

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

This struggle I’m going through has nothing to do with Blackness, but the whole poem deals with life’s contradictions. And for Cullen, the profound contradiction in the being a poet and dealing with the societal constraints, violences, and obstacles against Black people, especially during Cullen’s time period, marked a deep friction. In the depth of that friction I feel an echo of the friction I feel at knowing I have work to do, I have things to write, I have art to make, but often—exhausted by life’s demands—I remain motionless and frozen, unable to do the work.

I’m on leave from my job. I’ve used this time to rest, to travel, and to finish the fifth draft of my novel. With that draft turned in, I have some time on my hands. I’m very careful not to fill the time with projects. This leave is the result of burnout—and it’s something of a privilege to have time on one’s hands. So I’m resting, but during meditation, I received the suggestion to do one practice a day. In following the suggestion, I find that I’m still able to have rest. The preoccupation with choosing the right project, making progress, being efficient and effective is not on the table for this stretch of time. As long as I’m on leave, I’m giving myself freedom. I can focus my efforts when I get back to work and schedules and demands.

Every day, I think what do I feel like doing today. It could be writing a draft of a poem, making a collage, adding a little color to the many partially-completed canvases hanging around my room. In the circulating, I don’t feel the pressure of completion, or the pressure to make something that’s going to get me somewhere with my artistic goals. It’s just a little tinkering, a little connecting with the creative forces, a little remembering of what it feels like to play. I’m not fully there (not fully in space of creative flow and expression)—and I may not get there before it’s time to go back to work, but I am full of gratitude for the opportunity to: 1) have some free time (so rare in this modern age); 2) have the fortitude to fill it with rest, rather than productivity; and 3) to have these daily touch points where I can play, express, and let the work rest in a disorganized, new state—because it has no purpose or goal except to be.

Onward,

—K.