1

Artist Guilt

You will want to chase your creativity but you will feel guilty for not spending time with your family, doing the laundry, making dinner, applying for another job…. So you spend time doing those things and at the same time you feel guilty about letting that creative passion dissolve and drain away. Opportunities lost.

4

Be Empty

It’s okay to be empty, it can even be empowering. I’m sad overcooked, disappointed, broke and anxious. I’m not full of those things, but neither do they empty easily from my sticky soul. I am working on empty.

2

Meditation or just some STFU time

Even if it means you are lying on the floor, slumped against the wall in the stairwell or locked in the car - you need to find 5 minutes for yourself, 5 minutes to STFU. It’s good for you. Everyday.

5

Two poems:

Philip Larkin’s “The Mower”

“I had seen it before, even fed it, once.” It’s bigger than you think.

Charles Bukowski’s “Gertrude up the stairway”

“…before she wearied of the trick, and we of each other.” Whoa.

Then he added a stanza 42 years later that also reflects time passing in the story he tells in the actual poem.

3

tactile

Touch the brick wall next time you pass it, run your hands along the boxwood bushes, lean your weight against the earth and feel your feet inside your shoes. Touch a wet leaf and get some water on your hands, look at your skin in the drops. Recognize what you carry. Your are not the one in the mirror. Look in the mirror and you are not there.

6

HAYIF

How are you? I’m Fine.

Maybe. It’s complicated but it’s also rather simple, like a lava flow - silently growing, patiently slow, and unapologetically, entirely destructive.