setting mouse traps
It’s 2am on a Sunday morning and I just returned to bed after setting 2 more mouse traps. The peanut butter is not working so cheese is the new weapon of choice. I think I’m only half-trying when I set the traps because a) I think mice are cute and b) it’s scary to kill anything, especially indoor creatures. But mice are a level up from spiders because of their size and personality. You can’t hear spiders but mice squeeck and scuttle around. It’s been kind of an adventure to wake up every morning and see what clues they left behind and then to strategize as a house what our plan of action will be the next night. For whatever reason I have been spear-heading this endeavor but clearly I’m in need of some backup.
I only realized a few days ago that this is the 4th home I’ve lived in during 2020. It’s taken me until November to realize how full of a year it’s been for me personally and I’m beyond grateful that it’s led me here. The photo above is the small barn on our property which I organized and cleaned out a little bit the other day. I usually love winter and I’m sure I still will this year, but having a sunny day in November to get the house a little more organized was a welcome respite.
Last night I played around with some gouache, watercolour, leather and gold glitter and the results were…absolutely fantastic. I know a new series is underway already. I think what set me up for success was the long walk I had earlier in the day while listening to the Vistas album, Everything Changes in the End. It was the first time in a couple weeks that I had gone on a lengthy excursion by myself and it’s always a good idea.
After a year of so much transition, on both a personal and global level, it makes sense that time to be alone is of the highest priority, despite the isolation all of us have been dealing with in one way or another. I’ve just needed to slow down.
One of the things I find most helpful for keeping my mind slow is having a landline. I prefer it over my cell phone because it doesn’t distract me from whatever communication I initially picked it up for. As long as the other people in my bubble have that phone number I don’t feel the need to look at my phone at all these days. I had a call scheduled for sometime yesterday and completely forgot about it because once I left for my walk at 10:30am, I didn’t look at it again until after supper, around 8:10pm. That felt really good. I don’t have the energy to be available 24/7 even to the people I love. And I’m very aware of how counter-intuitive that may seem but self-sacrifice is not my modus operandi anymore and I don’t think it ever should have been. Martyrdom isn’t glamorous. And I’m starting to realize neither is self-optimization.
One of my housemates is reading a book called, Yeah, No, Not Happening and it’s so jolting to read excerpts of, I can’t wait to read it myself. Basically it’s a take-down of the entire self-improvement industry and how negatively it has affected our lives. I know I’ve fallen prey to believing that every single thing in my day needs to be purposeful and transformational for who I am as a person. The wild thing is it’s like just being alive isn’t enough when you give into the mentality that every single thing you do in the day has to be for your betterment…..what if being alive was good enough and your journalling, exercising, listening, reading, etc wasn’t all for optimization, but instead they were things you did because you wanted to? Things that bring you joy. That’s all. And if you don’t do those things - good for you! I hope you’re enjoying just being, whatever that looks like for you. Because it’s not a competition and we’re not playing the comparison game. Everyone is just trying to cope the only ways they know how.
Sometimes it feels like it’s going to take a lot of unlearning for me to just live for the sake of living.
But I have really good role-models for what that looks like.
Yesterday someone showed me a video of an American actor doing an interview at a show in France and he spoke in French the entire time. He was the first American on the show to speak entirely in French and you could tell the host and audience deeply appreciated it. They were enthusiastic fans. At one point near the end of the interview the speaker asked the guest what he most appreciated about artists or how did he know if he respected someone’s work and he responded with something like,
“I respect someone who knows what they want to say to the world, and then they say it, and when they say it they do so with no filter”
Sometimes I think it’s inevitable that I’m going to disappoint more and more people as I show up more and more for the kind of life I want for myself. That reality seems less and less overwhelming to me every day because I don’t want to spend my whole life trying to be 8 different people. I am only one. And I have some things to say.
I feel like I have finally come to the physical place where I can articulate the things I need to articulate and interact with the world. But first, just for myself. It seems so lofty and grand to say I have things I want the world to hear, but I do. As an artist that is my work. To listen, and then to show what I heard. I just need a quiet place to do it in.