Solar Plexus

I've been thinking a lot lately about my life. The whole experience of studying massage has started a subtle but fundamental change in me. Digging up my foundation, laying a new one. I realize how much I don't trust myself, how I've always been afraid to take responsibility for something bigger than just me, sometimes even for myself. As a bodyworker there is a power dynamic between you and the person on the table. You have to hold a space for them, respect them, be present with them, because in that hour their physical (and at times mental and emotional) experience and well being is your responsibility. Whoever walks in, usually total strangers with unknown life stories, you are there with them in every moment as much as you can be while also looking out for yourself. And looking out for myself is not something I've always done well, but I'm slowly getting better at it.

For Christmas, I went home to North Carolina for the first time in two years. I couldn't believe it had already been so long, it's hard to know how the days pass like they do. The previous trip eventually helped cement the decision to move home from New Zealand. It was just too hard to be so isolated, and so far from family and friends. Especially in tough economic times, when no one could manage the extra vacation days and the price of the plane ticket to come and see the place that meant so much to me. Being home again really made me take a look at my life between then and now, and from now until who knows when. Everything gets kind of broken down into puzzle pieces, fragments, decisions, actions and non-actions. Conversations, letters, laughter, tears, risks, small victories. I'm trying to see where I want things to go and how.

Some days I feel like my molecules are rearranging. I find myself wanting different, unexpected things. I'm turning 28 soon and my astrological Saturn return has already begun. There's a saying every 7 years all the cells in your body have regenerated, and regardless of truth or fiction I feel like I've started shedding a skin.

I can't help but feel frustrated in not making artwork now, in a time when I so want that retreat and forgetting of rules, just making a picture. But maybe all this weird fumbling and confusion will eventually give way to some serious focus. Letting go of any expectations or hopes I had for my success as an artist and just making work. Fuck it, because if there's anything I'm learning from this time apart from the cycle of making and showing work, it's that the process of creating is what I love the most, it's what matters most. When I look back on my life I'm not going to remember being chosen for some juried exhibition, I'm going to remember kneeling out on the beach with sand all over me, soaking wet at low tide building an impromptu wind shelter out of driftwood and detritus so I could try for the 80th time to light a fire in a set of brass scales while tourists stared at me.

Just for a picture.

Just for myself.