Feasting Friday (May 6, 2023)
As I sit here preparing to write this email, my eyes begin to water.
I'm so grateful to be home, and as I write this, I realize home for me is not the United States, or Texas, or Austin, or even this beautiful house I sit in as I write this.
My home is here, this place in my psyche where I sit down to write, to you.
For the last three weeks, I've been traveling South America sitting at two different Ayahuasca retreats (for a total of 7 nights drinking), not because I felt I needed too, but because I wanted to support some of my best friends and my to-be-wife.
A lot has happened, and it will take weeks and months (maybe years?) to sort and share it all, but one of the golden threads I gathered was about the 'you' that I write to.
My eyes are watering again.
Every writer has a 'you' that they write to. We're all writers, but many of us relegate our genius to Apple and Google chat boxes. There, our 'you' is easy to imagine. It's Brooke with the green heart emoji, or Zach with the eggplant emoji.
Take a step up in complexity and we get the dreadful Instagram post or Tweet. Now our 'you' is no longer a single specific person, but our 'audience.' May god have mercy on that word, audience. I don't know what kind of karma it accumulated to deserve becoming a word so many people loathe, but it is still an essential piece of the artist's drama.
Our 'audience' is a specter, a kind of ghost we each have created (being the magicians we all are), that we invite into the hearth of our home whenever we begin to write.
What I realized was that 'home' for me is the place in my heart where I write to 'you'...but 'you' doesn't have a body. 'You' has never been born. 'You' is no body. And yet, 'you' is my closest companion. When I write to 'you,' thousands of people feel my words as if I am speaking directly to them.
The unnerving truth is that I am talking to the most intimate part of you when I write lucidly to 'you.'
This insight came to me as I was half-way through my 7 aya ceremonies. We decided a good halftime show integration would be 12 hours of huachuma. As the Andes grew and shrank on the horizon, their outlines flickering and buzzing in kaleidoscopic fractal geometry, I began explore who my 'you' is that I've been writing to for these past 13 years.
The first thought that came to mind, of who my 'you' is, was who I was as a 19 year old.
My eyes are watering again.
That kid was terrified. He was so afraid, and he just wanted to be a good person; a good son, a good friend, a good lover, and a good father. But he was terrified and full of shame. He hid from intimacy. He lied about his success, the sex he pretended to have had, and he lied about being okay. He knew almost nothing. He didn't have a present father. He didn't know how to eat or move or be healthy. He didn't understand taxes. He didn't know regular people could start companies. But he knew human psychology. He knew he wanted to do something significant with his life. He knew he needed help, desperately, but he was too prideful to ask. He almost lost his mind. He almost killed himself.
He is a part of the 'you' that I write too. Everything I create, one of the questions I ask is "would he respect this? Would this help him?"
The next part of the 'you' I write to is my little sister. I was 10 when my youngest sister was born. Due to living in a single mother household and living in an unrelenting capitalistic culture, while my mom worked nearly every day, including weekends, my other sister, who was 9 at the time, and I, would babysit our newborn. Nearly every weekend for 2 to 3 years, we were child parents. Those years did something to my inner configuration. I had the blessing of caring for a child as a child. I got to watch first hand consciousness dawn in a human, to witness the fundamental innocence we all are born with, and to feel the deep aching pull in the gut to want to do everything one can to help nurture and protect that innocence.
A part of the 'you' that I write to is my younger sister. I ask "Will this help her feel less alone? Will this help her navigate the brutal facts of life while keeping the ember of her fundamental innocence alive?"
The last part of my holy writer's triumvirate are my future children.
It was an epiphany to realize that, even as an angry 19 year old, a part of me, through my writing, was writing to my children. I've been honing 'my voice' as a father for 13 years. My children's listening ears have been in the room with me every time I have written truly authentic art (they aren't in the room when I write snarking responses to trolls online).
I sat and basked in the awe that is writing.
When I sit down and I write to 'you,' I am rewriting my past. I'm teaching and nurturing my inner 19 year old who almost killed himself. I am also writing to the present, to my sister, trying my best to be an honest older brother, who shares his mistakes, his insights, his confusion, and, when he can, his inspiration, insights, and wisdom.
And I am writing to the future, to my children. But not just to them as my children, because the future does not stop. They will one day be adults, adults who will have to contend with the evils, tragedies, absurdity, and brutality that also accompanies the bliss, joy, hilarity, and goodness of life.
In some sense, all my writing is written from the perspective of wanting to provide stories that help those I love endure the harder and darker aspects of life. Through my stories and writing, I'm building rope ladders that I sling over the edge of the abyss...the place the human psyche goes to touch god...and also the place that if we slip, we might not come back.
All of us are artists, whether we deny it or embrace it.
All of us have a 'you' we make our art for.
Who is your you? Can you notice it? Do you wish to expand who your you is? What is it you're trying to tell them? Do you have resistance making this 'you' conscious?
God bless those artists who's art is snark-ful, bitter, resentful. Their 'you' is likely an abusive parent, an old partner who traumatized them, or their own private self-created self-hated. God bless the artists who's 'you' torment them.
Every day we make art, whether it be texts, social media posts, or conversations.
The art we make matters. All art feeds, and we feed the 'you' we art to.
May your 'you' be a beautiful inner family. May your art nourish your family.
For all of our sakes, may your art reach it's brightest luminosity in this life time. May you know the incomprehensible, inarticulable grace the human condition can know when our art lands perfectly in the heart of our sacred 'you.'
It'll help you, and so help the world.
I love yall.
Song on Repeat This Week:
Everything, Forever -Hucci
Thang I'm Reading This Week:
SAGA - I read this 1000+ page graphic masterpiece while I was traveling South America. I listened to the above song on repeat while I read it. The story is etched on my heart and this song reminds me of it. Truly a masterpiece. Go forth and feast.
Quote I’m Dancing With This Week:
"The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground."
-Chogym Trungpa
"God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby in the country they call life.
You will know it by it's seriousness.
Give me your hand."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
My Favorite Journal Prompt This Week:
Who is your you?
Do you deny or embrace that you're an artist?
What do you feed with your daily bread, your daily art?
How bring can the flame of your longing get?
We live in a time in need for brilliant flames.