Sometimes, it so happens that we've paid so much attention to the things in front of us, we've forgotten to look at what is not there. To consider the whole picture, background and foreground, positive and negative space, stuff and emptiness. We need both for the beauty of the picture, for the balance. Yet how difficult to let go of the song in front of us and free fall into the murky nothing. How difficult to forget our name and lose ourselves in the infinite letters. But, is there any other way to understand the shape of things? Spaces i. the trees have strung up our hearts, a thumping, bumping fruit, on this infernal, vernal day with the lavender blooms of mountain laurel, the glory of birdsong, and the earthy taste of greens plucked from the dirt christening our senses, making us forget our sins of winter and believe in a perpetual spring day ii. the birds have been singing outside our window in the light and in the dark they s
Originality: A Falsehood, A Goal Or, Everything (Nothing) is Original There’s a self-aggrandizing belief in all of us that we are original, that we can create something original. “Original” is a little arrogance we indulge ourselves. Every quip we make, face we give, and dance we release has been done before. How many times have I said something I thought was insanely clever, only to hear it uttered by several other women in the weeks after? There is an essential egotistical quality to everything we do- as though we were the first and the last, as though we have done something groundbreaking. What a shallow snorkel into the human mind tells us is that we largely know what we have been exposed to. I am able to repeat something in a particular manner (either verbatim or slightly modified) because I have seen it or heard it before. Yet part of my human egoism is that I claim it in this moment to be mine. To be new. To be brave. There are some, in our history, who have cont