everything feeds process

There’s something that has always been a struggle for me – reconciling the kind of artist I want to be with the kind of artist I am.

In my dream-life, I am the type of artist that can launch an independent career. Not a career that’s beholden to the publishing industry or the cycle of acceptance and rejection, but the type of career where I create my own opportunities for publishing.  In my dream-life, I can manage creating, promoting, publishing, and selling my work in some form or another.

In reality, I struggle to make a regular space for my creative life. I squeeze creative activities into the smallest crevices. If I had to answer to customers and marketing plans and all the other myriad tasks that come with being a successful creative entrepreneur, I would implode. I work very hard in my day job and work very little in my creative job.  In reality, my creative life is a release for me, a way that I can express myself and lower stress.  I often wonder if I turned my creative life into a career and pursued it with the kind of zeal necessary to be successful, if it would still fill that relaxing space for me.

I’m lucky in that I love my day job and my career. I am happy and fulfilled through my work in higher education. I don’t want an artistic career that supplants my education career. In my optimistic-winter-break-brain, I want an artistic career in addition to my education career.

Honestly, that’s part of the reason that I chose “resources” as my word of the year. I want to see if there is space in my life for regular creative practice. I want to create a “clock-in-clock-0ut” mentality for my artistic work. Then, I can build on that regular practice and find the next step.

As I begin this tracking practice, I can see that it’s difficult to add this time to my life. It’s difficult because I have grown different habits over the past months, patterns of behavior that I find comforting.  But I also see a tiny sliver of the possibility that I could add more.  It’s this little slice of optimism that makes me pause. There’s part of me that wants to try for a larger creative life and then another part of me that wants to be satisfied with what I already have.

Tonight, I just want to mark that I am waffling between these extremes (again).  I’m chaffing at adding more to my creative life, just as I begin the process of regulating my practice. I can’t (and won’t) make any decisions that will commit me to more work than I can handle.  I’ll just note my optimism and ambition and bottle it for later.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” — Henry V

This week for school, I’ve been reading Henry V, watching Henry V and writing about Henry V. Pretty soon, I’ll be breathing and eating Henry V.  While writing my paper this evening, I’ve realized that lately I’ve been pushing myself into the breach, once more. 

Last week, I was swallowed up fully by my job and my graduate studies.  Due to some changes in the administration at my work, I’ve been (probably temporarily)  given some of my boss’s responsibilities, so that she can take on some extra responsibilities.  As daunting  as this shift seems  I am loving the opportunity.  I find myself more excited to go to work each day, even as I work longer days.  In between all of this, I still had readings and papers for my class, which I’m totally digging. 

I’m left wondering what all this will mean for my writing practice. If I’m truly honest with myself, I was not successfully balancing the work-school-writing practice all that well before this change. Now that it’s happened, I don’t see where I’m going to find the time for writing. 

Right now, I’m okay with that.  I know I don’t have to make a decision for my writing or my work that will be final forever. I know that my writing, my career, and my education are lifelong pursuits, and that they will all wax and wane throughout my life.  I know that for this moment in my life, my work and my studying fills me and fills my need for self-expression and creation. 

So, if I’m a little quiet here lately, this is why.  I’m making some adjustments to my life, so that I can fit all of this in.  And really, I’m having a good time.

I’ve always considered myself a bit driftless. I’ve lived in three major cities and one small city in my life. My close family lives in California, Massachusetts, and Nebraska.  While I have many close friends that live in Minneapolis with me, I have several who are spread across the U.S., literally from coast to coast.  With all of this rootlessness in mind, I’ve always wondered what it would be like if my husband and I picked up and moved again.  What if we just selected a city we liked, based upon whether it was close to friends or family or just had a landscape that resonated with us, and started over?

With all of that in mind, we saw Away We Go this morning.  Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes, the movie follows a thirty-something couple who are searching for a city to raise their soon-to-be born child.  Of course, that’s just a cover. What they’re really searching for is community, family, and their place in the world.  They make pit stops across North America, from Phoenix to Miami, visiting friends and family while trying their lives on for size. 

While the movie isn’t perfect, some of the comedic characters are truly just broad stereotypes, it deeply resonated with both me and my husband.  Whenever we travel somewhere together, we talk about the same thing:  What if we lived here? What if we moved? What would our lives look like in this place? What is the right place for us? We’ve even gone so far as to making lists of the qualities our perfect home would have, from access to the wild to excellent public transportation.  The only certainty in all of these conversations is that we’d go there together, wherever the “there” happens to be.  We always return home, thanks to mortgages, steady jobs, a great circle of friends, and a love affair with our neighborhood in Minneapolis.  But we still talk about it, every time.

I think that the search that this movie touches on is a generational search for community. Our generation has, for better or worse, dispersed ourselves across the country, often far from family, friends, and familiarity.  We follow jobs and scenes, make choices based on the best evidence at the time, but we’re all wondering if the places we find ourselves in are the right ones. Even as we shuffle from city to city and home to home, we’re looking ahead and behind.

I don’t know if we have models for finding the right kind of roots. Most of our parents picked cities after college and stuck with them, building their community from the ingredients they found there.  (My mother though is quite the nomad and moves about every five years, so she’s the exception that proves the rule.)  Most of our grandparents lived in the places they were born, close to their extended families, which has its own kind of comfort. 

So, how do you do it, build a life and a family in a city that you love? Is it time and experience spent in one place? Is it traveling place to place, collecting bits and pieces of the right life, and pasting a life together like a collage? I strive for the kind of rootedness that the characters find at the end of the movie. (I won’t say where and spoil the fun, if you choose to see the movie).  Although, I wonder if I’m just craning my neck too far and not seeing what’s in front of me.