The Cosmic Up and Up

(Or, Ode to the

Creative Process.)

The human mind is open. The

heart is warm.

The fingers of distraction recede,

the pulse of something urgent

begins to drum more insistently,

more powerfully, more force-

fully than its hitherto murmur

of quiet, ruffled parsimony. Its

sanctimony.

The insistence then regales, re-

surgence and mammoth color fly

out into the face of you, the art-

maker, and divvy and draw and

drown and deflavor, then wipe

the slate, start again, until we are

all each saturated with a coin of

certainty that this, this here, this

now, this prime factor of sudden

awareness, that this mix is it.

The arrival. The story.

The ending. The finale.

And, perhaps it is

anticlimactic.

To devolve into the simplicity

of not being in the flutter, of

being instead a sidelined,

circumference-dweller, is

tough. But it is here where

we spend most of our living

moments.

In the ordinary, the slight new

variations in a landscape or a

city, or a bird-feather drawing

made by a child we love. The

now, the here, the present.

This is where we gather our

pantryfuls of inspiration for

future work, the color of promise, and fervor and an attempt at reaching up higher than our limbs allow into the skyward cosmic up and up.

Why?

To access the floating pilot of supple hope and

promise and treasure that is our wont for a better life, a warmer humanity, a clev-erer ending; we are each awake to the wide world of discovery and possibility, eyes wide open, underwa-ter, pressed to the starlight of a phosphorescent dance.

And then, mesmer-

ized, we partake in the

rhythm, the motion, the

story, the gait. It envel-

ops us wholly and we

succumb with neither

resistance nor remorse.

The flight is rapid. And

upward we go.

Flying full sail, cheek at the wind, keeping and floating first with a tiny cloy of resignation, then, as if a heron’s swoop has transferred us, we leap full-soul into the unknown and the westerly and the far and the out. We dance uncluttered, unhindered, untrained and yet surefooted. For these are the sandals in which we first felt love in our breast, felt joy at the light at the base of our spines.

Mesmerised, this winter curtains off the black, and as suddenly as we have arrived, our number’s ended.

The feathers recede, the edges of our new world blur and become unintelligible, our bright faces lose some merrymaking countenance.

But not all—no, not ever all.

The last hint of wonderment stays with us through the retransference, as we emerge backlit by the Purpose of our Next Creation into the modern certain space of the here, the pleasant present.

It is here, with pen or brush or digital pixel or hands or eyes poised, our methods already learned or intuited in this very minute, that we proceed to Make.

The Answer is in Georgia

I was sitting there, just looking off into space, with my pencil and a new notebook. I am often like this, with my papers out and thinking without solid threads, just beads percolating, running round and round. I was like this. Pensive, you could say. Or just quiet, looking for the in-between space that would make it clear what it is I had to do. A young man and woman approached. They were sprightly, I noted. Agile. They sat down at my table. “Hello,” said the woman. “Hello,” said the man. “Hello,” I said. I thought it was the right thing to do. “What are you doing?” said the man. “I’m waiting for The Next Thing.” “The next thing?” he repeated. “The Next Thing.” The woman looked at the man, and the man looked at the woman. They studied me, but not disquietly. “We know what you mean,” said the man. Something in his demeanor suggested yes, he did. “You should go to Georgia.” The woman now leaned forward, and her lip jut a bit. “Georgia?” I said. “Must The Next Thing involve travel?” They looked at me with square eyes. “You know it must,” said the woman. “Indeed,” said the man. Without travel, you stay in the same place. If you stay in the same place, your eyes and ears don’t hear the different. They get lazy. The tools of observation, of taking it in, become blunt. You have to sharpen them, from time to time. The man and woman said this very clearly. They gave me an address, a name, and a tele-phone number. This is how you know you’ve hit upon The Next Thing you have to do. It never makes sense. Nor does it not make sense. It is perfectly clear. I fold the paper twice, then push it into a deep pocket of my jeans, so no one will know it is there.

The Work of the Modern Craftsman. Taking the slow-cooked essence of a thing and giving it form. Attention. The soul of it. The heart of it. Finding that and naming it. Getting rid of all else. Design, but not as formal. Craft, but updated: informed by the trained hand. Eye. Sum of everywhere its maker has been, and the language she has come to understand. It is in this vernacu-lar that the modern craft is made. Soft. It is fall. The leaf-by-leaf removal to reveal the structure in bone. The skeleton. Cool and stern and poised. Robust in the columns, pale in thin fingers. Whispers of lavendar rustle edges, removing hopes lost or fad-ing. Buddedness cloistered until next season: the next moment, the next adventure, the leafing. The modern craftsman is consci-entious of only the sweetsong of the remainder’s vertebrae; the meat of the marrow. The scope, the scale, the layers: these are irrelevant for now. We are in the moment. We are in the making. She reveals herself as do the clouds at dawn. The wide yawn, an awakening. The “yes” of “I believe,” and “I know,” that this is this. This is all there ever was, and all there’ll ever be. This? Yes. The universal. Fly forward, sling back, the master craftsman calls out the belly of the New Spirit. A pregnancy of hope, not cynicism. Leaning forward with promise, not remorse. Sailing with a gait of plaited and kerned invincibility, or the approach towards that end. The integral. The integrity. The moon, the stars, the sun.