(This piece started from a fiery rejection of a tik tak. I felt like the creator conflated and oversimplified the creative process, blah blah blah lol.)
This year, I began to call myself an artist. This year, I am acting like one.
I finished the artists way last year, and that white lady ate. Or rather I ate that, and her food was hitting. It can be done I guess.
I’d been infusing morning pages into my practice since maybe 2014, by recommendation of a tarot reader. 2018/2019 I bought the book without realizing the practice came from it.
2023 I was in Kaui looking at crystals when the book and its seven other variations reminded me of its existence.
I felt a spark and talked to an older white lady hovering over the books, asking, “Have you finished it?”
Her smile touched her ears, and she spoke a mile a minute. She had—multiple times. Repetition deepened its meaning. She’d met multiple versions of herself in it’s pages. Boxes of morning pages.
I explained to her my starts and stops. I’m sure I was ashamed. She explained it’ll happen when it’s time.
I took her words driving back to the north side of the island. I’d pick things back up when I got back home.
And I did. But there were more more starts and stutters. A few weeks and repetitions ahead of my friends, we all knew it was doing something when we did it, but what?
Doechii brought more focus to the book, and as my friend would say, I didn’t want to do it because everyone else was. But, the years of repetition kept me flirting with it.
I was ironically back in Hawaii in 2025 as a caretaker when the time came. It said—If not now, when? (This realization came as I wrote this. Damn!! Spirit’s hand moves even when we can’t see it.)
I can’t remember if I rebought the book or brought it with me. I swallowed and fearlessly began again. Week one.
—
All my life I’ve chased my own words. I’ve obsessed over things said and unsaid. Over words unknown and meanings lost in translation or worse, intentionally misunderstood. I’ve talked for hours in circles because I believed in the power of words. One phrase, one sentence could shift everything. Couldn’t it?
I felt it could be done with the right words, and with that belief I laid my words down as a martyr for a greater cause.
My tongue scarred with bite marks, coated white with foreign words I still said. I couldn’t perceive the taste of me. Just a one note flavor of all I’d ever consumed.
The artists way didn’t work until I did it. It’s just like what I told the lady about meditation in 1500 days of practice—practice then let’s talk.
Now, with a hundred thousand words behind me and new focus, it’s clear just how much my creativity was repressed. I now know every choice is an expression of my creative power, if I use it.
The cliches make sense after doing. It’s the principle of causality, what you do you get back.
By DOING I evolve my awareness of how I create. I’m pulling knobs, levers, and buttons just to make this hoe MOVE.
Without direct experience, I consumed. I didn’t create.
Fear told me information alone is the solution. But that’s western intellectualism—it can talk and talk and talk and never do shit.
Its like the act of creation is too pristine to touch, to be sensual with, so you’re better off knowing every part of the anatomy before you wet your fingertips on creation’s skin.
I’ve stepped out from under that shadow.
Yeah I started calling myself an artist.
The strategies, processes, and systems refined how I did it (when I finally started). How I approach the work, what was important and what wasn’t.
I laughed writing this because I now resonate with quite a few things the creator said despite my initial rejection.
It makes me think about the place of frustrating things that conjure emotional reactions. They expand my frame while at the same time collapse truths that live in things I disagree with.
Everything has a place, and it’s all moving me toward. If I win I win, if I lose I win.
I’m building a relationship with my work, my practice. It has a spirit. I come to know it like the familiarity of a repeated task.
Repetition is play not a punishment.
I’ve been focused on a mustard seed of work. Bird by bird like Anne Lamont wrote (she is a white women with dreads, but I did in fact enjoy her dry, matter of fact voice over audible—it was different, I liked it).
Which all it really means is—how do you eat an elephant? One motherfucking bite at a time. We said it first.
See how the truth collapses?