Hello, You!
In the nicest way, January was exceedingly slow, perhaps the longest month of all time. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that February has hurtled by without ceremony. Though, now solidly in the new year, I continue to be unsure of exactly what I’m building, or where I’m heading.
My last Deep Dive focused on sensitivity and all of the different ways we can tune in, with particular emphasis on letting the subconscious do more of the heavy lifting.
It’s a tricky thing to learn, but I’m excited by what I’ve discovered so far. I’m hearing old phrases and ideas in brand new ways. Things that have previously whizzed right over my head are landing and settling. I’m noticing the messages my nervous system is sending, and remaining more flexible. I’m allowing myself to focus more on where I’m aiming, rather than exactly how I’ll execute the path from A to B.
As it happens, all three of February’s Artifice guests have further boosted my resolve.
I love, love, loved talking with April, first and foremost a creative parent. April pours all of her artistry (and she has truly so much of it) into building a beautiful, enriching, abundant world for her family.
Like many of the artists inspiring me lately, April works in several mediums and lets them ebb and flow as her desire evolves and necessity shifts. As she puts it, “this is my season for learning about this.”
If you’ve been following along for any length of time, you’ll know medium is a constant puzzler for me. Of course, music is the obvious one, but even that is so multi-faceted. There’s teaching, performing, composing, transcribing, and each of those holds myriad colors and textures for me. I feel I could pinpoint dozens of mediums within music, alone.
I’m also a writer. I’m an interviewer. I’m a passionate home cook. I exercise my visual art muscles in all sorts of unassuming and delightful ways. Even my curiosity feels artistically alive as I experience questioning and learning as creative acts, in themselves.
My personal artistry feels like all of these things bundled up together, difficult as they are to define or reduce to a single career-shaped noun.
All this to say, I’m moved by April’s comfort with the overarching term “maker.” It’s perfectly roomy. It doesn’t require any declarations of “moving on” or “switching focus.” The connective tissue needn’t be edited out of the process. It’s a beautiful, multi-colored, multi-textured thread spooled out over time, over seasons (in every sense of the word).
Relatedly, April tells me she’s not “schedule-y,” but that doesn’t mean they live in chaos. In her words, “there’s a rhythm. We have a flow. We have a routine. We eat when we’re hungry.”
This way of thinking is a revelation to me. I was raised in an almost militaristically regimented family culture. In so many ways, I was taught to prioritize the plan over all—over instinct, over desire, over physiological and psychological cues, over well-being, over individuality. I learned not to pay any attention at all to my inner seasons, or to the outer ones.
I’m unlearning this now. And I’m finding it requires maximum creativity.
April’s free-spirited artistry manifests in prolific, multi-medium making and days unfettered by stricture. But instinct tells me there’s another important component to highlight…
April’s creative magic shines through in the way she pays attention, in the way she welcomes inspiration. She tells me how she noticed simply everything she saw during her time working as a high-end house cleaner in her young adulthood. She found herself “wondering what inspo might be useful later.”
I think this says so much. There’s so much faith in it. And I imagine these things are all related.
I imagine April’s brilliant brain soaking in truly anything gorgeous, anything interesting, amassing an incredible catalog of ideas and inspiration. I imagine her spending a lifetime learning to trust her rhythms, to move with her evolving world. And I imagine these dual resources fusing together to fuel the artistic bounty she enjoys today. I imagine we don’t arrive at the latter without the former.
I will say though, I often find myself puzzling about how much fun I have in methodical pursuits. As I’m working to unlearn compulsory restriction, I’m pressed to tease out my personal analytic magic from the draconian programming of my childhood. Making lists is one of my most inherent neurodivergent joys; the nitty gritty subtleties of the planning phase are endlessly delicious to me.
Luckily, I’m not alone in threading this particular needle. German robotics artist and musician Moritz Simon Geist articulates it wonderfully. “Science and art and playfulness are not so much different. When you do research, you want to find something out…when you try to find something out—you try to find a new chemical process or you try to find a new semi-conductor material—it also involves a lot of having weird ideas, and spending nights and nights at the lab, and just tinkering, basically playing.”
I feel exactly this way about the more systematic facets of my personal creativity. I know my childhood friends would report that my play has always been a little work-ish. And I do so relate to Moritz’s penchant for midnight tinkering.
But again, I admit I often find the line a bit blurry, prone as I am to overwork. My family of origin has a dangerous “work before play” ethos, a sort of “rest when you’re dead” way of being. My diligent young self, striving against disordered parents who were never going to be pleased with me, took this ideology to heart. Deeper, really. All the way inside my cells, in my wee synapses.
At present, it’s hard to say which pedal-to-the-metal modes are passion-fueled, and which are driven by these more insidious motivators. And it’s all further muddled by the fact that my “work” is always art. And art is often work, if exquisitely so.
But I think there are some clues in another trait Moritz and I share. Neither of us procrastinates. Moritz says, “I’m so focused on the result, and I see the benefit of the result. And I don’t see the stress of [it]. If you are procrastinating, you are focusing too much on the energy that it takes to do something. If I finish this, then the benefit of that is actually much bigger than the initial energy it takes to get started. And so, I always got started, because I saw the benefit from being there, where I wanted to be.”
To be clear, I’m unlikely to procrastinate regardless of whether I’m embarking on work-play or work-before-play. But I’m compelled by the idea that when the end point feels like a starting point, when finishing something means I get to do the thing I actually want to do, I’m likely in treacherous territory, and would do well to apply a bit of wariness.
Further, I’m inclined to more deeply consider Moritz’s phrase “I don’t see the stress of it.” This feels important.
It’s not that there won’t be stress somewhere in the messy middle of a project. There may be. There often is. But if the predominant feeling is dread right from jump, there’s a strong chance the “end point” motivator is to have the work finished so that play may ensue.
I suppose I’d like to acknowledge that perhaps not everything can be work-play; one could expect some drudgery now and then. But a good rule of thumb may be to avoid burning the midnight oil on a work-before-play endeavor.
Contain the chores. Deregulate devotion.
It sounds simple enough, but this stuff is hard for me. I’m an excellent romanticizer. I can infuse nearly anything with profundity. But I’m working to clear the clutter, to sort the diamonds from the rough, to shed what weighs me down. I’m pooling all of my resources.
And while I’m sometimes tempted by the idea that I might get far enough ahead or far enough above to get a good look at it, whatever it is, I’m ever comfier in uncertainty, sans map. I’m learning to learn as I go.
In Moritz’s words, “I’m trying to integrate every aspect of the world that I’m seeing into this whole picture…It’s like a puzzle that will never finish, but it’s getting bigger all the time.”
Oof. Yes. I feel it so hard. It will never, ever finish. And it’s growing.
There’s no getting ahead of it. There’s no getting above it.
All we can do is point ourselves in a direction that passes the gut check, and try to move forward.
Winemaker and viticulturist Connor Book seems to embody this lesson perfectly.
Like April, his passions evolve with the seasons. As he finds himself taken with a new subject, he’ll slowly work it into his habits. Over time, each love naturally settles into the routine, and Connor will inevitably gravitate toward something new, and fold that in, as well.
He tells me he loves “seeing things grow.” And it’s more than grapes and backyard flower boxes. When talking about his love of hockey, he describes working on “mini projects,” learning this or that move or strategy, slowly working each into the muscle memory, feeling these micro skills layer and web into something powerful. In Connor’s words, “it comes together and…yeah, it can feel pretty smooth out there.”
I love this. I want to apply it to everything.
It’s that same “integration” Moritz mentioned. We stack, and stack, and stack our experiences, our loves, our lessons into these ever-growing puzzles whose meandering shapes we can only truly behold in retrospect.
As Connor says of wine, it’s “getting the structure and basis down, then trying to tell a story afterwards of what that year was like, the growing season, the harvest…reacting to what the fruit is going to give you that year. And then you have a bunch of tools at your disposal to decide what you’re gonna do to go forward, to make a wine that you want to make.”
What an elegant metaphor for life. Like the winemakers collaborate with mother nature, adapting to “anything the weather throws at them,” so are we all in collaboration with everything we can’t control.
Connor tells me, “I’ll have an idea in mind of how things are gonna go that day, and 80% of the time that’s not how it went, exactly. I have rough plans, but never too detailed until they really need to be…I like to be aware of the balance of a plan and a reaction that’s interesting.”
Listen, I know I’m always going on and on about how this Deep Dive practice delivers my lessons to me, how my Artifice guests deliver my lessons to me, but seriously – this couldn’t be more on the nose if it tried.
What are the chances that a whimsical southern homemaker, a German electronic robotics musician, and a Canadian oenologist interviewed six months ago would offer such explicitly pertinent advice for a problem I’m crunching on today? I’m sincerely spooked.
Then again, I asked for magic this year, didn’t I? ✨
If anything has ever passed a gut check, it’s this. I can’t imagine anything more wholesome.
Armed with lessons from new friends April, Moritz, and Connor, I’ll point myself toward the spring and take new lessons as they come. I can’t wait to see what March delivers.
Xoxo,
Emily
P.S. Here’s Moritz being a badass.
