Chaos in Bloom

when the name of your teen poetry tumblr becomes a current day mantra

Before we get into it, I’m excited to finally announce a new meditation is available to stream! As I recorded Morning Activation, I imagined the words flowing across you, welcoming in whatever message works for each day. It is the first of many meditations I’m adapting from the Now is Good archives.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Music, pretty much anywhere!

You’ll never guess where I am today.

Seeing as this format doesn’t lend itself to a game of 20 questions, I’ll just tell you. I’m at the center of a canopy made of mosquito netting, hung from a beam in the center of my dusty garage. 

This is the first day I’ve set up my laptop, pointed fans toward my face and called it an active workspace. Of course real ones will know that I tried to make this makeshift office happen about a year ago. When my bf and I found our current spot, the garage was a real selling point for me. 

I love a garage studio aesthetic. Nothing feels too precious: the floors are concrete, the walls have no expectations. Never having had a studio, I pictured a place to experiment, write and rewrite, putter with my old projector. Of course, reality slammed into my fantasy: too many spiders, too much heat, far too many mosquitos. I quickly packed up my laptop and left half of the garage unpainted.

For the past year I’ve been working at the dining room table. In an attempt to separate work thoughts from the rest of my life, I close up shop every night by clearing the table.

A lot has been good about that set up—mainly the air conditioning—but as the year stretched on, I’ve felt a bit stagnant. I’ve had the same couple projects as my focus, which I’d say is a mark of maturity but the fiery part of my spirit has felt a bit dulled. 

A big theme of my twenties has been actively finding pleasure in normal, grounded environments. Anyone who spent their formative years in a string of uncertain situations will adapt to feeling fine while the earth shakes beneath them. Not to be all meta, but the phrase Now is Good serves as a personal reminder that stability isn’t something to run from.

Thankfully, I was given the chance to move out of a survival mindset. I had to take responsibility for my own life, I had to define my baseline. Would I seek out random chaos for short-term comfort? Or would I start from the beginning, clearing the field before planting all anew?

Recalibrating took some time. In the process, I had to leave the part of myself that only felt special if I was in the midst of conflict and ashes. I had to build the part of myself that would thrive in the sunshine, with plenty of water and rich soil. 

In the past few years, I’ve really explored stability, and it lives up to the hype. It’s wild to hear myself say that and even more wild to think back on how I used to operate. 

Of course we can never swing too far on the pendulum, gravity will always bring us back to center. Instead of finding a balance between commitment and chaos, I had fully notched myself into a series of routines. I’m finding creative energy needs a little room to seek out the unexpected.

Turns out you can’t expect new rivers to flow when you’ve constructed a dam to catch all the water. 

I’d like to formally thank the unlikely team of Pilates and Judaism for wrenching me out of my rut. Discovering new physical and philosophical challenges began peeling back the layers that had settled on the creative threads of my mind. It didn’t hit as an epiphany, but a slow trembling that registered as either excitement or irritation. 

Now that I’ve understood these signals, I’ve started changing things up and declaring myself ready for more. That’s partially why these newsletters have been sporadic, because for me, navigating and documenting happen separately. I worked through the cobwebs in the garage as a symbolic ritual, a devotion to the muses. When the super moon hit, new ideas emerged. Fighting doubt with the desire to see what happens.

Maybe it’s a creative chaos that I’m cultivating: to leave things open for the divine’s surprise hand. 

Here’s to more of that. 

xx
James