sunset mindset
on repetition
When I was little, I never knew there to be a difference between routine and drudgery. Practicing the piano, cleaning the kitchen, studying my mother tongue, night after night after night — I grew up feeling like there was nothing more delicious than freedom.
As I earned mine, I chased the opposite of routine. After school my friends and I would pick a new direction and start walking, gallivanting around finding geocaches and backyard roosters and secret parks. I learned the word serendipity, and it seemed so beautifully infinite in its promise, like adventure and infatuation would float into my heart as long as I kept it open. As if I could find everything that was meant for me if I just kept looking.
I’m not sure how I intended to know that I’d found what I was looking for.
I read an essay recently about how misleading it is to be told to “find your passion” — it makes it sound so easy, like you could fall in love at first sight with a calling, a soulmate-vocation.
But the truth is that love is cultivated. You can’t understand what you want to do if you don’t know what it feels like to really do it, to struggle a little, to return and chip at it. To finish the last twenty percent.
I’ve always been really good at newness, at starting things — I’m not so good at staying. I wanted to give routine another chance.
For twenty days, I painted twenty sunsets. This felt like a good routine — like a true ritual, one that I returned to at the same time each day.
The sun always set so fast that I couldn't agonize over choices of brush or colour, so I was forced to convey a universe of detail in gists, in quick stylistic choices that reflect the sky and my awe in hurried scrawls. I never knew there could be so much nuance in cloudy greys, or so many secret flavours of electric cotton candy in the sky.
In a blink, the same dash of water vapour could fade from a wisp of white into a darkening bruise, or flames start to lick and burn at the edges of a rain-heavy shadow, or god rays would sear through a crack in the space of a second and paint the earth anew. The endless variety was so gorgeous that to call it routine almost feels like a lie.
Yet when the sky started to repeat itself, I started to feel like I was pacing in circles. Why did painting always feel the same? Scribbling for texture, striving to capture every cloud, holding my breath until the sun disappeared. I had thought of my routine as a kind of meditation, and I thought the reward for meditation was enlightenment. Or a painting I could point to that would crown me the sunset master, maybe.
But turns out enlightenment is a trap. It’s not really somewhere you can stay, or even somewhere you can be. It was silly for me to commit to a routine and then expect serendipitous discovery of a glorious new way of being — because the monotony was the entire point, wasn’t it?
There was an oak tree near my house growing up. It was ringed by a decisive dirt path worn into the grass, a perfect perimeter. How it got there was a mystery to me — until one evening, when I saw an elderly neighbour pacing her way around it slowly, measured steps with no destination til sundown.
I mean, it seems like a pointless thing to do. But I think I’m starting to understand.
I think the idea of a ritual is that you’re not really going anywhere in particular. The ritual is meditation because you return in search of understanding — not to grow yourself but to know yourself. There is no destination and no outcome, because the love is in the doing.
There’s poetry in doing something over and over again not because it makes you better, but because the effort makes you feel alive.
I think this is what it means to love what you do. So I'm going to keep doing it.
on my mind
Living life as iteration, trying to tend a mind garden
Conversational canyons with people close to me, good conversations with strangers
Love as choice/love as change, choosing love well
on the horizon
Aperture is an interactive projection art installation that I’ll be working on with some lovely talented friends. I’ll write more about this soon, with details about my process and what I’m learning.
I’m researching for a game I’d like to make about mixing cocktails and making memories. It’s on the back burner so I can focus on Aperture, but I might share concept art here and there.
A post I wrote ages ago about throwing pottery!
Thank you for reading — I'm so glad you're here.
with love,
and my eternal gratitude to A, M, and H for feedback <3
i love the conclusion you reached about doing rituals and i think i'm beginning to learn that too through other activities. hoping to produce answers, find ways to change yourself, to "improve" the things you don't like. but instead you come out of it understanding yourself more. being a little more patient with who you are.
also i always love your art and i love seeing the differences between each day. it feels like i'm seeing a snippet of how you were feeling each day with the differences in the brush strokes and what you chose to focus on painting.
these are so gorgeous ... I really love the idea of doing things just for the sake of being / feeling alive . !!!!