Meditations From the Studio
Meditations From the Studio
The state of creative surrender
I spent the entire weekend in my basement studio. Hours passed by in minutes, the clock rendered irrelevant along with email, social media, my phone, and everything on the other side of the door. I forgot to eat. I acquired a blister and two puncture wounds. The Band-Aids on my hands remind me that I'm using my body again in a way that I haven't in a long time, in a way that brings me as close to peace as anything can—a feeling I'd all but forgotten.
Over the last six months, which have been the most difficult of my life, my writing has been unavailable to me. Words have refused to form around my experiences to help me make sense of certain events, even if only to describe them to myself. And so they remained stuck. This weekend, I remembered that I have another way to make sense of hard things and move them through me.
I'm a different person in the studio, the person I wish I could be above ground. In the studio, I exist in a state of total surrender. I never worry about a problem being unsolvable or a task too great. I rarely become frustrated. I welcome mistakes as acts of providence.
This is the God I believe in. The one whose gaze I can feel while my hands are busy and my heart is calm, helping me channel tiny pieces of myself into objects that someone else might someday hold. Into objects that contain all the words that couldn't find me before.
This is the first time in the ten years of my sculpture practice that I don't have an exact picture in my mind of what I'm making before I sit down to make it. I walk into my subterranean house of worship and put my faith in the process of becoming, both for the work and for the maker.
The light, sometimes it washes over me Washes over me I close my eyes So I can see Make my make believe, believe in me –R.E.M.
Thank you so much for the incredibly sweet messages, comments, and works of art that you’ve all shared over the past week to soothe my tender heart. I’m still going through them and crying as I do. I will be responding to each one in time. You have no idea how much they have meant to me.
Yesyesyesyesyes. There are two such places where I have experienced this unequalled state. It used to be in my darkroom where I would lose hourshourshours - nothing beyond that closed door even existed. Only my thoughts and the wondrous, sometimes ghostlike emerging images on paper.
Now I experience this when I am behind the camera shooting on a documentary. In this case, the only world that exists lives inside that rectangle of a frame. It is that wondrous dance between me and my subject, precariously yet unbreakably held together by the lens between us.
Athletes call it a state of flow. Meditation practitioners states of jhana. Buddhists, "in the bhav".
It is one of the most wondrous, addicting, most complete experiences I will no doubt ever have!
Thank you, Jen for your inspiring words. And whatever it is that you are going through, may you do so with grace and as little suffering as possible. 🙏
Inspiring words from an inspiring human.