On Writing...Other People's Words
Transcribing a passage is a meditation, sort of, but also it's a tribute, a salute, a thank you to the author. It's a chance to stop and study the lines and passages I'm enamored with more deeply: I paint someone else's words with an old-fashioned pen dipped in ink or a paintbrush, whatever it takes and transport. Looking for flourish, which may or may not make a particular word come true, more-so if the color changes from olive green to violet within the same signifier, is a freeing form of love I think, and as close to reverence for me as it gets without a big swath of nature being involved. It's so many things--mostly, I'm drawn to writing excerpts about loss and failure and trying and resurrection and connecting them to a bigger part of me, the bigger world..I am a slow learner and comebacks are never without the weight of what we come back from.
This funny little stanza resonates so much with me that I've transcribed it around my birthday for the past seven years. It reminds me of our human-ness and that, within our failings, beyond our failures is another chance and there is beauty within fortitude from which our successes are informed. Life is an ocean waving, and a beehive of fancy work to do and un-do. The visceral idea of creating something new, crafting a new chapter and finding, within whatever chance was lost, whatever bitterness perceived, the sweet, is finally all we can do to get back to grace...my birthday came and I've been re-writing.
So I decided, because someone on instagram, messaged me to purchase the one I had posted, to create this lovely resonant little stanza individually for people, handwriting them to order and selling them for pretty cheap to support my habit of painting (and transcribing words that other people have written). If you want one, made just for you and packaged real pretty the way I've been practicing packaging for yearzez, click here to find out more.