Sandcastles in Olympic National Park
We spent several hours building sandcastles and a moat encircling them all just to watch it topple with the incoming tide.
In the moment, I wasn't thinking of its ultimate return back to the ocean or even whether anyone other than me and my group of friends would gain enjoyment from its existence. Something about its built-in restrictions (we only had the materials the beach provided) and inevitable lack of permanence birthed the necessary parameters that so often form the foundation where creativity takes root and blossoms.
We were occupied for hours. I thought about how easy it was to create the sandcastle and how hard it can be to lift a pencil or paintbrush to make something. It's easy for me to be so focused on an outcome or goal, that I forget that falling in love with the process is what matters.
The graphic designer and painter, Kim Na, speaks to the necessity of loving the process and repetition in InterviewMagazine.
What kind of painting do I want to make that I’m not going to get sick of making in a year, or 10 years, 20 years, or 30 years?” You just have to make the work that you want to make and that will feel true, and I think good things come from that. And not every piece has to be a masterpiece either. You’ve got to make some bad paintings so you can make good paintings, right? Because I paint every day, because I’m exploring one subject with these boundaries, it opens up a lot of possibilities and it helps me be less precious about the work. And it’s not boring to me to paint the same thing every day, because the results are so different. It’s life, baby. You’ve got to enjoy the ride.
Kim Na
Artificially placing a binary outcome of either "good or "bad" before I start limits the work I even make an attempt to do. Na embraces the good and bad outcomes as inevitable to the process and does not identify herself with either. It's about the ride and the ride isn't a ride unless it has ups and downs and turns.
In building a sandcastle, the process of creation turned into play, naturally. Reframing process as play makes starting all the less daunting. After all, it's a privilege to build a sandcastle in one of most beautiful places in the world. And isn't it a privilege to have the ability to create at all? It's a good reminder for myself.
Fin.
Seeing Italy in Detail
My first time in Italy was a solo trip. With two months of Italian Duolingo in my pocket, luckily backed by years of Spanish, I embarked on my journey. Without much of a plan other than booked lodgings, and a rough outline to meet with a friend, I meandered aimlessly and allowed happenstance to reign. And I'm glad I did.
It turned into a trip with lots of walking, clocking in at an average of 25k steps a day. It gifted me moments of presence that let me soak everything in, nourishing the parts of me that get starved in the daily to-do lists of life back home.
The trip was punctuated with nuance rather than big monumental strokes gesturing at the "greatest hits of Italy". It was textured with things like: noticing a woman and her dog walking in the heat and their aging hairs matching, peering into a Renaissance painting and seeing the intricate metallics glistening off a sleeve, and inhaling the flesh of a fig picked off a tree.
Purposefully slowing it down helped me appreciate the time and intention of life lived in between. Hayao Miyazaki in an interview with Roger Ebert famously spoke to this:
The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension.
-Hayao Miyazaki
I'm glad I didn't pack it in, and instead let myself savor my surroundings. In the slowing down, it really did feel like I existed in a wider dimension.
Not to mention what it does for my photography practice. The slowing of breath, the slowing of pace hones my intention to see the details forming the composition rather than photographing with a predetermined goal or object front of mind. And the slowness of the moment can be seen.
Not to mention what it does for my photography practice. The slowing of breath, the slowing of pace hones my intention to see the details forming the composition rather than photographing with a predetermined goal or object front of mind. And the slowness of the moment can be seen.
Fin.
