Music is My Lover

I talked about empty spaces a number of weeks ago. Often, I feel that there’s something missing, something below the surface I should have or hold or feel.

Truth is, if we don’t have the comfort of familiarity, if we take life for what it is, really see it, we realize that nothing is permanent. Human relationships and physical possessions and status are all transient. My biggest problems come from attaching expectations to people, places and things.

I did this really awesome yoga practice tonight in the Mission District of San Francisco: Yoga Punx. In the beginning of the session, the teacher asks everyone to think of an intention for the practice. I got so lost running around these last few weeks, moving my stuff into storage, cleaning my old apartment, finally finding an affordable place in Oakland so I can keep working the same hours I’m working and spend the rest of my time on music and writing and meeting new friends and people.

I lost my center, not having a solid base and a person (and a dog) to come home to. I slept at friend’s houses, on the floor of my old apartment–wherever I could. I found solace in unexpected places. I feel like a million years went by rather than merely the month of June. Every day was like a year.

Then, I started to come back to earth and I realized I was missing something. The emptiness inside kept growing larger the more I tried to fill it with people and my expectations of them. I realized I needed to find my hub again.

What is my hub? I asked myself.

The answer came when I was driving in my car listening to the songs I’ve been working on for half a year with my friend Jafar: my art. I came into consciousness here, in this world, for a reason, with the family I ended up in–a family of musicians, dancers and artists. I was raised to believe in the power of creativity. My religion is art, in addition to the belief that the universe, or god, or something inside that is intuitive takes care of us and gives us what we need. So I dedicated my yoga practice tonight to getting back to my art.

Now you can argue that children are dying everywhere, wars and famines rage, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that for now, right here, a lot of us are being taken care of. And we can try to rail against the injustice of it all, or we can appreciate the space and gifts we have been given. We can take those gifts and turn them around. We can reach out and help others, here or far away, with what we have.

I was born to write music and words. I was born to sing. I was born to give what I have in the form of art. When I don’t do it, I run dry. I’m married to my art. I’ve tried to fill the space inside with substances, tattoos, men, exercise, obsession, eating or not eating, abstaining or indulging, and I always come back to this: When I do music and write and then share these things with others, I feel happy. It’s a simple guage. I’m neurotic as they come, I suppose, and perhaps this is just my way of finding meaning in a world where we have the ability find our own meaning individually and define what this meaning is to us.

I can’t fill myself with other people. I can give what I have to other people. And when I’m connected to my destiny, everything works out. I was stuck in the mud for a while, and the mud ejected me from its bowels of chaos. I suddenly found myself without a lot of things I used to have. But I got all the things I lost back—except one. My husband.

It was nice having someone who always had my back, who would drop everything to help because we made a commitment to put each other first. It was nice to feel safe and taken care of. He helped me through many years where I was drifting, trying to find my way back to me. I helped him, too.

An old lady came into the library today and we were chit-chatting about things like divorce and her husband’s death to suicide fifteen years ago. She told me when her husband killed himself, she found that people were attracted to the vacuum that opened up inside of her. She felt curious about this, why human nature was to nurture a bottomless pit.

I don’t know about that, but she said something else, about how it’s hard to lose a husband, because of the reasons I stated before. You have a bond and a commitment to each other. You agree that you will not leave the other person alone. When something happens, you go running to their aid. You know, until death or illness separates you, that you always have that one person. You have a bubble, a cushion to protect you against the world. We mutually broke that bond so that we could find a better happiness for ourselves, and it’s a hard bond to break. Friends don’t fill the space that lovers do. It’s a hard world out there with so many possibilities.

There are a million songs written about love and losing love, because this is the nature of human existence. Sometimes we have things, sometimes we don’t. All I know is this: I will appreciate and respect what the universe offers me. I have turned my thinking around from negative to grateful. And if I need a hole filled in me, I will focus that much more on my music and writing to fill it. It’s the only thing that works, because it’s real, it’s who I am, and it’s how I see the world. When you respect your art, you get more rewards than money and success. Money and success are not necessarily the rewards I want. I am seeking the substance behind the art, the power to connect with people and lift them to a higher plane through simply baring my soul.

Music (and art) is my lover. Music (and art) is a part of my makeup. Music transcends time and space and it’s what I was given and what I will give.

P.S. A couple of my readers have been very helpful and generous during this time of transition, and for that I don’t even have the words to thank you. The only way I know how to thank you is by continuing to believe in the power of art, and my own voice.

Filling the Empty Space

Life requires more than a series of projects to keep us busy – Stephen Elliot

Monotony and sameness are a rule for most of us, rather than an exception, although I’m sure we all picture “others” who don’t have to face these things. Art seems to me a method of filling the empty spaces.

It seems maybe that I am lofty with my goals—some judge me, saying I have it easy. Maybe I have it easier than some. I am lucky to have two jobs I can tolerate, friends who support me, an apartment that, though right by the train and not the prettiest, is somewhat affordable for the area I live in. A family that encouraged me to be creative growing up. The passion for creativity above most everything else.

I am passionate about creating stuff. God forbid you get stuck in the car with me. This seems to be the place I start ranting about art. Yesterday, I was telling my friend that creation is amazing because it allows you to process things that you can never resolve, and help others with what you end up with. A few months ago I told another friend, “Some people do drugs. I create stuff.”

But really, I’ve been thinking about art and creation lately, and part of the reason I do it is because I can’t usually sit still without a pen or guitar in my hands. It’s a way to channel anxiety. I think for a lot of artists what they create fills the emptiness of not knowing anything. For me, it’s the emptiness of not knowing why I’m here and what connects me to this world or other people. And it’s often to channel boredom and loneliness, too. Since I was young, I’ve felt alone, even when I’m with people.

I don’t say we don’t know anything to be all nihilistic and apathetic (though I do suffer from permutations of those words), more to say that that’s a part and parcel of this life we’ve been given, where things are not distributed fairly and we’re left to create our own maps, just as soon as we realize nobody else has one, either.

Some people claim to know. This was common in the church I grew up in, when people would go up and bear their testimony that the church was true and god had a plan for them (and all of us, in the audience, too). I was guilty of doing the same thing when I was 17, telling everyone I knew. One of my friends always told me she didn’t, and I judged her, until I didn’t either.

Nobody knows. This is the reality I know. Once I accepted that, or decided that I didn’t know, I was free to make whatever meaning I wanted of my life, and I started focusing on the here and now instead of the next life, which nobody knows is real or not.

And there’s an urge to leave something behind me. There’s an urge to help people. There’s an urge to help my younger self, too, and I’ve heard this from a lot of artists. Dear Sugar, on The Rumpus (Cheryl Strayed) talks to her twenty-year old self. Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, writes to his teenage self.

I could write a whole blog on writing to a younger self, and probably will, but I am trying (trying I say) to stay on topic, since I tend to ramble, though my points often do connect if you keep with me.

I am learning that I can’t fill all of the empty spaces with doing. In order to create, I also need to do nothing, reflect, or just hang out with friends sometimes. It is quite possible to get caught in a grind with your art, too, if you don’t take a breather. I have weeks where I am spending every spare moment writing music and non-fiction stories and poetry, and then weeks where I am bereft of ideas and the wherewithal to edit any of it. On those weeks, I still tend to it, but I squeak by. And if I force myself to work on project after project, I start losing sight of other things that are important in life, like my husband and the dog and all of the amazing friends I have right here in the Bay Area.

Perhaps life is about more than filling the empty spaces with projects, and filling the empty spaces with projects is just my way of channeling the anxiety of not knowing and hoping to leave something behind, hoping to change the world in some small or large way, and these two things are enough fuel to keep me perpetuating creations. A third reason is that art helps me process absolutely everything. I’m sensitive, I see a lot, I take in a lot, and I get overwhelmed easily. Music and writing help me make sense of emotions and people, too.

My husband used to comment, when we both stopped drinking, etc., about “filling the empty spaces” we had filled with substances before. Art fills those gaps for me, too.

Why do you create?

Filling Up The Empty Spaces

A lot of my time is spent lately filling up the empty spaces in my life. A lot of times in the past, when I was working non-stop, I fantasized about free time. Endless solitude. Now that I have both of those things, I can’t help but wish for less of both.

I need to be around people some of the time, so that I have ways to bounce my ideas around. If I am my only judge/critic, then I can come up with some crazy flights of fantasy about how the world works. Without other people, I can only entertain myself for so long. My ideas are not the greatest in the world. They only work in concert with other people’s ideas. At least if I hear a bad idea I can compare mine to that and tell myself how good it is. Without the contrast, how would I know if my idea was good or not?

I usually write best when I’m challenged by something in my life, like doing something I don’t want to do. I don’t know if I started creating out of rebellion at the way things were, but it worked for me for so long. Now that I don’t have that much to rebel against besides my physical and mental state of affairs, well, I’m not creating that much.

Some people have a writing practice, or a music practice. They sit down every day and write no matter what comes out. And they say they’re always glad they did it.

My tragic flaw, I suppose, is that I’ve always written on a whim. I write when I feel creative or inspired. So the stuff I come up with is usually feeling-oriented. I can sit around waiting for weeks or months for the write (ha, Freudian slip) inspiration to come. I fear formula. But in fighting structure, I do myself a disservice. We have to adhere to some sort of a formula, at least at first, so that we can proceed to dash it to pieces.

So my question is this. If I do most of the things I do alone, do they matter? Or do we gain meaning from talking about the things we do alone with other people?

Feedback is such an important part of writing. It’s why we have blogs and writing groups and classes. The writing life can be so lonely. But what can you write about if you don’t spend any time around other people? Unless you’re a complete misanthrope, you do expect other people to read what you write. And if you expect this, then you have to write about things that will interest other people. Which means you have to spend time with other people at times before you come back to being alone with your words.

How do we fill up the empty spaces in our lives? What purpose do they serve?

Thestifledartist's Blog

Pep talks for writers, musicians and artists (myself included)

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Music is My Lover

Filling the Empty Space

Filling Up The Empty Spaces

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