On Process and Practice

An abbreviated cosmology

From a trip to the Cloisters a couple weeks ago, high summer

I haven’t written here since April. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say—I always have something to say, and that’s the trouble—it’s more that the alchemy that renders private thoughts into public consumption sometimes feels in equal measure rough and tender.

I’m finding myself back in a space of questioning and curiosity regarding my own creative practice. One month ago, I had top surgery, and since then I’ve been enjoying a pretty gentle recovery, having taken a month-long hiatus from most social media at the same time. There’s a sense in which the hiatus has felt like a carving away, or perhaps a pulling back of the superfluous in my life. Making room for something else to push through.

Oftentimes I find myself standing on the banks of a river of art, theorizing the best way to navigate it. Jump in? Take a boat? Sketch its shape while leaning against a nearby tree? I feel like I spend more time asking myself how to make art than I spend actually making art.

Sometimes it’s good to actually take the plunge. I find myself pulled into the refresh cycle of checking email, discord, other sites through which I sometimes receive messages and information as my pattern of incessantly checking social media finds a secondary outlet. Sometimes—what feels too infrequent, to be honest—I put down the screen entirely and I do jump in. I write a few lyrics, I hand-stitch some fabric, I brainstorm-journal about a possible conceptual art project.

In some ways, I’ve spent the past decade plus trying to ascertain my ideal positionality when it comes to my own inputs and outputs. By which I mean, how can I intentionally ground my practice in terms of the art, media, and, for lack of a better word, content I consume and whatever it is that comes out of me in response? What this might require, I’ve been contemplating, is a kind of cosmological understanding of both process and practice.

By “cosmological understanding” I suppose I mean a framework that’s grounded in the way the world—and my life specifically—actually works. The first thing that’s important to note about this for me is that I want to avoid easy binarization. For too long I’ve segmented out the part of me that spends a lot of time on social media as some secondary aspect of myself that does not actually have an impact on the rest of my life, or perhaps more interestingly, that has nothing important to say to the rest of my life or personhood. When, really, having spent much of the last decade or so engaging heavily with certain social media communities has fundamentally impacted how I write, how I speak, and how I engage with others.

Process and practice are two words for interrelated concepts, both regarding the way things are created. Process refers to the means by which something develops or moves forward, while practice is a word for the particular kind of repetition out of which process can emerge. You could say that process is housed within practice.

Thus, my writing practice makes space for writing as a process—specifically, the entire cycle, from just showing up with my pen in hopes that I might catch something interesting, to working at an idea, to drafting something in full flesh, to revision and finalization. Cosmologically, this conjunction of practice and process works best when I am well and presently attuned to what is coming into my creative consciousness, and to what is going out.

Unsurprisingly, this is most easily managed when I am feeling good; when I have energy, focus, and motivation. It is much harder when I am stressed and I have not been meeting my basic needs (I am hungry, tired, etc). When I’m feeling good, I feel like I’ve really figured the whole thing out, and that I have the ability to shift tactics if and when I need to. When I’m feeling less good, I can find myself feeling trapped or overwhelmed by a drive to follow my fancy from website to website, going down a rabbit hole of links or refreshing email in a way whereupon any conceptualization of the outside world and my goals drops away from me as if severed.

So, no, I don’t have the answers, not really, but having an understanding of the way my process and practice actually works and the ways that being online (and offline) interfaces with that has gone a long way towards my understanding of how to ground myself.

Which is kind of all anyone can ask for, isn’t it?