Burn Before Needing
Take all your creative kindling, burn it, then let your work (and life) feed off the smoke.
Step into that circle of delectable doom. Don your ceremonial garb—dressing gown, smoking jacket, or Whatever-core1 uniform you desire—and step right on in. Surround yourself with the feelings and situation and tone and madness and raucous din and just sit.
Still.
Quiet.
In it.
Sit in the sadness. Sit in the shame. Sit in the anger and the jealousy and the overwhelming woe and feelings you cannot possibly process. Not yet.
Sit with the tears and wails and confusion and perplexing roiling melancholy and malaise. Sit in the shit and the piss and the pus and the scab of a wounded rejection. Sit in sorrow.
Sit in it viciously and without compromise.
With your chakras aligned and your heart open and sucking blood in gulping glassfuls, sit and observe. Watch with expectant dread and wide-eyed wonder as the emotional embers of those bad day days land with graceful fragility upon the many tear-soaked tissues festooned around your chair, at the edge of your crossed legs on the carpet, or at the periphery of your pleather recliner.
They land. They ignite. You are surrounded.
Be not afraid. Even while high-pitched battery-powered banshees shriek upon your ceiling, remain seated.
Sit.
As the sadness and the shame and the rejection and the hurt and the pain and the pity party and the wallow of it burn wildly around you, fear not—you are shielded from this heat. You are immune to the damage of the flame.
Lean in.
And as each lick of licentious pain overwhelms and sizzles and rages around you, take to your bellows and squeeze. Huff and huff until the fire releases its prisoner.
Fan those flames until it speaks.
The answer is not the fire. The answer is the smoke.
Encourage the smoke. Let that attention-seeking fire burn and gather its glory with the fuel of your unprocessed feelings until it burns itself down to smoke at your border. Absorb this smoke. Let its wisdom permeate your mind to toughen and tasty-up your skin with its experience.
The smoke will set you free.
All things burn away. Love. Ideas. Desire. Motivation. They burn hot and fast and have the power to immolate our very souls in their magnificent pyres. These fires are built on creative kindling. They burn so that you may grow—in your work and your life.
Sit in the smoke. Eyes stinging, lungs coughing. Sit in the smoke and learn.
Sit in the win. Sit in the center of its joy. Sit on the fire escapes of success upon the sides of your buildings, daring and courageous, and yell your whomp song into to the shifting winds of interest.
The white smoke of your new pope signals a victory. Surf that billowing cloud across your ancient city to sustain your momentum, to fuel your commitment to the chase of the do and the done and the next.
Your building’s on fire. Always. Step into that inferno of success with your camp chair at the ready. Slather yourself in ego grease and the joy juice of your precious win. With every fiber of your being engrossed with the me! me! me! of your you! you! you!-ness, allow yourself the deep inhalation of it.
Sit with the success smoke and blow it up your own ass. Why not? Someone has to.
Sit with your ego as it shimmers and vibrates with the sensual wave of this magic moment. A potential smoke monster with more tickets to more shows and a stomp and a cackle and the “about-bloody-time” that sets off blips and chatter across the airwaves. Allow your ego this one moment, then rise from your chair and move onto the new.
It’s not the fire that raises your temperature—it’s the smoke.
People are a sea. A sea of flames, hot and wild and destructive and unpredictable. Wade into them and set your brain on fire with their spark. With love, with hate, with mellow inclination, let their oil slicks stick.
Sit with friends. Sit with family. Sit with lovers and haters and melancholy mopes. Sit with the like-minded head nodders. Sit with the ones you absolutely, not even if hell froze over, don’t agree with at all, people.
Don’t care for ‘em? Sit with ‘em.
Sit with strangers and vagabonds and weirdos and geniuses and cats and dogs and goldfish and quiet, introspective hamsters. Sit with prophets and phonies, painters, and politicians. Sit with them all.
Sit with their fire licking at your kindling.
And when they flare and glow and threaten to devour with their hot-spot incandescence, sit quietly and with great stillness as you absorb their smoke.
Allow the combustion of thoughts and actions and relationships to stoke the fire of your heart and generate a smoke that threatens visibility. Catch it in a bottle. Take the stench and the vapor and the sting and the taste of char and store it. Capture it so that it may reappear at some later date in your work, your life—your character.
Sit alone. By yourself and with yourself. Allow the smoky fingers of your bonfire to twist around your brain and through your ears and up your nostrils to the core of who you are, what you want, and where you want to go.
Sit. In. It.
If you singe your eyebrows with the knowledge of it, you are perhaps too close to your fire. Maintain perspective with smoke.
Sit in the idea. Sit in the buzz and blur and success and failure and error and triumph. Sit with the color, the shape, the style. Sit and watch as the intention burns and the outcome threatens to extinguish your eager and overzealous candle.
Sit back. Examine the smoke of it as you burn your work (metaphorically). Is it blue? Clean? Fat with oxygen and purity? Or is it as black and depressing as a tire fire?
Take a chair from another room, grab a coffee or a tea, and a notepad, then sit. Strike a match and set your work on fire. Let the smoke soak into your clothes and leave the odor of the lesson upon your skin and in the filaments of your being.
Just sit.
In case of emergency—confusion, dejection, emotion—break glass. Remove chair. Sit on it.
If you don’t understand what the fire means, sit.
If you don’t understand why something caught fire in the first place, sit.
If you can’t fathom the when and where and why and who of the fire setting, do a fireside sitting and let the smoke whisp whisper.
The longer you sit, the more you will absorb. The more you absorb the more noise you will make when you get up from the chair.
Some people will attribute those noises to old age or a body on the wane.
No.
The noises you make when you get up from a chair are simply skeletal symphonies of comprehension, full orchestral blooms of enlightenment, and ghost notes of total understanding. Of the world and your place in it.
Or to put it another way—smoke songs.
Every sitting is a gathering. It is the gathering of your creative kindling so that you may bask in the glow of your blaze and find your smoke. All experience, good and bad, makes this kindling. All kindling, good and bad, looks the same when it’s on fire.
It’s the smoke that changes.
It’s the smoke that is your fuel.
Burn before needing—that’s the lesson. Let everything burn bright and hot and white and searing. Burn feelings and thoughts and constructs and encounters that leave you discombobulated. Burn them all. Learn from the inferno as it smokes your flesh into a fine and deliciously seasoned thing.
Sit in the fire of your life.
Find your smoke.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
An oldie, but always a goldie.
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
Via Gary Provost’s 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, 1985
On Rotation: “Strange Powers” by The Magnetic Fields
Trailer for Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City”. The colors, man. Leeches are leechin’ ‘em!
Via YT algorithm
Love this weirdness. Seinfeld and Twin Peaks have a baby with Seinpeaks.
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I can’t decide what my ‘-core’ fashion style is. I’m in the Karencore age bracket, but I don’t rock the Karencore aesthetic. (Note, that’s not listed in this article—I just assume someone’s called it that already.) I like the word Gorpcore, and do dabble in the Patagonias from time to time, but am not totally into that aesthetic either. Schlubcore? Now that I think about it, Whatevercore fits me pretty well.