Situation /ˈderəˌlikt/
How to take a renovation vacation from your fixer-upper of a mind house.
Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
This is my derelict mind. Can you feel the empty stillness of its neglected real estate?
Light once flooded these vast hallways and rooms, seeping into cupboards and illuminating stairs to other levels of higher thought. But now? Now a silted, tea-soaked hue licks the walls and floors with its sallow tongue. With no creative spark to pay the rent or gas, and a heater that refuses to cough out ideas, there is but one choice: Get out. I will evict myself from this tenement of torment, fling my mind’s door wide open and stride out into the world. There is no hope here, just the steady trickle of motivation leaking down to a dank and dark basement within me.
Don’t even get me started on the fetid stench.
But.
A derelict, primed for demolition mind state is not a permanent mind state. Never forget this. Mental markets swing in that big band, free-form way and one day derelict, next day divine. And today it teems with excitable voices—loud, soft, whispering, full-throated. What was yesterday a brokedown hovel of lost hope is today a motivated mansion of purposeful productivity. This mind palace is filled with conversation, love, passionate debate, and laughter. It’s a warm place to be on days like this, with a heat that rises on the breath of possibility, a heat so powerful it can change the temperature of a room. In this mind, ideas dine with each other at long, pastry-laden tables, and you can easily walk the floors sockless and never get cold feet.
Don’t even get me started on the intoxicating aroma.
But.
This is not a permanent state either. Come tomorrow and the mind market takes a dive and here we are again, back on the doorstep of 666 Hollow Husk Avenue. A stickiness of spirit soaks the carpet as my bare feet squish and slide on the anguish of creative emptiness. Neglect seeps from tears in the peeling wallpaper. There is the low gurgle of desperate abandonment emanating from cracks in the floorboards as the mind becomes, yet again, uninhabitable. It violates several county health codes and as the walls close in I will once again do what is necessary—I will stride out the door of it and away. An inside mind like mine must occasionally live outside itself to survive. This I know.
But.
How to live outside the state of your mind on days like this? How to begin the renovation process so you can return to it? Because you must return—there is no true escape from your derelict mind. There is only the constant of creative reconstruction.
I can only say what works for this mind, which has a habit of slipping into the derelict state easily and often. And what I’ll say is this: It’s perfectly reasonable to swing that big mind door open and stride out and away for a spell. It’ll do you good. Your mind in its unliveable state is simply a work in progress—a fixer-upper if you will. It ebbs and flows between the states of derelict and divine, the fix and the up. And it’s the UP that you need to find to do the fix and you can really only do that by leaving. By looking outside of yourself.
But.
A word of warning. This circle of DIY never ends. You’re going to restump the whole structure and you’re going to be restumping again and again and again for the rest of your life. From the mundane to the stimulating, from the trivial to the intense—these will be the inputs (the stumps) that will rebuild you. This is how bigger and better blueprints are drawn. This is how you get the rats out of your basement.
To fumigate and renovate you’ve gotta investigate.
Fling wide the door and…1
Go for a walk and get ice cream. Admire people’s gardens along the way.
Lay down in the grass and close your eyes. Can you feel the sun on your eyelids? Is it making weird colors?
Read a book. Or a magazine. Or a comic.
Write a letter.
Watch a film or binge some television. Don’t feel bad about it. What did you like about what you watched? What did you hate?
Talk to a friend about trivial things. Talk to a friend about deep, DEEP things. Get into the heart of the artichoke.
Bake some cookies.
Look at art. Say “That’s not art!” and defend your stance.
Draw a picture. Don’t judge your smudges too harshly.
Go camping.
Stare at the sky (but not the sun).
Stare at the sea.
Stare at nothing at all.
Just step away. Away. Away.
When you feel better, only then should you walk back up the path to your mind. Say to yourself as you approach the threshold:
“This mind is my forever mind—I must fill it when it is empty. I must redecorate when it is sad. To do anything else is a creative dereliction of duty.”
Collect all manner of DIY re-construction materials. Gather new curtains of creative inspirations as you restock, rebuild, and reanimate your derelict mind. And through it all, be open to the outside. The tools you need are scattered everywhere, ready to be hooked to your tool belt, so keep your eyes peeled. Because you never know what will happen while you’re out there not thinking about your run-down creative mind manor. You might just catch a volcano and a meteor in the same frame, and won’t that be something worth hanging in your mind’s vestibule?
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“Well, since Samuel Beckett, the tragic and the humorous have been allowed on the stage to link arms as it were. I'll never forget seeing, say—like in the first week I believe it was of "Waiting for Godot", which is a terribly funny play, incredibly funny and then all of a sudden Bert Lahr, right after getting one of the laughs, big heavy laughs from the audience, he "We give birth astride a grave," pow! The hardest—and I began to discover that the hardest laughs come from our deepest pains. In improvisation that's particularly true, and in a sense, like as I was saying before, laughter is a significator of understanding, you can't really laugh without understanding. You can't understand without sharing. And so when someone laughs at a pain of yours, it is not necessarily—it's—I mean, if you take that slight mental adjustment, it's not that you're holding yourself up for ridicule anymore, you're--the audience is saying, "Yes, me too. I feel that too."- Del Close, from this interview with Studs Terkel in 1970.
This documentary (trailer below) about Del looks good, too.
“You have a light within you. Burn it out.”
Them’s some good marching orders, right there.
I try not to inflict my love of Radiohead on y’all too often, but this is a fav song and it was a REJECTED song. The deconstruction of how bond themes work in this video—and of how that signature riff plays into so many of them—was just something I had never even thought about until I watched this video. Composers are awesome. And this song is so great. I still can’t believe it was REJECTED. Love that RH released it as a Christmas gift anyway. :)
Via “the algorithm” that rules us all.
These photographs (obtained via drone by Ukrainian photographer Alexander Ladanivskyy) of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt are baller. Photos at the link zoom RIGHT IN to show texture—and graffiti carved in the top bricks—like crazy. Seriously, click through and look.
“Each photo zeroes in on the pyramid’s tip, or pyramidion, which was once topped by an immense capstone that some speculate may have been gilded with gold.”
Via Colossal
I’m out camping at the moment and had my own encounter with a bear in my camp last week. I called him Lil’ Smokey. Anyway, this is a streaming LIVE bear cam of bears catching salmon at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park in Alaska. Some days it’s pretty packed, and I’m not sure how long the LIVE will but up, but it’s quite soothing.
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Not an exhaustive list, just a starting point. There are plenty of ways to disconnect from the derelict and seek out the divine.