When in Doubt, Build a Sandcastle
A head full of sand ain't so bad.
Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
Brain sand is heavy. It overloads my internal sensory buckets with its shifting, shapeless ways. I hear it swirling, flinging its gritty anger at my stubbornly shuttered windows. It makes my head heavy. I am sleepy with the nod of it.
Brain sand is impossible to hold. Its fragile potential is loose and dry, with singular grains performing street theatre behind my eyes. Somewhere in the vicinity of the frontal cortex. Bloody mimes—just tell me what you want!
Brain sand slinks through my curtain of neuronic fingers to pour itself out as wasted time. It is caught on many breezes, shifting uncomfortably as one half of a first date at the Cineplex, and finds no casual rest. The credits cannot come soon enough.
Brain sand forms dunes of thought desire. I shovel them into my mind sock and prepare to swing until it connects with the jaw of creation. To knock it to the floor so I can dance around in soft-shoe glory. Sock it to ya! Is that the way to do it? To burst and scatter it everywhere so as to slide upon it in some game-set-match, Roland-Garros fashion?
If it sifts away to collect under the floor mats in my creative car—if it remains granular, individual, and shapeless—what use is it that?
Brain sand is magical. It hurls itself against the internal shape of my skull, getting into the butt-cracks of imagination to implant a pearl. It is worn from the cliffs of my life’s timeline. As my clock winds down, my supply ramps up to form the beachhead of my art.
It’s nothing until I make it something. Until I wet it with action. With purpose.
I must apply the liquid force of my inspiration to bind it to my creation. To give it structure. To give it shape. I must create a sandcastle from its coarse and irritating ways. With my bucket. With my trowel. With my mind.
It’s nothing until I make it something.
Just add the water of my memory. Pour, scoop, sieve, rake. Bury my doubt up to its neck and wait for the tide to come in and drown it in the foam.
Brain sand is a tool. Work with it.
Brain sand is a toy.1 Play with it.
Brain sand, man. It will bring me my dream.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“Art is fundamentally a survival device of the species. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so persistent. It wouldn’t be in every culture. We wouldn’t know about it…
How does art help you survive? It helps us survive by making us attentive. In a simplistic way, when you go past a forest and you look at it and you say, ‘that looks just like Cézanne.’ And you realize Cézanne has made you see the reality of the forest in a way that you never could have seen before. He’s made you attentive. Every work of art that you care about makes us attentive. And if it doesn’t do that—it ain’t art.”- Milton Glaser
Via idsgn
On rotation: addicted to this song.
A couple of 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards Finalists. More here.
Yes, I’m putting cycling content in the Ephemera section of this newsletter, although this could easily go in the Eyes, it’s so pretty. It’s in ephemera because it’s about cycling, and since I tend to bore people with cycling on all my socials, I try not to do too much here. Anyhoo. I want to ride in Yosemite with light like this. (But I don’t want to ride TO Yosemite from here.)
Via (of all places) LinkedIn
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Of all the finalists, how is sand not ALREADY a hall of famer? It’s as old as dirt—literally.