The Lesson Of The Falling Leaves the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves ― Lucille Clifton
My mom doesn’t give herself enough credit.
Whenever she gets a compliment on how far she’s come or the fruits of her labor she always points to the sky and cites god as the source of all the goodness in her life. But here is the thing, faith is the hardest part. She never gives herself credit for her faith. For the labor of staying steadfast to a promise with your name on it, a promise you can’t see yet. That’s the hard part. Taking risks that make sense to no one. Taking risks that sometimes don’t even make sense to you. All because of your faith, because of that promise with your name on it.
How do we cultivate faith as a gardening practice where we plant the seeds of our pleasure centered creative visions over and over again?
When the vision is so clear it’s almost as if it’s already happened.
When your creative ideas camp out on your chest.
When your body simply won’t let you do work that has nothing to do with you.
Faith becomes the only option.
As a general rule, I trust the role and creative magic of improvisation and generative accidents in my creative practice. I am so codependent on this trustworthy collaboration that I don’t even enjoy creating without it. Without it the work often feels incomplete, flat, dead. But the contradiction is: in my actual life I tense up at the thought of not being able to control the outcome. Change consistently shakes up my nervous system, self doubt activates, and trusting improvisation no longer feels possible — it becomes irresponsible…and here comes the shame. This cycle is as familiar as the seasons.
What are you choosing to embody? The questions I surface in my newsletter are always the questions I must answer for myself. Richard Powers reminds us, people don’t change minds, only stories can do that1. What stories have you been telling yourself? If you can’t make up your mind, you’ve probably made up a story. You have been praying with your worry and the message that has been delivered to you over and over again is to live inside your strengths, live inside your strengths, live inside your strengths.
But this is in conflict with the story you have been telling yourself:
I am an artist. I know writing, making, and teaching are the creative acts that come most “natural” to me, these are my unique strengths, my sources of pleasure, but unfortunately the world isn’t set up to reward our pleasure. The suffering would stop if I just face it, the life I want is not possible inside of prioritizing pleasure.
The subtext of that story, the thing I’m not saying is, I subconsciously believed that financial excess would grant me access the love I craved. Financial excess would unlock the status and material proof that I was worthy of the love I desired. This is the story I was embodying which looked like stress about schedules, abandoning pleasure, and squeezing productivity out of every waking hour. This is the story that caused me to clip my exercise and meditation practices, skip calls with friends, return to unhelpful eating habits induced by stress, dismiss physical care, and misinterpret time spent with family as “distraction”.
Capitalism demands we embody a certain absurdity and betrayal.
The practices we often label “unproductive'' or pleasurable are oftentimes the most important work of our lives. Inside these pleasure practices are often where our strengths live, also known as the work that comes naturally, also known as the only work we want to do, also known as the only work we need to do.
Here’s the thing: being in this body needs to feel good. It must feel good. That is no longer negotiable.
What stories of possibility do you need to embody for it to feel good here?
Here is the new story:
I will act out my faith. I will practice the promise with my name on it. I will embody the possibility for me to wake up with the sun, not an alarm. I will prioritize care and time spent with loved ones, ecosystem, and self. I will tend to the garden of my creative practice, remembering seeds that are planted with loving intention and attention often grow. I know the promise with my name on it is lifetime access to creative spirit, infinite love, and deep belonging. Following a curiosity informed by care, I will live as if another world is possible.
I prefer this new story but here’s the hard part: you must not take your strengths for granted. You must not take your gifts for granted and decide being an artist, writer, teacher [insert your thing] isn’t enough. You must not adopt the story that being who you truly are might mean inaccessibility to the love you are craving. You can’t decide that focusing only on what you’re good at is too easy, too pleasurable, too simple, too straightforward, too whatever. Life can be full of ease if we let it be. You are worthy of ease. Navigating the inevitability of suffering is the trickier part (especially when the suffering is not evenly distributed). But, if suffering will happen with or without our help, we don’t need to be the source of unnecessary self suffering because we are committed to believing the story that the gifts that only our uniqueness can offer are not enough. When stuck inside the story that the gifts of your creative spirit are not enough to be impressive, are not enough to provide, are not enough to earn your breath. It helps to remember…
You do not have to do work that hurts in order to earn your keep here.
In early spring I was acting out the old story. I embarked on a software engineering job search and I almost immediately felt my depression creeping back in and all the full body uneasiness, dejection, and sickness that comes with it. I realized committing to my pleasure practices wasn’t just about creative expression and freedom, it was literally a matter of health and survival. I learned committing to my art/writing/teaching practice is committing to myself, allowing me to show up fully in community and with loved ones. I am still an engineer. I was always already an engineer. But it took me a while to realize the journey toward being an engineer for industry didn’t feel good. What it was requiring of my spirit, body, mind, and time just didn’t feel good to me. It left little space for the erotic yes2 inside of interdisciplinary being. Since then I’ve been thinking about ways to continue to integrate my love of the generative possibility of code into my art practice. Today I ask questions like, what software and biotechnologies do we build when given space to imagine, play, and speculate outside the enclosures of industrial demands? Inside my new story I am giving myself permission to trust my strengths and my pleasure practice as a curiosity playspace where I live the questions3. I have faith in my strengths as an artist/writer/maker/teacher/communicator. I have faith that following this creative curiosity will also provide the life I dream of, surface blessings with my name on it, and a wild abundance I have yet to imagine.
Zora Neale Hurston told us, “The dream is the truth”4.
Make a fetch()
request and receive a promise.
fetch('http://faith.com/practices.json')
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => console.log(data));
Here we are fetching a JSON file across the network and printing it to the console. The simplest use of fetch()
takes one argument — the path to the resource you want to fetch — and does not directly return the JSON response body but instead returns a promise that resolves with a Response
object. To learn more about using fetch()
check out these MDN docs.
My faith proved to be a safe space enough times now for a vision to be revealed to me with the truth that in collaboration with my devotion, creativity, loved ones, and community it will come to pass. Never a matter of if, just when. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is to release the timeline. Even a fetch()
request has to await a response. Visions manifest in their own divine timing. Our only job is to show up and water the page, water the canvas, water the running trail with the grace of our stride, show up to the meditation pillow and water the moment with our presence, show up to the bath tub and water our bodies, show up to whatever practices keep the soil of your faith fertile and the seeds of your pleasure nourished. May our ceremonies, creative visions, relationships, and life-affirming desires for the future be seeds of possibility our faith may nurture.
When planting a seed, we trust the soil, sun, water, wind to collaborate with us in growth and harvest5. We don’t force the growth, we tend to the growth. In the forest, birds count on plants to provide material for nests, squirrels count on plants for food, deer count on plants for hiding cover. The soil counts on nitrogen from alder trees, pinegrass provides shade for “new Douglas-fir germinates”, and smaller prickly-needled spruce seedlings count on rhododendrons to protect them from hard frosts6. What do we need to start allowing ourselves to count on to manifest possibilities we’ve already imagined? Who do we need to count on to build realities already revealed to us in dreams? Ease made possible through collective care is a universal truth you are born into.
Ease made possible through collective care is the promise with our name on it.
Faith is what makes acting out/practicing/embodying/performing/rehearsing7 our new stories possible. Look, I am a writer, I am not above needing a good story to get me through. My faith may just be a good story I’m telling myself to get me through. Funny thing is, most of the time that’s all it takes. Not so funny thing, most of the time we’re living in, embodying, and living out someone else's stories. This time you’re the writer, counting on faith to hold the pen.
“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” ― Richard Powers, The Overstory
The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde. This essay was originally a paper presented at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978, and was later published as a chapter in Sister
Outsider. Copyright © 1984
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” ― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, pg. 32. Originally published September 18, 1937.
Slowness, Ease, and Intention with Latham Thomas Part 1. Emergent Strategy Podcast. Published June 9th, 2022.
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard. pg. 92. Published May 4, 2021.
“Abolition is presence, which means abolition is life in rehearsal.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore