you can have everything

greed, glory, rhythm

As Long As You’ll Be Here by Nickie Zimov, shared via @PHurducas

hi friends, 2 newsletters in a week (woah!) I’m trying to write shorter pieces more frequently. welcome new readers to my little space on the internet (my art, words, and thoughts).

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you can have everything

Life is a pretty delicious dream if you know what you want out of it. Brian Eno once said: for the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time. This is true. If you know which strings to pull, whose shit to shovel, which rules to break, the world can absolutely be fine-tuned to what you want it to be.

I live by this mantra: you can have everything you want, you just can’t have it all at once – you can have love and desire and youth and wisdom and education and career and puppies and children and indulgence and control. Humans are built to want more than we can handle. To experience pleasure in small amounts and then seek it excessively. Huxley: I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. I know you want to consume everything, put your greedy little hands on anything you can touch, open your mouth wide, consume it whole. You want to pour something essential of your soul into the world, leave a legacy. You want to run right into the warm, gooey center of love and clasp your arms tightly around it, but external love will not fix you because the love you’re looking for is right there inside of you already. You just have to dig a little deeper.

You crave everything at once, and see life as one big feast. You want both discipline and freedom, both stability and novelty. But sometimes you need to learn one before the other. You need to see life more as a dance, one that ebbs and flows. Henry Miller: The art of living is based on rhythm. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, ‘the dance of life,’ metamorphosis. (Acceptance) is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live. It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender.

Learn how to wait for things. Accept that you can’t have everything at once. Have patience and a little more self-trust. Surrender yourself to this big, glorious, dream-filled dance we call life. Everything exists on your timeline – you just can’t see it quite yet.

-N.

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Concept of the Week

The word “Kokoro” (Japanese), also the character 心 in Mandarin/Japanese

Kokoro is well understood in Japanese, but difficult to explain in English, says Yoshikawa Sakiko, director of Kyoto University’s Kokoro Research Center. Conceptually, it unites the notions of heart, mind, and spirit: It sees these three elements as being indivisible from one other. “For example if we say, ‘She has a good kokoro,’ it means heart and spirit and soul and mind all together.”

Art-things

In the process of thinking through making a new painting in the style of these ones I made a few years ago, so I went to an acrylic store and picked up some new paints, brushes, and a new stretched canvas. Very excited to paint again. I am going to be painting a new colorful bunny-human.

my *very* old bunny paintings circa art days

Inspiration Images

Cara Thayer, Louie Van Patten for inspiration of details of hands

Teil Duncan Henley figurines for color palette inspiration

Newsletter of the Week

@sun_girlxo’s newsletter on ‘grief for the living’

I believe this specific instance is when we experience this unique grief for the living—when the contradictions are too overwhelming for us to accept or peacefully incorporate into the image we’ve created of someone, making us feel like we’re stuck

We experience this grief when something happens that requires a complete reassessment of the person in question; when the only way to understand and accept who they are now is to stop clinging on to our image of who they used to be. Physically, the person is the same—psychologically, they might as well be a stranger.

grieving someone who is still alive

Thought of the Week

I’ve been thinking of spaces, the way they generate inspiration, ideas, provoke emotion, thought and consequently action. We need more lovely thought spaces in SF. Bringing people across diff disciplines in the same room = imagination and creation (kind of cool to have so many friends thinking along these same lines - thinking of M, M and T!)