The most random postcard yet.
The journaling system that changed my life, plus inspiration from random art.
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Hi fam,
I struggled to find a topic to write about this week, to the extent that I briefly questioned the purpose of Postcards from Somewhere entirely. I was going through my own little artist’s block, feeling overwhelmed by it.
Was I doing it right? Was I putting “valuable” things out there? Do people care? Are people reading?
I was so in my head that I eventually took a step back and gave myself permission to write about whatever my mind wanted. No rules, no expectations, no right, and absolutely no wrongs.
So, randomness became the topic.
Art has seen different movements related to the rejection of logic and “order.” Dada and the Beat Generation are two examples. There’s something inherently special and magical about approaching a creative life from a lens of the nonsensical and the irrational.
With this in mind, I set a tomato timer and gave myself 25 minutes of total brain dump, randomness, and freedom. No strings attached. No filter. No post-editing.
Here is the result:
I write about creativity and nature how these two go hand in hand and how nature nurtures.
How it’s been here in us.
It’s us.
So, what if going back to the source is the most intricate, beautiful choreography we can experience? Can we contemplate the beauty and ugliness of human (along with non-human) existences and how despicable, yet gorgeous this transformation can be? how powerful? how ugly and delicious?
I used to love the Beat Generation, I read Howl a million times:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix — Howl, ALLEN GINSBERG
I felt like I was a mind and soul, not destroyed but definitely lost by madness, definitely starving and called hysterical and feeling naked.
I felt seen by the randomness of the Beat Generation, the Jack Kerouacs the Allen Gingsbergs of the world.
The absolutely no-fucks-given hallucinating works of the Dadaists of the 60s.
I sometimes can’t believe that poem was written in 1955, and we’re still here grappling with the idea of imagination, of madness and starving hysterical beings looking for an angry fix.
Perhaps we have to be so lost that the pain becomes the one ticket for change. Perhaps we only know pain as love.
Perhaps the sphinx of cement that opened our skulls and ate our brains is our same brains.
Perhaps we are the mountain.
Perhaps and only perhaps we are the ones letting our imagination dry out, like the Amazon becoming a savanna.
Like the last living river of Mexico City gasping for air.
Like our mother becoming a kid again.
Like our inner child asking to play… to go.. outside.
To go outside.
How many times have you been outside today?
How’s the sky on your side of the world?
What’s a song that’s in your head lately?
How’s your coffee this morning?
How’s your heart?
Are you grieving? can we grieve together?
Can we sit and hold each other’s mud and bathe in it?
and sit with it.
and drink tea with it.
Can we hold each other tight and trust that it is in the intricacies of silence that sound can truly shine?
“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” Howl, ALLEN GINSBERG
That the imaginative, the bold, the extraordinary, the magic, take place in the most mundane and intentional of places, of moments. That the crack from which we bleed is also the crack from which we are reborn, re-incarnated, revived.
“who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus” Howl, ALLEN GINSBERG
So, if we’re (still) in a crisis of imagination, what are the systems, the rituals, the beliefs, the mechanisms of trust, beauty, serendipity, and connection with our true Nature that we need? how can we contemplate the idea that this alternative imaginative place truly exists?
I can see it, clearly.
I can smell it.
I know, I feel, I embody its existence and want to allow you, dear, reader to embody this too.
This is a welcoming letter for you to join my dance, my choreography, my decadent spectacle where we all get to build, give shape, and give birth to the existence that we desire.
Where healing and sound and source are just like a shoreless ocean, a shapeless star, an evolving rainbow, a cracked-open shell, a liberated human in co-existence with non-human systems.
An effervescent, marvelous universe where beauty reigns supreme, where love makes waves, it shakes things up.
Ripples or tsunamis.
Accidental or instigated.
Love rocks the boat, and stirs the pot.
I read somewhere that at the center of the word enchantment is the word to chant or to sing.
To be enchanted, therefore is to be in song.
So, enchanted land in one sense is land that has been sung to, honored over many many years through the repetitive ritual of song. But also a land that has had its own song listened to and sung back to it.
This was music to my ears. To be enchanted is to be in song.
How can we be in song?
To live an enchanted life, to sing to ourselves and to the land where we stand, where we were born.
How can we honor through repetitive rituals or songs?
Are we able to sing? are we willing? prepared?
Have we had our own song listened to and sung back to us?
This is the womb from which imagination and the spaces of tomorrow will be created.
Let’s get singing.
boom. 25 minutes.
So, what is the Power dadaist writing, automatic writing or brain-dumping?
Well, glad you asked. Here a list:
You give yourself permission to write without constraints. It’s a great exercise for perfectionists.
You free up space in your brain for what’s essential.
You enter a flow state by immediately getting into automatic emotional writing.
As you free up brain space, you open up to new ideas.
You start re-calibrating your brain into detaching itself from any outcome.
You start giving less fucks.
As creatives, being able to tap into this flow state is crucial. This is truly where the magic happens. I’m now open to mentoring those who feel stuck creatively and want to find clarity. Learn more about my creative breakthrough offering here.
That’s it. Have a good week, fam. Write to me, send me your thoughts, prayers, rituals, and whatever is keeping you alive these days.
Much love,
Until next time.
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