Music

... is an extremely important part of my creative process. A long time ago - before the defining events of my childhood transpired - music was my truest, and best-loved, medium of expression. And even though I have a tenuous relationship with it today, I still often turn to it in my most vulnerable moments - using it to process sub- or unconscious thoughts, which might feel too strange or complex or fleeting for language.

Recently, I've been listening to this song by Samantha Crain on loop, while writing. Or, to be more precise: I've been watching a video recording that I took of myself, singing and playing this song on the guitar. Watching this video, over and over again, is slowly helping me to feel something new: a desire to look for beauty, and not potential for correction, at the forefront of my past creative actions. It's helping me to feel strengthened for the task that lies ahead - of re-looking at old work (and the old selves who produced it) again, without my inner voice of self-criticism firing up.

I could say more about this, but I don't feel like it. Here are the lyrics for the song instead - the song is in Choctaw, so these lyrics are a translation:

When we remain, we will not be like the beautiful bones of a forgotten city. When we remain, we will be the flowers and the trees and the vines that overcome the forgotten city. We have woven ourselves into the cloth of the earth. We have mixed our breath into the expanding sky.

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