Documenting time

Current read/audiobook: Lights On

Fun with Acrylic Inks and Watercolour Paints. Little abstract flowers painted this Winter

Sometimes, creating is the only way I feel like myself, knowing how to just… be, and this is about that.

Every time I sit down to paint, my blood slows. I sit within the vessel of myself and stare out at the paper before me, afraid.

I’ve been listening to an audio documentary called Lights On. It’s about consciousness, a thing that happens from within. My brain bends when I listen to it. I rewind it a lot. I often think about thinking, watch myself watching, and wonder what’s happening. It turns out consciousness is a topic of hot debate, not about whether it’s real, but what it actually is.

What do you think?

Creating art, taking photos, writing down thoughts and feelings, and telling a story are all ways we try to make meaning. And sometimes, we’re simply trying to be, and struggling to do even that.

Some propose that if we have the elements required to spark life, then we also have what’s needed for consciousness: a chair, a rock, a spoon.

Take a bunch of molecules under the right circumstances and boom, consciousness.

We don’t know how. But the idea is that everything we need is already present. In everything. In anything.

It’s no wonder we so often ask why.

Maybe it’s better not to worry too much about the why.

When I paint or when I’m lost in the flow of making something, I’m not just documenting time. I’m experiencing it from within. I’m giving up control and learning more about what it means to be conscious.

Here is the audio documentary Lights On.

Maybe we don’t become conscious by creating. Maybe we remember that we already are. Perhaps creativity is the moment when we stop trying to understand consciousness and start living it.

Thoughts?