A few days ago, a friend asked me where my strengths, my creative strengths, the way I make and see and process, come from. I struggled to just acknowledge her compliment—that I have strong creative juices. I’m still working on acknowledgment, acceptance.
We had been talking about family—masked in her kitchen, the fancy sophisticated air circulator cleansing the room, working to save us from each other. She had said we could even prop the door open for fresh, clean Maine air. I have not seen her since probably last Christmas, although I have walked often by her house.
I am careful and closed off and alone in my apartment, and have been now for nine months—a baby’s worth of time. A whole life nourished and built, lungs and circulatory system, the toes, skin, personhood. There are people making babies in theses pandemic times. I am, however, long past baby building.
I believe she was thinking I could name where I got the words, the ability to craft them into something, the desire to explore fiber and paint, scraps of chipped iron from the railroad bed, the discards of the everyday, and the opening through which the world arrives in my heart. I am a logical thinker in many ways—often too logical—but I make in a completely different way, showing up and moving. It took me a long time to trust that unknowingness and to be okay with the fact that I couldn’t see a way for it to support me, that I would always have to be looking for an income stream, that I’d best drop in motion so I wouldn’t be a burden to anyone.
Families are such interesting stories we live, and they are definitely our roots, the foundation. No doubt. Good, bad, supportive, rejective, loving or distant, they are the foundation.
Who was that in my parentage—the outside-the-boxer? My mom was a small-town New England girl, daughter of immigrants, come to the big city. My dad, an immigrant, arrived half grown with no English, no language for America, the land of the free and the home of the brave into which he wanted to slip unnoticed. For a time, he changed his name from Jakimides to Jackson. Writing this, typing this sentence, is the first time I’ve realized that he had no accent despite arriving late and having a mother who never spoke English, even decades after she moved here, in a time when there was no ESL programming.
My brother was incredibly creative. As a teen, he made these beautiful boxes, from exotic and local woods, covers with some kind of pearl inlay, lined with meticulously fitted velvet, sometimes felt. The drawing and painting. Photographs. Guitar playing. He was a wonder. Neither one of us ever had lessons in the whatevers—including him at the beginnings of IT and coding.
I will sit with this more but I suspect we are all interweavings of so many of our people over time, and that some of us just pop through with little obvious thread to a direct source.
What I now know to wish for everyone is that you follow your leanings, that you listen to the voice in you that drives you—not try to fit in or to see how to make it conform to the given vision of the time. I didn’t know how to just accept that what I wanted to make didn’t need to fit/form/be perceived as anything other than my heart spilling out into the universe contributing its essence, no matter how it was received at the time. I didn’t think I was all that, that I could make art or write. I knew I couldn’t sing—although I have been told that’s not quite right either.
That’s how we improve the world we live in, how it moves closer to unified differences in love with waking up to each new day and to/with/for each new person we meet.
May your light shine.
