Hey you.
First off: There’s five new pendants, one pair of earrings, and about 20 or so Fidget Pens and Seam Rippers/Stilettos newly listed in the shop this week. (It has been a full week over here.) Oh, also the working prototypes of my Calligraphy Nib Holders. I am not trying to downplay how much work that is. I’m just so brain-fried from DOING it that making it sound fancy is well beyond me right now, heh.
And, with that, off we go.
I shared a painting of mine on Twitter this week called Bittersweet Joy. It’s this rather large, predominantly yellow, white, and orange abstract painting, painted about a year and a half ago.
A year and a half ago feels like both yesterday and an eternity ago, but the feeling of Bittersweet Joy is very much one of right now. This week, especially, was threaded throughout with it. So many good things happened this week, and so many joyous, delightful, proud moments that I wanted so much to have someone to share that with. Not necessarily the moment itself, but just to have someone to talk to about it, to celebrate them with. Someone who understood why I was celebrating, and who wouldn’t feel a need to judge, criticize, or compete. Just someone who would celebrate with me, for me. Bittersweet edge to joy, like the inverse of a silver lining.
It’s a whole lot like the feeling when my 19 year old son walked into my room/office earlier this week and stated, point blank: “I want to talk about something.”
“Ok…” I say.
He launches into a description of a video game about pirates and sailing, and I wait, knowing the way he tells a story – details, details, details, four side stories, and then the point – and also knowing he doesn’t talk about things without them being extremely important to him. He describes the game, and its glitches, and the shortcuts a game has to take compared to how things work in real life, and… pauses.
“I keep thinking about how Steve would have liked this game.”
Ah, this spell. I know this one. So, I load my save game of Steve, and with it, the memories of how my son’s stepfather played video games with him – the video and voice memory archives with the phrases they used, the jokes they made, the little things. Then, while he tells me more about the game, I interject with how Steve probably would have responded, and how they would have teased each other, and, and, and… all those memories they might have made playing that game together. For those moments, his step father wasn’t gone, the last two years were gone, and we laughed about the memories that didn’t happen.
It’s an old magic, a magic to rival that of even Marvel superheroes: to create the memory of a future that might have happened, if. At the foundation of that magic though, is just memory, remembrance – a sort of living, breathing requiem that allows you to step into another Universe or timeline for a brief moment, and to show it to someone else. To have paid such close attention to another that you can picture them in another situation they have never been in, to know how a new joke would make them laugh seems like a magic balm for an aching heart.
This is how I love. This is the magic I do like breathing; bending time and memory. This – breathing into being what was not, remembering what has not yet been – is what it means to be an artist, a creator, a maker, an inventor, author, gardener, dreamer, programmer, designer, the list goes on.
We forget sometimes though that our experience of what we create matters too. We create for ourselves first, right?
Or do we? Do you? Or do you, too, find yourself putting others’ experience first and then struggling to stop and put yourself first? Have you ever put yourself first? Have you ever just created for yourself and no one else?
The harder question: Do you know yourself well enough to be able to find, create, or build what brings you joy? Do you pay the same attention to yourself as you would someone else you loved? Why?
I’ve been slowly learning how to over the last 13 years, and more intensely the last two years. (It is not an overnight process.) I’ve broken my own heart so many times during it. I’ve grieved losses I didn’t want to acknowledge, selves I never got a chance to be, years of missed joy and satisfaction. Yet, in remembering what was not, I am given a chance now to let what was not be part of what is. (It’s weird, but kid-in-a-candy-store exciting.)
So, you might be able to imagine my reaction when rehearsal restarted on Monday for the community choir I sing with… and the Director handed us Requiem for the Living. Requiem for the Living is the major piece for our Spring concert– it’s 40 minutes long, five movements, mostly in Latin. If you’re not familiar with Requiems, they’re typically for a memorial mass or funeral service (in remembrance of the dead) – so Requiem for the Living seems, as a friend of mine pointed out, a little ironic. In memorial of the living, in remembrance of the living? But we’re still here, what’s there to remember?
Thing is, the Latin in a Requiem? It’s a whole lot of Lord, have mercy, grant us rest, grant us peace. As our chorale director said when explaining the reasoning behind his choosing this piece: who among the living couldn’t use those things, too?
The Director is right – we all could, especially the last few years.
But some of us, I think, could also use a Requiem, a Remembrance, of ourselves – who we are, what we need, what we want. We have forgotten how much we are, in incredible, glorious, multi-faceted ways. We need a Requiem to call us back to living fully in our capacity of Now, even if now the joy is bittersweet for what we’ve lost. We are deserving of remembering ourselves.
I am, obviously, most definitely among those who have been Remembering, as well as discovering. It has been a deeply bittersweet joy, and I don’t yet have the words to explain it the way I’d like, except to say:
Our experience matters, too. Our memories matter.
The Requiem I hear in my final hours – the one only I will hear – I want it to be one I enjoy listening to when it is finally finished.
I can’t do that if I don’t know what brings me joy. Finding that out, well, that’s what they call living, it turns out.
May the notes you add this week be ones that bring you joy twice,
A. Markov
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