This was originally sent as a newsletter for Of Pens & Paintbrushes. If you’d like to get this directly in your inbox, you can sign up here, at the Newsletter sign up page.
First off: I finished my first Bespoke Fountain pen this last week. A bespoke pen is something of an accomplishment for a pen maker – it’s the synthesis of engineering, material, tool, and skill mastery, with a lot of artistry thrown in for for good measure – all in a single item. It’s the accomplishment of a goal that’s been two years in the making – literally, pun intended. It’s a graduation of a sorts.
I’m celebrating by making more of them. The first one is already spoken for, but I have already started my next 10 or so. Hopefully most of these surivive the process.
I also FINALLY have something to show for six months of deeply re-working the soap business…I don’t know, vibe? It’s not really branding so much as aesthetic and feel, but this kind of thing is slow when it’s just one person doing it all. Still, the new soaps (the Glow Ups) are kinda adorable, and I love them. Worth the work, even if it was hard not having anything to show for it for half a year.
And off we go.
My faith is rooted in paradoxes. Nothing is true. The more I empty myself, the more of myself I discover. The less I grasp, the more I am trusted to hold.
They are very, very difficult for me to explain. They’re more of a knowing that sunk into my bones over time than something I read in a book and learned. I use the metaphor of sinking into your bones as a kind of knowing, almost indescribable, for a reason – in the same way you know your skeleton is there supporting everything, but not something you are necessarily aware of in the same way you are your skin or your heartbeat, that’s how you know this thing. When something sinks into your bones, it is deeper than simply knowing the information. You might even take for granted that you know it, like the operating system your device runs on.
My bones are made of different knowings than yours, and there is exactly nothing wrong with that. In the same way my brain connections would map differently than yours, our understanding of how things are will be different, and for much the same reasons: we are different.
Our lives, needs, dreams, goals, ways of thinking – they’re all different. We can never fully understand each other’s bones. We can try, we can write poetry and create art and search for every metaphor possible, but in the end, it is simply a close approximation of each others’ experience.
That is one of the most inspiring and heart-breaking aspects of humanity, to me. Here we are, reaching out in every possible way we know how, in spite of the impossibility of it all – and from our striving for understanding and connection come our most beautiful works, our deepest wounds, our greatest traumas, and when denied, often the roots of some of our greatest atrocities against each other.
Here, in that aching place where we are most deeply aware of our differences, we are, paradoxically, the same.
A.Markov
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This was originally sent as a newsletter for Of Pens & Paintbrushes. If you’d like to get this directly in your inbox, you can sign up here, at the Newsletter sign up page.