Pervette | nulla dies sine linea

You practice bibliomancy daily.

It’s usually in the middle of the day that you pick up a book that calls to you. You open it up and read what it has to say..

Is it just you or is everything that you’re reading is reading your mind?

You write in the margins.

Your thoughts, your memories, your reflections..

You read and read until you feel inspired to write..

You write and write until your book is all filled up..

Remember how you wanted to be an art major in college, but to appease your mom, who wanted you to be more “practical,” you decided to be a psych major instead..

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever her kind of work may be, she becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. She becomes interesting to other people. She disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and she opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, she opens it, shows there are still more pages possible.¹

So you made a promise to yourself: You’ll major in Psychology. But you will make everything else your art. You’ll make your life your art.

You want to explore the human psyche. To you, this is what it means to go deep. In college and grad school, you learned about how the mind works through books, theories and the scientific method. But something was missing. Because not all your questions were answered. There are still things in the inner world that are yet to be uncovered. The unconscious fantasies, the a-ha moments, the unlocking of one’s highest potential. How do you explore that realm?

This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. ²

Your art is trying to find a way to share your inner world, your unconscious, your fantasies, your a-ha moments with the world around you. The trick to it is to do it with everything you got, your wit and your tits. And all of your he(art).

At the age of eighteen, you had a realization that you’re going to write a book in your lifetime. Leave something behind. Make meaning from your life. That’s the meaning of life. But before you can sit down and write, you have to live a meaningful life. Collect experiences, make interesting choices and follow your inner compass aka your fantasies. It’s only then will you will live the story that you want to tell.

My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole..

What we are to our inward vision can only be expressed by way of myth..

Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my fortieth year, to tell you my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only “tell stories.” Whether or not the stories are “true” is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.³

From that point of realization onward, you’ve been following your curiosity. Making curious choices. Oftentimes your life seems like a mystery. You are a riddle to many, including yourself. You began to see that to truly solve it is to dissolve the ego that wants to draw conclusions and control what comes next. All you can really do to “know” yourself is to quiet the judging voices and listen closely to your heart’s desire and trust your intuition. Trust the surprises. Trust all the choices that you made.⁴ Trust all the time it takes to find your voice. Trust that when you are ready to put your voice out there. It will be heard by those who are open and curious, just like you. Trust that this is how you find yourself. Trust that this is how you find true love, connection and community. Trust that thiis is how you find everything that you’re looking for.

Learn from your joy. Learn from your pain. It’s in the heights of ecstasy and depths of suffering can you see the fuller range of how you feel and who you are in the patterns of your life. The rhythm that drives the rise and fall of a good beat can be heard more clearly when you don’t overthink but feel your way. The melody of synchronicities flow more fluidly when you don’t judge but dance with your shadow and see how light always comes through when you look for it in your darkest hours.

We are in an age when people think they should have opinions about everything, and they rush past the facts to ge there, pass judgment without basis, and then spread the judgment ass fact when the facts have never been uncovered or sifted through or verified.

A lot of times you can’t reach a firm conclusion from an action or connection or statement or association, and you shouldn’t try.

We don’t need to have opinions about everything, and every opinion we do have needs to be on a solid foundation of fact. “I don’t know” is a really good position to take, and it’s often the most honest and accurate one available.

And we need to recognize the difference between an opinion and a fact, an inkling (or prejudice) and a settled truth.

One thing that I recognize more and more is that public falsehoods are not something to be foisted in us; they are something we must be active collaborators with, by accepting and repeating the unchecked lie, rumor, over interpretation.

Or we can be their enemy, refusing to accept and repeat unless we know, and accepting that often we do not know.⁵