Addled Ramblings
The storm does not ask what you’ve made—it only asks how deeply you’ve grown.
05/08/2025
I stayed up until 4 this morning after a rigorous day with my significant other. My anxious mind wouldn’t spin down. She's much better, but a very poor patient requiring extraordinary bedside manner from her caregiver.
When I did finally drift to fitful sleep I had strange dreams of swimming with octopuses and turtles and parrots. The parrots wouldn’t stop talking and the octopuses and turtles just swam around the periphery.
🦜 🐙
Trust the direction.
Trust the direction.
The parrots kept chirping.
And I would say to them to stop and ask what direction? But couldn’t break out of the cycle.
And there was a big tree I swam into and the parrots loved it there but the others couldn’t get in. It felt cacophonous and very lonely.
—
I woke up late thinking about what a strange thing it is to be an artist. Wondering if it would not be superior to be pragmatic and good with business and the growing of wealth. Practiced at the art of the practical instead of just being really good at staring out windows all day.
Doubts, I guess.
I am an artist. And all that entails.
There is the myth of the artist and there is the reality.
The romanticism of the creative mind is it basks in the warm glow of new ideas and exciting concepts. That every setback is a new opportunity for exploration and adventure. Seeing things from unique points of view and having desire and passion to capture and record those in image, song or prose.
The reality is less thrilling. Uncertainly haunts the creative mind. Second guessing decisions made from intuition instead of logic. An inability to make pragmatic decisions and when we do, there is fear we may have skipped an opportunity for something superior, though less reasonable.
We cannot help but long to burn in the fires of creativity even though we know it consumes us instead of making us more.
Our grabbing hands (physical and metaphoric) grab all they can. Snatch at every shiny thing and idea in the hopes that it will be the critical component to a masterpiece or our magnum opus. Believing that more is the answer to happiness. This contrasts with Thoreau's mentality that a man's wealth is measured in the things he can afford to leave alone.
But artists do this even knowing great art is about not what we put in, but about what we leave out. The quiet between the notes. The negative space. The missing pigment.
'And she became the missing pieces that gave me shape. The absent parts no one noticed unless they stopped and studied my silhouette.
And then they would say, “Oh, yes! See how fine that contour and edge are! Defined wonderfully by the part of him not there.”
Only they don’t realize what they are describing is the empty place where my heart once was. Its absence making me a tragic masterpiece.'
I am become a vessel of honor only through loss.
Maybe that’s what the parrots meant.
—
I read a strong heart can endure if it has roots deep enough to hold it fast in the face of the winds of life.
I am reminded of the devastated living pillars in the lower ninth ward after Katrina. Denuded and battered, broken limbs and stripped bark… some didn’t survive… but today, twenty years later, most look healthier than ever. You can’t tell they ever suffered a setback.
They are larger and more mature because of the intensities of storms they suffer.
But, in the moment, when the winds howl and the rain lashes, all we can do is trust we have grown robustly enough to endure.
The question is: do those roots anchor us in the past? Unable to move forward and find new horizons? The answer, I think my friend, is blowing in the wind.
Our ideas and action of life reaching for the warm light of the face of God gives us purpose, strength and growth. Stretching to the sky is our journey, our purpose. And in doing so, we find perfection.
The leaves and pollen and seeds of who we are travel in ways we cannot conceive. It is our ideas, our smiles and our love that do the real work of moving us through time and space while our roots keep us standing and growing strong in the soil of Jehovahs love.
This is true whether we are poet or politician, painter or pilot, musician or monk— at the end of it all, we come to the same conclusion. I suppose it’s all just a matter of the style of our walk.
And maybe that’s what the octopodes were trying to sign to me. That it’s important to be flexible, adapt and overcome. Accept that life has limits and that’s okay.
As long as we can love and we do so, we have conquered the world.
Love always,
Charlie
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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