you are profoundly generous

becoming generous artists

i am writing this in one take to ensure it reaches you. may it reach you.

you must take seriously the fact of your inherent generosity.

you must avoid the temptation to downplay yourself — to say of your speaking that you ramble or your writing that you’re a bad editor or your poetry that it is not that good.

what the artist intends to transmit through the art is not always what is received. this is by design. you live within your consciousness, so there are aspects of how you experience the world, reality, language, beauty — that escape beyond your awareness.

when you offer your he(art), you think you know what you are giving. this is a kind of hubris.

of your art you may ask — what’s the point of this essay? this Substack, when there are so many Substacks; this podcast, when there are so many podcasts, this YouTube video when there are… the audacity underlying this question is unfortunately the wrong kind —

it presumes you could ever fully know the answer.

i do not know what the point of this transmission is. I cannot possibly know. it lies somewhere beyond me, closer to the moon than my ability to wrap language around it.

what’s the point of the sand? of leaves? of life itself?

there are many potential responses to this question — and all fail to fully capture the profound mystery and magic that oozes out of every crevice of existence, including what you make, and what makes you.

when i say that you need to take your inherent generosity seriously, i mean that it is no insignificance that the universe occurs to you precisely as it does. it is a ridiculous, baffling confluence of staggering possibilities that you should be here at all, all thirty plus TRILLION cells of you, let alone that your hereness can be given language to in the precise way that only you can.

or even that many people can, because our worth does not actually stem from our uniqueness, just ask the water droplets.

as you know already given our shared intimacy with the topic, i am speaking to myself. i am speaking to my own stories of what makes me worthy of thinking myself a writer, a thinker, a philosopher, whatever it may be. with writing specifically, all these imposed standards and stories limit my expression.

but i am quite literally going to die. and then who will type these words exactly as i am typing them, keep the words that i have kept, feel the world as I have felt?

and the water droplets know, like the grain of sand and the beehive knows — our value does not come from our uniqueness but our togetherness, what we allow to connect in the cosmos. more leaves create more surface area for connection — with each other, the sun, the complexity of shadows, the breath of air, the feeding of insects, life itself.

there are places you can reach within the collective consciousness that may be elsewhere unreachable.

who will embody and express the connections that you are specifically here to? your connection to your language, your culture, your identities, your spiritual understanding — connection is what, ironically, makes us unique, the way we specifically connect varied aspects of reality in an irreplaceable way.

it is a tragedy, to expect excellence of yourself in theory yet commit yourself only to silence in practice. it betrays the inherent generosity of your spirit. it is not kind. it is not communal, to keep your poems and music and sketches to yourself — not because of an intimacy you hold with them, but out of fear and unworthiness.

systemic fears, systemic unworthiness. how do we end them? there are many answers that i will not pretend to have, but i do know at least one of them is — we create through them. not through as in despite but through as in medium. if earth without oppression exists, we must have co-created that new earth.

specifically, you must have chosen to listen to your inner artist and visionary more than your inner critic and judge. and how we fear our own inner judge, and the outer judge of the world. how it torments us terribly.

what heartbreak, to be trapped by each other in stead of freed! one of the ways we feel trapped is the fear of judgment, of being embarrassing, or unacceptable in some fundamental way.

consider the difference between being seen-as and being seen-with.

most of us have seen-as fears. we’re afraid of being seen-as not good enough, not smart or brilliant or beautiful enough. we fear being seen-as unoriginal, failing, trying, succeeding, even.

but oh the beauty, the humanity, the wonders of being seen-with.

Being seen-with compassion. being seen-with delight, joy, awe, gratitude.

we are waiting to see with you, not to look at you. you are the point and also, in so many ways and to great relief, not the point at all.

bring us up right next to you with your finger pointed out to the world, and show us what you see. let our eyes travel with you to what holds yours.

and please, in honor and reverence of life itself and you as it, don’t ever underestimate how profoundly, life-changingly generous that sight is.