Wednesday, July 24, 2024 - Creation as Meditation

Collages, guitars, and the redemptive power of creativity

Guitar Winner

If you somehow haven’t heard, the Candy Macabre guitar has been awarded to a very fortunate album-purchaser.

A screenshot of my repost of the winner’s post; there’s one guitar—it only looks like there are two because of photo trickery.

Fear not, however, those of you who did not win. I’m deep into my next guitar build. This one is for me, though. I posted about it, and I’ll do some process essays too. Progress pic:

More to come.

Creative Practice

I had a revelation this week. Like most of my revelations, it’s the kind of thing that barely makes sense to anyone else and certainly doesn’t seem significant, but such are my personal epiphanies. I’ve been in therapy off and on for more than two decades. It’s starting to work, a little. A musician and guru-type I really respect, Krishna Das, often recounts that after decades of spiritual practice, the big sign of progress in his life is that he “mopes around less.” He’s being customarily self-deprecating and understated, but until pretty recently even that kind of improvement seemed like too much to hope for. I was committed to hanging in for the duration, but it was feeling like a slow, painful crawl to the grave, as one of my favorite brother-in-law’s dad’s puts it.

There’s more to be written about all the therapies I’ve engaged in and all the meditation work: DBT, CBT, “regular” talk therapy, self-compassion, mindfulness-based stress reduction, IFS, existential, Jungian, inner-child work, etc. I put in a lot of work over a lot of years, and things were survivable, but they weren’t good.¹

I’m getting a little tangled up here because there are several points that I want to go on long asides to make—taking those kind of asides being more or less my thing stylistically. But for once I want to skip all that in favor of asserting the main point directly:

Creative practice = meditative practice

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