Lava, Slow and Beautiful

The rabbit hole knows something I don't

I sat down this morning to do something dull and necessary, clear out an inbox that had bloomed past a thousand messages. I used to be diligent with what I called the Friday 50, an hour every week to get it under a hundred, but somewhere in the last few years I decided that was just hustle culture wearing a to-do list, so I quit it as I was no longer a part of the productivity bros culture. The inbox grew like everything left alone grows. One message near the bottom was from a creator I didn't remember subscribing to. I opened it out of curiosity.
That was the whole mistake, or the whole gift, depending on the hour you catch me in.

The email led to zines, which I already love and have been meaning to make more of. That led to an Instagram post about storing zines in old cassette tape cases, which led to a free template, which led to more email, which led to the thought that I have two boxes of unused CD cases sitting in the studio and could make a template for those too, or use the template I already have from back in the day. Bust it out of lockdown, sitting on some long-forgotten resource files for products once made. On the same page I found Free Little Art Galleries, small installed boxes, like a Little Free Library but for art, and I fell into that for the better part of an hour. Should there be one in North Platte? Should I launch it quiet or loud? Should I build it or buy one? Is there still a World FLAG Day? Should I even do this at all? Dumb, like I need more projects. But this one is super cool. That's the trouble with saying every strange idea out loud the second it hits. 

All of that happened before pickleball, before the ruck, before the espresso even, in the first thirty minutes of a morning that started with the simple goal of deleting old email before I headed out for a ruck. I know better.
This is not a strange event for me. Ideas arrive the way lava moves, slow, glowing, and if I'm honest, a little destructive, rolling over whatever plans I had for the day and leaving something new and half formed in their place. Beautiful to watch. Also, a talisman with two very different sides, because the file where I keep these things, these days tend to be something closer to a small library, and now hold more than one lifetime could use. I know that intellectually. I still feel the tug to get to all of it, which is its own kind of math problem with no correct answer.

My fellow teachers went back to school this week. Students arrive Wednesday or Thursday. I am not walking into that building this fall, and retirement, which had been a concept for months, turned into a spotlight and a microscope aimed directly at how I spend a day. Not planning exactly. Guilt is closer to it. A quiet accusation that I am not doing enough with the time I supposedly have so much more of now, that the ideas keep arriving faster than I can ever burn through them, and that this is somehow a failing rather than just how a creative mind works when you finally give it room.

This particular morning I did not want to make anything. I wanted to do nothing, actually do nothing, not just say it while secretly organizing something in my head. That's a harder discipline than it sounds. So I went and played pickleball instead of writing. I gave myself a pat on the back for being a rebel.

Before that, though, I opened the door to ruck and it felt like opening a sauna, seventy five degrees and a hundred percent humidity, the kind of morning that makes you understand why dew point is its own number and not just a fancier word for sticky. I learned that distinction properly in the military, the difference between humidity and dew point and wet bulb, none of which changes the fact that stepping outside felt like walking into something with a pulse. I picked a new direction, no goal for time or distance, just an hour to observe. Robins first. Then a cardinal or two. Then, once the tended green yards gave way to cornfields and pasture about a half mile in, meadowlarks, who kept me company the rest of the way. An hour of thinking about nothing in particular is still one of the best uses of a body I know. Problems get solved while you are not thinking about them.

The world outside that hour is not calm. It rarely is. There is a real argument to be made that things are difficult right now, politically, socially, in whatever direction you want to look. I don't think that argument is new, though. There has never been a version of history without something on fire somewhere. What has always been available, in every one of those versions, is the choice to turn from the shadow and face the sunset, to notice the color instead of the smoke. Same trick works at sunrise, just pointed the other way. This, I practice daily as I try to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Some days are easier than others in that.

Reflecting on the week, some of this week's better hours had nothing to do with ideas at all. My youngest grandchild, soon to be a middle schooler, drew and painted next to me in the studio one afternoon, and we made some genuinely fun stuff before we ever loaded the paddle board and kayak. Then we put in for a two hour run down the river, a stop at a sandbar to swim and eat something, then back on the water.

My youngest grand daughters "Balloon Monster" WIP.

I also watched a magician on a short reel that hit my inbox, which is not usually my thing, but a performer named Rafferty Cooper made me stop scrolling. Not the tricks themselves, though the sleight of hand is its own kind of skill. What got me was the architecture of the act, the decision to move from harmonica to some other object entirely and back, the sheer creative nerve it takes to see a connection nobody else would think to build and then build it anyway. There's something familiar in that willingness to chase a connection nobody else would bother making. It's not really about the trick. It's about noticing what you might try.

Which is maybe the whole thing this week was trying to tell me. I keep treating the unfinished ideas library like a debt, like every entry is a promise I made and haven't kept. But nobody promised the FLAGs research or the CD case template or the cassette tape zine holder anything. They showed up because I was paying attention, the same way the meadowlarks showed up because I went out looking with no goal at all. Debt implies I owe something. Attention doesn't work that way. It just asks to be given, not repaid. The noticing is not the waiting room before the real work starts. Some weeks, the noticing is the work.
I still don't know if I'll build a Free Little Art Gallery. I will know by the end of today. I still have two boxes of CD cases doing nothing in the studio. The ideas are still coming, slow and glowing, headed somewhere I can't predict yet.

Good. Let them.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.
Tio

PS-Now that I am done writing this, I have to do a Free Little Art Gallery. Keep ya posted.

Finger painting and marker.