My inner critic was alive and well for much of last week, telling me that I am never going to make anything out of this life as a creative. “Just give up and be normal.” – A familiar refrain that I’m accustomed to feeling to my core. The words that I say to myself in…

For the first time in, well, ever, my hands felt compelled to illustrate without words. Just what exactly I was attempting to draw isn’t clear, but it felt good to try and I experienced a completely tranquil hour mentally that just blew by. I believe this is the visual representation of my “man in the…

I am working on some of the writing that is a paid project and it has me reviewing places where people go for a vacation experience. The website shows a woman standing on a grassy mountainside in front of a borrowed horse taking a selfie of herself and the horse, presumably to share the experience…

It’s been a year since my brother died and I am not sure I’m any closer to having sympathy. It gives me pause to think that maybe I shouldn’t continue looking. I am lucky to possess the level of awareness I have about who my brother was. The detachment from emotions surrounding him was easy…

Next week is a preview of the season at our doorstep and I look forward to it. I can already feel the to-do list growing as I think about all the things it will be nice enough to accomplish since it won’t be in the mid-80s or 90s. This is the time of year where…

Today is shaping up to be one of the hottest days of the year, if not the hottest, pushing the mercury to just a few degrees shy of 100 by the end of the day. The room I’m in has a mostly covered window that I can look out of and see that it even…

The scattered mind plagues me today and I’m finding it difficult to concentrate on much of anything. It is a reminder that I need to get back to clearing the clutter out of my head instead of just letting it accumulate like so much trash. The second after I finished that sentence my mind wandered…

It’s never enough to fulfill the nonstop desire to create. I feel an incessant, animalistic drive to continue pursuing whichever direction feels right on a day to day basis. None of these things pay me especially well in worldly ways, the ones that allow me to buy shiny things I don’t need, and maybe that’s…

I decided to indulge and picked up the Audible version of Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act and I have to say I am floored by it. I already had an idea that this legend of the music business was on another level than the rest of us but having a window into it is…

There exists a sort of organized chaos within the clutter of my mind. Most of the time I spend trying to wrangle it into submission for the sake of being a productive human being. Every once in a while, though, the patterns become clear and there is a calm in this otherwise messy space. I’ve…