Foundation
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Before. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
“Every act of preservation is an act of creation.” — Ethan Hawke as Rev. Ernst Toller, in First Reformed
What is your foundation?
It’s a new year, and I’ve been thinking about what I hope to see happen. The candidates are numerous: I’m feeling serious momentum in writing my novel; maybe (or maybe not) it’s like when you know, from a cryptic stirring in the air, that a symphony is about to build toward its finale. In just over six months I’m set to compete in an Ironman triathlon in upstate New York, an undertaking that very recently would have felt as plausible as landing on Mars or executing the menu at Le Bernardin. In two weeks I’ll start teaching yoga for the first time (if you’re in New York and would like to come, please give a shout).
My boyfriend just started moving into the country house he will shape into a retreat for other creative people, and the two of us will be ferrying back and forth, between that place and my apartment in Brooklyn, a pair of Tennessee-born baby chihuahuas that James’s mom rescued after the sudden death of their owner. (Their names are Luke and Leia; and the status of our multi-mammal household is that so far neither cat nor dog blood has been drawn.) I hope that we somehow pass through an election without serious upheaval. I hope that conscience and reason prevail in the development of artificial intelligence. I hope that everybody holds on to their health, or regains it.
But most of all I hope not for any specific outcome but for the ability to keep at the same practices—whether I am good at them, whether mastery will ever be within reach, whether they can make me any money, whether I know where they’re leading, or not—that carried me through this year, and the one before, after their long respective accumulations born of a slow and curious revealing, reinforced now and then by crisis. These things are my foundation, which goes where I go (or, I follow it). Their steadiness has been revelatory, because that which could stand with them over time has endured and that which couldn’t hasn’t and that which feeds them has joined us.
Movement, writing, connecting to and caring for loved ones, and tending to my spirit: I have loved the triumphs these things have led to, their dividends, and know they will lead to others. But those achievements are brief stops on a highway whose destination, if one exists, is inscrutable. That feeling you get when you stop in to say hello but you know you’ve got to get going again—what sweetness there is in returning to the road and seeing the sun lower in the sky but still so far from setting, and the earth stretched out before you, and nothing final.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.