This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Poco adagio. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Time outdoors has taught me that one of the best things that can happen to you is to be surprised down a new path. Such moments, literal and figurative, make up a counterweight to the heft and steadiness of habit, and over time they’ve nudged the course of my routine so often that they’re now its authors; that is, I am the ways that I’ve departed from who I was.
In my life, Southern Utah originated the new path. My mom and brother and sister and I—or sometimes the teenagers from church—would drive down from Salt Lake to go camping in bulbous, arching, color-saturated landscapes so fractal and desolate that from the stance of a city-dweller in the Instagram age they feel like fabrications. Hiking in that desert stillness, which even silent still buzzed somehow like a high-transmission power line, you’d stray a bit from the faintly marked trail and find yourself looking out on multiple horizons of earth and sky stacked like Play-Doh under a wide-angle lens. Dimensions misbehaved, so you were always much higher up or lower down than you had been a foot earlier, and whatever lay on the floor of the deep canyon below you foreshortened itself to arm’s length. I remember hiking down a river, for long portions ankle deep, and ending the day in a collection of boulders and pools that felt like the gods had been in the mood for a water park. It was a double dislocation, perceiving an alternate reality and yet knowing from touch and scent that it was, if anything, realer than what you were used to.
I’m thinking about new paths this week because I started down one about a year ago, when I met James, who is now my boyfriend but was then an Instagram contact of hazy provenance. In a summer evening my carefully assembled beliefs about what I did and didn’t desire from human relationships—beliefs birthed, as beliefs are, in both agency and lack—began their slow process of deference to something else.
That process continues, but I can say this with increased conviction: Embodiment and the creative acts it gives rise to are not abstract or solitary pursuits, or not only. Creative work is important because, and only because, of human relationship. Its whole meaning is in that light.
I’ve been reading to James from Gilead, by Marilynn Robinson. Her character John Ames writes:
In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.
I love this passage, and it resonates with me deeply. But even if the spaces between us are intraversable—an effect amplified in Ames’ preacherly world, perhaps, by people’s inheritance from their maker of an isolating divinity—they do something other than just nullify our attempts to traverse them. Our efforts flash against the darkness, revealing some of its edges, which may lie askance from where we predicted, so that what we thought was a gap is actually part of us and even vice versa; and what seemed to be distant is all tangled up in our body’s own magnetics. Mapping all this is itself a creative act. Some new paths, though creased at first with terrors, lead further home than we’d thought to imagine.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram or Threads, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.