I Have Created This Space For You

It's spring break. My kids are home. It is raining and cold. Squatting on the corner of the couch I'm updating my artist portfolio as a promise to a future version of myself.

The illicit gymnasium in the room over my head thunders with the floor routines of unpracticed but ambitious athletes. Feet, hot with cabin fever, hammer their misspent energy into the plaster ceiling over my head like the rain pelting down outside.

There is a crack in the plaster. It's been there since we moved in, but I swear it’s growing. With morbid curiosity I watch and wonder how long it will take to come down if I just let them play. They are just kids. They need to play.

My phone buzzes. It's the Democratic party. They want me to prove that I'm not a secret Republican. They want me to rush them five dollars. Or it's scammers. Or A.I. I am not sure what the difference is anymore. I look up at the crack. Did it always have that little curve at the tip?

I look down in my hand again. There is a dog on drugs. I don't remember opening Instagram, but here I am. This dog, home early from surgery, high as a kite. It looks calm. I am calm. Slow breathing. Sitting still. Away from myself, and the crack, and the noise, and the art I am supposed to be explaining to.... someone. Customers. Collectors?

I get up. Into the kitchen I take my distracted hands and busy them with mixing a protein drink. I don't need protein, but it says it's chocolate flavored and it gives my insouciant hands something to do. It tastes like the memory of chocolate seen through a haze of drywall dust.

The couch croaks an ominous croak as I fold my protein laced musculature under my the purring base of my laptop. I stare at the screen. The screen stares back like its patiently hosting a failed job interview.

I made this art. I had a reason. I felt something when I made it. Of all the infinite possibilities of marks, colors, moods, textures, and compositions I chose these to speak my truth to the world. It felt so right and important when I made it.

Trying to find those reasons again, fumbling around my dark interior, my hands find nothing but old coats and to do lists. I am hollowed out.

I have plastered the ceiling with my patience. I've sold my attention for a hit of ersatz serenity. I've left my faith and attention in the collection box. I've sustained myself with saccharine near food. I've been extracted, spent, consumed, and combusted. Every last drop of value milked. And I'm looking at this screen trying to fill it with something important and true and I have nothing left.

So I start by describing what I've made.

This is a sheet of paper, not empty, but filled with space. Space that hasn't been optimized or generated. In a world filled with noise, and lights, and signals, this space is expansive and filled with quiet. If you look closely you might see brush strokes, bubbles, eddies, estuaries, and escarpments. I've put them there for you to find if you invest in looking closely enough.

In the center is a leaf. In this leaf there is the hand of God, or the forces of nature and chaos, all the pressures of life that allowed this leaf to be formed and that this leaf had to overcome to exist and then fall. It's veins are a map of all city streets, and the scrawled genetic code that's been handed down from bud to seed since my grandfather's grandfathers stood under their ancestors and knew what quiet and space really was.

I found this leaf on the side of the road. Passed over by hundreds, if not thousands, of uncaring eyes. This unimportant, everyday, side of the road leaf contains an ever unfurling fount of awe and beauty if you're just willing to stand and look at it. It's free. They are everywhere, these leaves.

The amount of coincidence and chance that had to come together for you to stand here and look at this leaf. The cohesion of galactic dust, the raw chance of a single spermatozoa reaching an egg, muscles stretching and coiling along optic nerves that grew in just the right way to let your eyes shift and focus and drink in the atom thin edges where leaf shape ends and not leaf shape begins. It's all so amazing that my heart climbs up my throat and paints the edges of my eyes warm and wet.

I have created this space for you. This space in time, in the noise, the ever extracting routine that machines away all things of you that are valuable. It is not paper, or color, or leaf, but a way of seeing that I am trying to give to you. Something of value given back, that can't be measured or optimized. Something that can be taken out in quiet places and savored without limit. Even when it is raining outside and the ceiling grows older with anxious cracks.