Hard to Find

It’s interesting to me that the things that I love the most - the absolute most - are all things I’m well over a decade into loving. I can probably count on one hand the number of newer things that I love that hard. Now part of this might be that I’m a decade past being young and not knowing what I liked and really being opened to exploring and finding new things and seeing if I liked them, but I suspect that a certain amount of this lack of finding new things to really love - and I mean really deeply love - has to do with the fact that any new thing that I discover now that catches my interest is one google search away from an overwhelm of information. Type the noun into the search bar, hit enter, and bang! An instagram page, a handful of other socials, a website, four different ways of purchasing a product and possibly even a wikipedia entry about the person, place or thing. Not that I needed all of these links - almost every one would be carefully & meticulously curated to lead you to all the others, perfectly optimized to provide as much information as possible in the hopes that you fall down the funnel by sheer virtue of clicking through the interwoven web of links to other bits of information about the thing. Easy. Much of the information ever generated about the thing accumulated painlessly and nearly instantly.

I get it. It makes perfect sense to optimize this way. It even falls into my more-often-than-not believed mantra that “more information is always better”.  But I kinda miss the slow, growing tension of thinking about the thing over time. Of hearing the song again on the radio, or on spotify (before it got so good at giving you what you wanted), and not catching the artist’s name yet again. Of a line of prose stuck in your head, repeating itself over and over again until it was almost a chant. Of scouring the newest issue of a magazine for more information on an artist you had just found out about, and desperately wanted to see more paintings by. Getting the next book on the weekly trip to the library. Doing a google search and coming up blank, or mostly blank. Wracking your brain trying to think of another angle of exploration that would yield new knowledge of the thing. Every little new piece of information on the thing being added to all the other scraps in your head already to attempt to see a bigger piece of the picture that was the thing you were learning to love.

I wonder if this may be the way we humans grow to love things (or at least how I do). In bits and pieces, a little at a time. Getting new parts of the puzzle that helped grow our mental model of the thing. Balancing good and bad things learned, slowly building a picture of the thing and growing comfortable with it. All the blank spaces -  the unknowns - were just as important. It allowed you to project onto the thing. To put some of yourself into the thing. To feel like you had an ownership of the thing.

I love even thinking about this process. The fascination, the motivation. Hell, the sometimes downright obsession about the thing. It makes me want to fall in love with a thing again. But I am uncertain how to go about doing that anymore. As well, if I am to fall in love again, I’d like it to happen naturally.

This all sort of brings me to the sort of half-point that I had when I started writing this. If my work is any good - good enough to attract attention - I want that sort of relationship. The slowly-fell-into-love with their work relationship that I have with some of my favorite things in the entire world. I don’t want a shallow, curated intentionally inter-connected web presence that makes it easy to discover me, learn all there is about my work in 5 minutes, make a value judgement, good or bad, and forget about me and my work five minutes later sort of relationship. I would like to connect with people slowly, on a more permanent level where they get to appreciate the evolution of my stuff, to see it in its whole context, bit by bit. And I have this thesis that that sort of thing requires being somewhat hard to find. Or at least not having my stuff super intentionally connected together. So if you’re reading this, I guess welcome in whatever capacity you’re here. I hope the things I make here are enough to inspire you to keep looking for me. To get to know my work better. And maybe, eventually, to fall in love with my stuff. If that’s even possible anymore. 

And if you’d like to not work sooo very hard for my work as I make it, please feel free to sign up for this newsletter. You’ll get an email every time I have some new work to share. It’ll come a little bit at a time - with enough time in between for the work to resonate or be forgotten, and allow you to absorb or discard the work. My goal is for the emails to be a small spot of light and joy and love in an otherwise dark sea of email asking things of you. A gift  of light and color and wonder in the world we live in.