I am ambitious when giving up...
While staring at a photo I had taped to my wall
of Georgia O’Keeffe sitting in the back of a truck
in the desert looking through a piece of swiss cheese,
I was thinking a lot about the way she used the holes
in sun-bleached animal bones to contextualize the vastness of the sky
as a negative space in her paintings–
death as the thing that grounds us against the gauzy, open space of living.
Later, I found this 1976 quote from her:
‘I was the sort of child that ate around the hole in the doughnut,
saving the hole for the last and best.
So, probably—not having changed much—
when I started painting the pelvis bones
I was most interested in the holes in the bones—
what I saw through them—
particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun
against the sky as one is apt to do
when one seems to have more sky than earth in one’s world.'
Tomorrow I’ll return to writing my book.
seriously but also gently.
10+ years of stops and starts,
and now this year to submit
and worst case, next year
I publish the damn thing myself.
Scrolling IG recently, I stopped
on Adrienne Maree Brown’s account,
one of the bright spots of my experience on the app.
In her meme roundup she shared a photo of the saying:
IF WE WANT THE REWARDS OF BEING LOVED
WE HAVE TO SUBMIT TO THE MORTIFYING ORDEAL
OF BEING KNOWN. (originally from this essay)
Oof.
Books take a long time to write
aaaand I’ve been navigating so much fear around the possibility
of sharing this work with the world & being known so intimately.
More specifically, of being seen
as not flawed enough or too flawed.