100

Dearest Ones,

Welcome to Daily Breath number 100. The simple openness of two zeroes together invites a moment to pause and reflect. Those two zeroes — they are a bit like eyes looking over the past weeks and gathering up impressions of what has happened here.

A while back, I was walking in the park with my Beloved, and we had a conversation about process and product and how to teach a creative art in the absence of product. How to teach the violin, for example, with no recital looming in the far distance. How to teach acting in a pandemic, where you play only to each other and an empty theater. How to teach writing in the absence of any thought of publication.

It was in this conversation that I realized what exactly it is that I am doing here. This little experiment I started on a whim, almost without thought — there is a deeper purpose behind it all.

The purpose, Dear Ones, is process.

I am in love with the process of writing, and I want more people to find that love. To paraphrase something Joyce Carol Oates said, I love how words go. If no one ever takes in these Daily Breaths, and the mailing list never grows, I will still want to play in this space.

The process is the point.

Of course I welcome new readers, and may even pursue more “official” modes of publication — but only insofar as the deep love for the alchemy of turning sensory input, body sensation, and emotion into language stays with me. The instant the product starts to devour my love for the process, I am out. (For a while, that is. I will always find my way back to words.)

This is my rambling Artist’s Statement for this newsletter, 100 editions in. This is a space that is all about process and play. This is about loving how words go and not being afraid to make weird noises or odd choices. My hope is that this little dose of process calls forth the part of you that remembers what creativity really is — play.

And so tomorrow, we get back to the important stuff. We get back to process and play. I want to look back over what I have written so far, and maybe re-work some of the poems to show what happens in the next parts of my process. I have some ideas about which poems I want to play with — and I want to hear your ideas too.

Thank you for being here.

With love,

R