Seek out what magnifies your spirit.

Patti Smith talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

(Maria Popova)

Having a first draft mentality is being unafraid to put something down on paper, even if it’s a skeleton of what a finished-product should be. Iterating from the past and changing it until you get somewhere exquisite. Being open to a little play and experimentation. Listening closely to the deepest part of your heart and what sound it makes when something profound emerges. Doing things because you believe they matter, even if there’s no proof yet that they do.

So build a playroom, a darkroom, a door, a vessel, a dam to finally channel the infinite spectrum of pain and possibility. Something profound is coming through. You just have to find the right frequency.

“How many thousands have I spent on perfume and alcohol, cigarettes and Turkish baths, disappointing trips and third-class movies; how many months in silent bars or parks, expecting, in a chair with a book not reading, or waiting in line, waiting in line? Who will tell me it’s a loss when I know life must be for pleasure? The parks were balanced by museums, the baths by oceans, bars by composition, and the dreaming chair by books finished. Nothing is waste that makes a memory.”

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

| Anais Nin

We are all ‘en mal d’archive’: in need of archives … [we] burn with a passion never to cease searching for the archive right where it slips away … [we] have a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return of the most archaic place of absolute beginning.15