thanks for making the waiting season sweet
you don't write a song, you receive it
"The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest." —Simone Weil
Sales is actually much like research or design or drumming like Miles Teller in Whiplash, it's quite a generative process.
This I realize while watching an avant-garde trio perform in Brooklyn last week. i'm sorry you flew in from Berlin just for this chick in the front row to pull out her phone, type in SALES GENERATING PROCESS the words that came to mind as a result of trying to listen to what is either cacophony or a precise, practiced interrogation of sound and movement.
Observation is a type of creation too, dwelling in a place that becomes something new by virtue of how you listen to it.
I've been observing lots but not been creating much art, given sales* is a generative process. Given it already demands the capacity to dream. Uninterested in putting my brain on double dreaming duty; the side effects are usually not great.
(*sales meaning personal biz dev and finance and pivot tables and publishing and filming and community building and configuring the lifestyle to support, e.g. Gym Tan Sleep Laundry)
In reality I'm just not ready for art right now. Two passages struck me from philosopher Simone Weil's Waiting for God:
"In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying it we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread. It goes on crying just the same."
"This waiting for goodness and truth is, however, something more intense than any searching."
And so, a thank you to Secret Granola Club members...
The miracle that we exist is not lost on me.
I've been writing a personal newsletter for around 8 years now, before it was normal or cool. I turned on paid subscriptions maybe a few years ago and y'all have been a tight, steady group. Attrition is low so there's longevity to my reader relationships. (I used to wonder about doing more to grow, but the size probably reveals something about my writing; how small preserves intimacy.)