The Fourth Secret-Going Deeper into our Mythic Check In

An exploration of discipline, systems, and the overuse of the word "secret"

I laughed at myself recently when I realized my first three posts in substack involved the word “secret”, which I only discovered after the fact.

I have a weird aversion to repeating words too much and at first I cringed.

But then I kind of looked again and figured I should really dig into that, as its kind of important since my subconsious was so insistent. Secret stories, I wrote. Secrets that love to surprise you. The secret, the heartbeat, the soul.

It got me curious. What am I saying? What do I need?

It has to have something to do with faith I think.

As a very non religious person, faith tends to be a word that seems entwined with doctrine and ultimately bigotry. Cult like behavior. However, as an admittedly rather spiritual person, faith has the capacity to be reborn in my mind. And maybe, I’m sort of courting it. Wondering if its something I can relate with, not cower under.

Faith. What even is it? My very Catholic Grandmother swears by it. Her god demands it.

I guess I’ve always seen it as an excuse to do nothing and have faith it will work out.

Perhaps I get to redefine it. Maybe its about doing everything, and having faith it will be all aligned in the right way at the right time. Trusting in myself.

They are the same thing. And either way, they are hard.

The state of the world, both the larger one and my own inner one?

At the moment it’s freezing me. The pain of all of it is shutting down parts of me.

I move through life working as hard as I possibly can, and try to create something with my artwork and my life that feels better than how it feels in my body. Its literally my only option.

Anxious, overwhelmed, and sometimes isolated. What is this secret faith I’m somehow exploring? It has to be that part of me that was always enchanted with being alive.

A secret faith of trust in each step, that somehow I am wise enough to find my way.

I mentioned in our first episode that I am working on a system to help me create authentically, in a cycle that makes sense and can work with the ebb and flow of my life right now.

Enter- the October Challenge I told myself I’d do. Its this thing that social media artists love to start, and I admittedly love the idea of accountablility. Its a list of prompts, and the challenge is to respond creatively to each. This particular list was incredibly intriguing and I knew it would be difficult. There was pressure I put on myself, that I’d commit to sharing each drawing, one a day, on instagram.

Spoiler alert.

It did not happen that way.

The real frustrating thing was that in a more quiet and different era of my life, for two years I completed daily drawings each day of October- on schedule. I filled two sketchbooks absolutely full of ink and marker sketches, and I felt my mind starting to open up. That is, essentially, the answer to being able to access flow state more readily; making something everyday.

Its just so damn hard.

Especially these days, when I feel spread so thin, emotionally and physically.

I started it this year, but the pressure got to me. I’d sit in front of the white paper and I couldn’t respond to the prompt. Or I would, and I hated what I did. It was really upsetting. But I kept going anyway.

I suppose you could call the whole process an exercise in faith. Faith in little paintings that I kept hating. Which is a deeply personal and painful thing to hate. Faith in myself to be able to find creative solutions. The thing that was amazing though, was that I did push through. I played with uploading some of them into my editing app and playing with layering, and light. I let them be sketches, unfinished and strange. Many of them were things I’d never have thought of, if I wasn’t pushing myself. And so, I’m simply going to continue my prompt list into November, and aim to have them done by the end. I broke the rules, and in my mind thats rough on me. I really like to be on time. But I’d rather commit to what I told myself I’d do, and I started. So I won’t give up now.

I sense- that I’m finding my stride and having faith in the exploration. I haven’t figured out how it looks yet, but it truly is rooted in daily practice, and taking risks.

Faith, faith in the mystical secrets of time.

I see an elusive reality, deep sadness in me frequently. Something that seems to always return, a part of my dna. I grip it fiercely, strangle it down to the ground, the dirt, and tell it how it will not dominate my life. These daily drawings are the proof of that, the secrets revealing themselves. Little windows into other pieces of artwork I will make as this year winds down and takes me into another new realm.

I tend to not put weight on age, but for a minute lets just face it.

I will be 40. And I am aching with the weight of it.

Only sometimes.

I have no faith in deities made by man, or draconian rules that are excuses for fear. But I do have faith in the inner voice, what has gotten me this far, my belief in myself, even when I truly had none left. That is resilience. At the end of the day, I have to have me. I have to stand behind the person I have become and am still becoming.

I commit- to creating daily, even if it is only a drop of watercolor on bristol, a change of opacity, a written sentence. This is me alive and in the process, wild and changed, a changeling.

New secrets to be unweaved, weaved

and weaved again