#guillasimo

Sōjirō

Some gardening I've been doing.

To feel so distraught within yourself is nothing short of torture. My self imposed anxiety pulls me in the undertow of a thousand waves; each carrying the full weight of my whole life onto me. It is hard to know if I will ever feel what I want to feel. The fabrics I wear that are glued to my skin carry scars of a past that was never mine. How lonesome it is to suffer inside yourself.

I sit in the sun and it is hard to not feel such overwhelming love for the earth. Everything untied to humans; the trees, the air, the soft crunch of dead leaves as you walk on the ground. To breathe in the movement of the wind as it fills the caves of the lungs; a full breath. The way in which I internalize my pain creates remnants that are part of the core of my soul. It goes beyond mental boundaries, and is buried so deep into me that I can not find it. Perhaps this is where the lost feeling comes from. Everything I feel has been compounded over years of experience, and as the tower gets heavier, the restructuring falls further away. Every brick becomes a moment in time that I had to construct a wall; a protective measure to somehow survive.

I continue to sit here and observe; to fully immerse myself in the current environment. My thoughts are seemingly always blurry these days. The idea of living much longer past this point seems incomprehensible. If I can barely feel myself now, how would I twenty years from now? Ten? A part of me has always felt that death will come for me much earlier than that. I've felt the passing sway of it. The perspective changes when the notion is there; just beyond the peripheral. I feel caged in this life. I am always drowning. The intensity to which I hold sorrow and pain are like needles relentlessly stabbing my body; I constantly bleed.

I truly wish I could be understood; to be felt; to be seen. To have a shared understanding of what this feels like; but this is impossible. How could I ever be known in this way? At times I wish I could be completely annihilated; entirely destroyed piece by piece so the soul that feels broken couldn't hold onto anything anymore. Maybe then it could feel the freedom I've always longed for.

Hello, 

I just began reading the artist's way and am already starting to really feel a shift in the way I think. This is my first introduction to really feeling myself as an artist and as someone that needs this for life. I have for a long time not felt comfortable in giving myself the title of artist because my skill sets do not feel antiquated enough in what I want to be. Even right now as I write down for this exercise, I can feel the weight of this pen and even the sort of distraught nature of my thoughts in execution. At this point of the page, the idea of getting to the bottom seems impossible. Another two pages on top of that seems almost inconceivable. This to me is entirely due to the nature of today's world. The way in which media is consumed, the way in which we are supposed to fully give in to the media and really lose our sense of complete identity. It is this in why I so desperately want a shift. I know within my mind that who I am is so far beyond this simplicity. I know within myself that who I want to be is unfulfilled because I long for more. I long for connection with people who understand me. I long for connection in regard to the projects I so desperately want to get better at. All my life or at least my life in youth was filled with strife in the sense that my foundation of self never existed. I never during that age had a glimpse of what or who I was. I simply existed in space. I ragdolled through my youth and rode through in utter turbulence. I never knew calm except for the pockets of time in which I was alone and in nature. Nature for me has always been the place that I have longed for. It has always in a clear sense been pivotal in my own creative direction. I have gone to spaces of nature just to feel that sense in mind of who I am. How am I in tandem with the universe? I love the trees, the clouds, I love the sky, I love the flowers that shimmer in the light from the small light of the sun. I love the color green because of the representation in our world.

I will never forget the first time I really experienced the forest. I was young and my dad took me through birdhills park. I remember walking into it feeling complete freedom. The path of trees in front was ever expansive. They represented something so much bigger. They were magical in scale. I ran through the thicket; alone and in love. I felt as if I was transcending space. The woods are soft in their calmness. A space of such beautiful magnitude. Ever since then, I have gravitated to the forest and trees. They are the limbs of veins of the planet. They bleed like we do. They are ancient relics of time; their history is reveled in the spirit of the woods. It's this magic that makes me feel this way. It is also why princess mononoke is such a lovely movie to me. The balance of the world rests on the state of nature. To follow its process and live in tandem with it. We as humans are not above the earth, we are all children of it. It is this planet and the universe that represent our mother and father. I don’t understand why so many people believe that they are so above the universe this way. How can you believe that our significance is beyond the eternal energy that is nature? When I look at my life and the moments of specific significance, I think of the way in which I perceived all of the beauty of the natural world in full. I love my time in the forests, I revel in the sounds of all the creatures of the outdoors, I crave the colors of all the flowers as natural beauty. The earth should be allowed to be bountiful; not have to feel all of the effects in which human disregard afflicts it. My problem within my life has not been about my need to be above the world; it comes from a deep inner turmoil about not being able to be fully aligned with it. How can I be more than a sensitive, reactionary response to the organic stimuli that I experience? To me there is a disconnect to how I live and think, and I feel what I know I want to be in this life. I want to represent something more aligned with the values I possess. This again is perhaps why I have felt such a level of discomfort in time. I do not feel aligned in my life with the values I possess. I want to create everyday and I want to feel fully aware and able mentally. The lifestyle I live is not conducive to this. I work in jobs that while sometimes provide insight, they usually are a mental strain that makes it hard to fully understand myself. It becomes a cycle of overstimulation in these places and then believing in the fact I have changed too far from who I used to be.