I thought leaving an MFA program where each day was full of scheduled obligations and moving home to focus on my career would create a welcomed vacuum of time, and my days would be full of creative writing and inspiration and blogging about said inspiration. I forgot the verity of the adage: if you want something done, ask a busy person.
For the first time in a few years, I've not been busy, and I have very successfully gotten very little done. Each week I've been home, there has been something I have wanted to do in Louisville: free concerts, book readings, food coop meetings, farmer's markets. Somehow I have sabotaged each excursion with poor planning, momentary disinterest, distraction or as is the case is most of the time, sheer forgetfulness.
I've been going to auditions, visiting with family, doin the yogas, biking round town, scouting houses going up for auction, walking the dog and doing the bread work. Literally and figuratively...I inherited a sourdough starter from my sister-in-law and that thing is like a part-time job in and of itself!
In the more figurative sense, Gandhi preached about this concept of bread work and equality. It is a concept I'd like to model in my life (while I simultaneously dream of jobs that pay me more than I need).
Need.
I don't know that I've truly ever needed.
I mean, sure...I've been shy a few hundred bucks a few hundred times. I've had to ask for things from loved ones or request help from Uncle Sam. I've had to borrow from Peter to pay Paul. But true need?
Love.
There was a time when I needed that, I suppose. Romantically, I mean.
Many years of kissing many toads.
But now that need is more than met. Each day I spend with Jake, I love him more. You get it.
There is something to be said about an embarrassment of riches. Perhaps it's embarrassing because you know inherently the inequality of wealth plagues our humanity. Blights our hope for a more just world. And yet, we accept.
We accept our privileges and whine about our struggles. We fill insatiable yearning with stuff and food and booze and smoke and live in lack in want of more. I don't mean to project. I am responsible. I am guilty. I am trying. I say we as Americans. As artists. As tribe members of the New World (Dis)Order.
Though there's nothing new about disparity.
Isn't it funny I've know the word disparity since grade school, but only just learned parity in recent years? Or perhaps I'd heard it for longer, but only just realized the root connection in recent years.
I always thought disparity and despair were more closely related. And it can still feel that way sometimes.
But opposites are often just two sides of the same coin, yeah? Now isn't that hard to swallow? Something as meaningless...no, as precarious as a coin toss decided the fate of whether you are born in light skin or dark, in a male body or female, to parents with money or not, etc, etc, etc.
What if there were a way to forgo any excess if you could be assured no other human being would experience lack? Yeah, yeah, communism in theory...but I'm not talkin politics. Morés not laws. Standards not policies. Action not direction.
What if?
I'm gonna keep imagining it.
Meanwhile, time to make the sourdough.
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