Build a nest 🪹

Why do we do the things we do? Man, it's a good question. 

Last night I started that Netflix series Worst Roommate Ever. The first episode was a story I'd heard on a podcast so, like seeing the movie of a book you've read, it was interesting to see the places and faces of what before lived only in my imagination. 

It's not giving anything away to say this episode is about a serial killer. An older woman. Who didn't look the part. And it left me with questions because it wasn't clear: What drew her to kill? What drew her to do the things she did? I'm always interested in the why.

The same questions can be turned on me, on you. Why do we do what we do? 

I just started a new book called The View From The Studio Door: How Artists Find Their Way In An Uncertain World. Author Ted Orland hits on this question a bit, too, drawing a distinction between us and animals. Animals move on instinct. They're always "in the flow", just doing what they do.

Ask the birds in my backyard who are building a nest in dirt of one of my spider plants. Those juncos are just doing what they do and it's beautiful and useful and life-giving. That nest will be home to eggs soon.

Humans move on instinct, too. And yet we also have this thing called "free will". We make choices. Some of them in line with self, others that take us away from our core. 

Ted:
  Perhaps our conscious separation of the world into self and not-self makes it impossible for us to immerse ourselves in the totality of experience, and so we try to recapture that totality through our art.
An interesting idea, right? That our art making (or whatever we're bringing into the world) is a way of us trying to connect back to a world we feel separated from. 

I wonder about this old woman. Was she moving on instinct? Is a serial killer simply who she is? Or was this her making a deliberate choice, away from her self and the person she was actually put here to be? 

I know what I believe. And I like Ted's idea. Art making, doing what we do, bad or good, may indeed be an attempt to connect back to the Source. To feel one with it all. 

Jump + pray + build a nest,

Joce

Excited to share I have some new, original art up in the store. This has been a hurdle for me - to put stuff up for sale. Because that's not why I make art. But I've had enough requests from people asking if I'm selling, that I bit the bullet and did it. I will have some prints very soon, too! (Who am I?) And if none of that interests you, I've started a Patreon where you can support my art making monthly — and get cool stuff (like mail and playlists)!