Keeping Time with Water

Dear Creative Friend,

Last week we sat by the creek, listening to water jump between the rocks. To get there, I tuck my phone into my shoes and forget them at the door. We scurry and small-step across the gravel, finally sighing with relief when warm grass is underfoot.

Down there, the afternoon spreads. My body stops measuring time and tunes into the water’s tempo. I know how relativity works — how time slows under different weights of gravity — but feeling it happen is a surprising thrill. It feels nice, sitting there together. It feels like a return.

I think you know this tempo better than I do. When you are relaxed you slip into your craft and your attention becomes focused and wide open at once. You somehow take the whole world in while giving yourself entirely to what’s in front of you.

I miss that feeling. Watching you work, I think about my own economy of attention, and how badly I’ve been spending it. I spend it on goods I neither want nor find valuable. I am a child with a ten-dollar bill, ready to hand it over for the first thing that glitters.

So as we sit together, working on our craft, I feel the value return. I pull a rock from the river, turning its wet weight over in my palm. I begin to paint a watercolor, form pooling within water. My attention spreads with the soaking color, crystallizing into structure as the pigment dries on the page.

With this simple drawing, I think about how good it feels to let my attention rest on what’s real. And I feel sadness for the ways I’ve scattered my attention, trying to anchor it in phantoms.

I spend my attention online, in that fantasy space where I wait to see if someone will notice me, say something kind, or prove that I matter to them. I spend my attention on fear, past mistakes, or self-uncertainty. Nothing tangible that I can weigh in my hands.

You know this pull too, I think. The way attention drifts toward an audience that isn’t watching, instead of resting on what’s actually in front of you. But today, I notice that when I give attention to what’s substantial, reality returns the gift. We feel the solidity of our awareness and ourselves, and time begins to bend differently around us.

This is what I want for you, and for myself: to stop handing the gift of your gaze to the fog of people who aren’t there. To say no to the demand that we give our attention to things we don’t value. And choose to spend it on what’s real and close — a creek, a page, a rock breaking the water. The way we did as children, before we learned how to keep time.

Notes from the StudioNew paintings are always entering the stream, including a new series that’s been using line in ways that are surprising me. Lots of works on paper are on sale, as well as a few early paintings.

All my love to you.