Vivid Dwells #2

During my 5 am routine of body movement, resistance training, and writing, writing, writing. I got to thinking about my music outlet, Nomadic Firs. I’m about to release my fifth album this spring, and the first two singles off this record are available anywhere you listen to your music, digitally. It’s an exiting time for me and this particular piece of work. Many years in the making, many false starts and rediscoveries to see it finished. And truthfully, it’s never finished. We just realize the importance of the next experience, so the goodbye is always right there, we just have to own it, and let it go. With enough of them, you get really good at this part. It’s applicable to every aspect of your life, except your children. That’s forever, even after you say goodbye for the last time.

I can say without hesitation, this is a life long concept with very distinct points in time, all based on my experiences including romance, whether realized or fantastical. People, the human experience, mannerisms, actions, cruelty, violence, deep love, seeing birth, divorce, criminal activity, and sex. These moments have meant so much to my work in this space. The ability to evolve inside my own emotional intelligence, truth, and spotting the unfortunate and fortunate reality of humans in certain situations – spotting the tells to inform the realness. It’s taught me how to listen, and care for others, the importance of community outside of technology, with strangers and streets, and parks, we all need to take care of independently of friendships, which are important as well. This project taught me about boundaries, my boundaries, and the importance of connection that’s not based in my own opportunity. It’s taught me my value system, what I will tolerate, and where my intolerance begins.

There’s a deep place you go in creativity. It’s a religion of solitude that requires a great deal of courage to manifest such vulnerable truths in ones self. Along the way, in your love (life) movements, you’ll find confusion, and people’s general ignorance to mere facts and actuality of devotion in a space of art making, that isn’t commercial in its intention. There’s a difference between a maker who sells wares for a living and an artist who struggles and succeeds based on the whirl wind flux of life, translating onto a page, or a scene, or a sound. And actually, this reality is not what you make, eventually, it’s just who you are. The solitude is a developer of Self. The ultimate way to discovery in your truth. Now, this doesn’t mean you live there forever. You move in and out, swaying like a dance. You seek others to come in and play with you, to feed off you as you do them, then you move back into your place of isolation for a time. You can isolate around people, it’s not an “alone in the cabin” story, every time. You become the outcast to some, or seemingly “unapproachable” as one woman said to me recently, then we talked for two hours, and danced the night away. You’re the mystery, and all the words and judgments are part of what you need to move forward. You lay down a welcome mat for these cruelties. You know something they are afraid to explore, because quite frankly, this deep space of solitude with you feels as scary as it gets. You can’t hide from your soul, or your shame there. You sit in it, dwell, ruminate, express in your craft. It’s good, it’s ugly, it devastating, but you do it anyway because you’re breaking through to the other side, and it’s GOD speaking to you. And the people who never see that, believe in it, or try to understand. Those are the people who will benefit from your work the most. Crying, laughing, dancing, thinking weirdly, being in crazy love. Those are just a few of the gifts brought to you by my hard ass work in the solitude of creativity. We are tasked with bringing forth the emotion of humans. That’s a lot of responsibility.

So what does Nomadic Firs mean?

Our minds are vast and endless, practically limitless and hardly ever fixed, rooted, grounded, etc. Our bodies are limited, almost always in one place, and often staying in one area. That’s Nomadic Firs to me. It’s a metaphor for the human experience. This concept started when I was married. You start to feel trapped and stuck in a routine. I love family, my children, and being a father. As an individual with a creativity value system, my mind was an endless adventure filled with imaginative story lines, some wholesome, others not. I began to see how limited we are in life because of our bodies, and in many ways how the body can trick the mind into a stationary stasis of existence. We can’t fly, we usually live in a house or apartment, in one town, for the majority of our lives. We typically stick to the same routine or start a new routine. Even the good things are programmed. Is this a bad thing? Of course not. It’s not a matter of those old languages. It’s just a truth that’s hard to avoid. Especially as we age, slow down a bit. Remember, it’s a concept. It gives meaning to the work. It’s playful, and bigger than a song. It’s a film, my film. I’m always tinkering with it, but for now, I like where it is.