mole habits
no artist statement. just digging.
Within me are trite little things worth being bored about. I went walking in the woods today without music. It doesn’t seem like much but I’m doing the the things I’m supposed to. Carving a little path through the trees. There are no finished paintings and there are no final drafts to place on the editor’s cherry wood desk in a satisfying THWUNK of white papers pinched by a black binder clip. And I can’t name ideas but I have to think they’re quietly forming inside of me. Doing work like a mole moving earth.
If you were to walk over his very spot, you wouldn’t even know he’s tunneling, but he is, under the garden, blind. I want to move like the mole does. He only acts on instinct. There’s no prime directive. No artist statement. Just digging. He’s got the muse, in a way. And someday there’ll be a whole tangle of tunnels he’s made. Whole time, he’s just swimming through the earth. Unthinking.
You think about how long it must’ve taken to create the catacombs. That swirling, tangled vortex - and people aren’t made for shoveling, not like that - of human remains.
Aren’t we so beautiful underneath, our articulate skeletons. You can look at a finished thing like a gorgeous skull and wonder, how’d He do that? and, where’s He’d even get the idea?
I know better than to think God had first drafts. It was all incremental. Or maybe the word is iterative. Whatever happened, and scientists agree on this, it happened in a mysterious way. Until one day, a mole emerged with his funny shovel hands. And one day The Louvre opened their doors. And maybe one day I’ll write a story. One I’d actually like to show you.
just digging. this one is gonna stick with me.