The Empty Room

Inner tectonic shifts

The Wild Unknown Archetypes ID: A round card on a table surrounded by a few objects. The card reads The Empty Room and shows a line drawing of a dark rectangular space.

I have not written much in the last few months. Not for myself, and certainly not in this container. I have not journaled much or written poetry. It’s been a quiet spell, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly. 

At the beginning of SeptemberI I got a sense that I was on the edge of a big change. I had no clue what it implied, all I knew was that I would spend a prolonged period in a remote location in the Amazon with no set agenda other than to be present, and that this experience would re-orient the way I look at several things.

Though some people might assume that cultivating an oracular practice means peeking at what lies ahead, for me it means learning ways to stay put where I am and look with attention. 

The oracle dwells in what they know without pushing for it to be other than what it is. 

A knowing can be abstract, formless, vaporous and shapeshifting. An inner knowing goes through its own alchemical process. I’ve learned that it’s good to accept, that as the knowledge refines itself, the best thing is to not seek more from it, not pull cards from every deck or consult oracles, but to dwell in the fog of possibility and take note of what appears and disappears without attachment. 

Do not assume that this process implies ease, on the contrary, it’s the most challenging and uncomfortable process of my practice, because dwelling in the fog of not knowing triggers my nervous system, defies my capacity for patience and humiliates my ego.

I feel thoroughly inadequate, and exhausted by the pressure of trying to stay present while understandably anxious. 

Coping mechanisms show up to lighten the process, and aggravate it too. Presence and awareness are much easier for me when in a new and demanding environment. In my time in the Amazon, while immersed in the terrain and the community, my attention was consumed by what was in front of me, the need to figure out life day by day. I had little energy and space for anxieties about other timelines, identity crisis or long term life plans. 

Yet upon returning to a familiar environment, and still deeply in the process of not knowing what the inner tectonics are up to and what their shifts will yield, the coping mechanisms show up with foe edges: doom scrolling, over thinking, thumb picking, escapism. My efforts to root myself with daily walks for vitamin D, pleasurable movement in the form of dance, seeing friends, keeping house and feeding myself delicious nourishment, are simply not as immersive as feeling victimised by mosquitoes. Deadlines will spank me up into shape only for a few hours a day of attention deficit battles, and washing in the shower is not a daily relational practice with the river Matavén.

I’m not advocating for an off grid life as a means to stay in the present moment, I love my little life and its domestic tasks, its humble luxuries, and I do love the Internet even if it is rewiring my brain constantly in ways that scare me. I like having access to meme lore and being able to send screenshots to my queer fam about random things that make me think of them. And by the gods, I appreciate the queer bubble I inhabit, its culture (wars and all) and the willingness to try to do things in a different way in every aspect. What I’m realising is that not knowing the shape I’m aiming for and trying to dwell there, while being immersed within a wider society and culture that is constantly demanding certainty and plans, and squeezing people into the forced creative space of living within aggravating precarious conditions, takes a heavy toll. 

The highly contrasting experience I had at the end of last year in a completely different environment, and how I’ve felt since coming back to London, is screaming loud in my face. And I still don’t know much more, but some statements have been uttered in front of others and I’m holding myself accountable to my word.

Last November while sitting around a ceremonial fire with the cohort of expanded weavers that I shared space with in the Colombian Amazon, I declared that for me art was a vehicle for interesting experiences. I’ve been thinking a lot about what that means. What are the experiences I’m interested in and how do they differ from career oriented markers that contribute to a tidy progressive narrative around art practice. 

I’ve often experienced a sense of shame about not sharing huge ambitions regarding an exhibition practice, given that it’s the most recognisable form of validation within the arts. I’m not disinterested in exhibiting at all, it’s just not what drives me. 

I recently gave an artist talk at Goldsmiths University and took the exercise as an opportunity to reframe the way I speak about the various outputs of my work. What I found as the thread was a commitment and enthusiasm for relationships: a relationship with language (poetry), with the symbol and its constellations of meanings (divination), with others and the other than human (collaboration), with cultural dialogue (essay), with materials (object making). Being immersed in a relational process is what actually motivates my art practice, and the expressions of the various ways in which I do this does not always render a tidy narrative or a tangible output.

I recognise that a good portion of my sense of shifting the way I operate in the world has to do with the acceptance that the container of art in its professionalised forms does not always support my type of work, and that has material consequences for my sense of well-being. Along that recognition comes the acceptance that although the discourse around art is malleable, expansive and full of potential as a space holder for my type of practice, its impact is not sustaining enough. Thirdly, as a person that lives in crip time, the acceptance of my limited capacity outlines a complicated constellation of tangled and valid desires to be seen, recognised, appreciated while feeling cared and resourced enough, and the arts might love to generate discourse around care, but in practice it’s rare and infrequent to engage professionally in an accessible manner. 

So far, my inner tectonic shifts are releasing these rather obvious realities in an explicit way. I’ve told some friends, now I’m writing it down: the process of acceptance rather than acknowledgement, a call to stop ignoring the elephant in my bedroom, because it started to pull at me from the inside out after being fed up with being petted in insignificant ways. 

I’m not sure what this means in practical terms, and it doesn’t have to imply huge external shifts. But the effects of giving it space are informing my life in many ways. For one, a break in pulling cards for myself and engaging in contemplation as a way to freshen up my relationship with the visual aspects of my oracular practice is revealing how other forms of information manifest for me, in this image reset, mystery whispers and tickles my body-mind. The silence and lack of writing is making me reflect on the importance of letting ideas refine without pressure of articulacy, a very counterintuitive approach for a writer. And lastly, the acceptance of the conditions of the professional field I operate in sober me up and ask me to act accordingly as I refine what I want for myself.

What that is, is still in the alchemical lab though. I don’t expect it to be anything other than a spacious idea to hold a multitude of experiences through a discerning filter. A malleable concept still being concocted.