One morning, just like any other, I woke up and rolled out of bed. I was immediately struck by the way the light hit my messy bedsheets, folding into the creases and diffusing across the soft material. I stood there for a second, almost as if recovering from meditation. There was clarity in the air. After a moment stuck in awe, I grabbed my DSLR and snapped a few pictures. The moment was gone, but the morning was somehow different. Nothing peculiar happened, but this minute difference in the quality of feeling extruded like a mountain peak amidst the sameness of the still life laid barren behind me. It is the days where these moments are gone, where sameness and apathy seem infinite in the rolling sands of time spread from the present, it is those wholly unmomentous moments when life is most dull.
It is these small moments, then, where the light hits my eye in just the right way, where the water tastes just a little different, a little better, that make life tolerable. It isn't the grand moon or the brilliant sun, who bear down on us like royalty in their celestial thrones. It isn't by any grand gesture that life is livable. It isn't by great surplus. If anything, the desire for these things makes life miserable. No; instead we must look for the rays cast by the sun, the shadows amongst the moonlight, the little moments to stay sane. This makes art simultaneously man's greatest achievement, and his worst sin.
After all, it is art that makes the little things seem gargantuan, that puts kings on their thrones, that describes beauty to us as if it were singular. The grandness of art makes the smallness of life seem unbearable. Great heroes and villains sparring to save the fate of the world, of their world. We must remind ourselves that we are the protagonists of our own story because the art we make does not reflect that point.
That's the kind of art that I want to make. Art that reminds people that it's okay to not be a hero, to be normal, that being normal is heroic enough. That your art doesn't need to sell, that art is about the feeling and not the dollar sign or the like count. That the world is more beautiful with you in it, because we are small and without the small idiosyncrasies of life it would be impersonal and boring and unbearable.
So I tell myself: I am a drop of rain, I am a piece of bark, I am the grasshopper hopping along giant tree-blade grass pillars. I am small. I am small. My story is small, but my smallness is poetic enough to have worth in itself.
