to keep the writing up, lovely and i have been doing exercises with prompts. i’m generally terrible at coming up with them, but lovely is a wizard. her concepts have jolted me with energy, especially when my troubled mind can’t come up with anything to write about other than how guilty feel for not writing enough. but the other day, she stumped me. write about a time, she began, when you experienced an unexpected miracle. whatever i began writing right away, i deleted almost as immediately. what i ended up with was the third or fourth draft, mostly cheeky comments about how everything and nothing can be considered miraculous, that expectation and reality are merely dividing lines in binaries.
which is all to say it has been a refreshing start of the year to finally come around to reading dr. bayo akomolafe’s essay coming down to earth, where he so poignantly declares that “power and enchantment are always in short supply relative to deepening demand,” a deepening demand powered not only by capitalism but the framing of the modern world as we know it – one where a sense of dissatisfaction can only and must only be met by accumulation of materials, experiences, data.
but is that the source of my sense of dissatisfaction, lately? in my memory, this dissatisfaction was not present throughout the weeks when i was writing constantly, when creativity felt like a generous and bottomless fountain. i found this sense of peace during a rise in trauma of 2020, when it seemed that nothing of the outside world could produce the joy that i could mysteriously recognize, in that moment, in myself. an unexpected miracle.
what they don’t often say much about miracles is how sorely they are yearned for once they’ve transpired. miracles appear to widen the scope of reality, even though nothing in reality has actually shifted – just the notion of it. a crack, a tear, a puncture in the world that we’ve allowed to be built around us, the futile sense of me as the center of it all, the toxically imaginary, slanted and skewed i.
i’m reading dr. bayo’s essay slowly this week – it has been neatly divided into 8 parts, conducive to one of my new year’s resolutions to consume everything more slowly. every night i starve myself for the few hours before dinner, only to fall into a hypnotic state once i start stuffing my mouth, only to awaken from it with a decimated plate and a battered stomach. much like when i haven’t read for awhile and lose a day on paragraphs i glossed over too quickly in order to reach the last page. much like when i don’t write, only building more and more pressure on myself to finally sit and produce endless reams that i’ll never revisit. so here’s to taking things more slowly, indulging in the smallest of things, and resting assured that miracles are abound, even if i don’t recognize them when they appear.