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Happy Autumn friends!
I’m writing to you straight off the cuff today — I normally write my letters to you on a Sunday to give my ideas a little room to breathe but my brain wasn’t playing ball yesterday, so here I am writing to you in (almost) real-time!
Before we dive into today’s essay, I am unbelievably proud to share with you my Autumn pop-up print shop. 4 never-before-seen A3 collages, available for only two weeks!
Sometimes I feel like a massive art fraud for not being able to give neatly-wrapped explanations of the meaning behind each work, or what message I was trying to achieve in their creations. We’ve been taught that art has to mean something or be defined to digestible information for it to be worthy or understood. But the truth is— and I know this makes me sound like a wanker, I really am just the conduit, completely independent of what my work needs to say and often, what it wants me to hear myself. There have been too many occasions where I’ve created a piece, only to look back upon it down the line and realise it showed all the signs of what was to come into fruition. Last summer I created a Saraswati Goddess print, and lo and behold, half a year later I was at the Saraswati temple on the other side of the world — completely unplanned at the time of creation. I’ve come to realise there is no use me trying to define what I create, only that their messages will be revealed to me over time. That their vision up on my wall will be a portal I never intended to step through but rather, realise I was meant to step through. Call it coincidence, call it bullshit; I choose to believe it’s magic. And I hope they serve as a powerful source of manifestation up on your walls too…
To say a massive thank you for subscribing to this newsletter, please use the code ‘NEWSLETTERTHANKS’ at the checkout to enjoy 10% off prints.
And thank you, it means the world. X
Let's talk a little more about manifestation…
I am a woman who is collecting wants. After what feels like a lifetime of stumbling through life without a plan, waving my arms around shouting I just don’t knows, giving out pieces of myself with no slices left for number one, I finally have the faintest idea. I know where I want to live. I know what I want to do. I know who I want to be doing them with. It’s not a lifelong plan — if this year has taught us anything it’s that if you don’t change your mind, something external will change it for you. But it’s something. A vision, if you will, of how I see my life taking shape over the next couple of years or so.
But how do I know that what I want is actually, from the bottom of my heart, from the pit of my stomach, what I want? And not just something I’ve convinced myself to think that I want? How can I trust that I am chasing something sincere and just not something that will satiate my ego?
Earlier this year, I tried to manifest something but it failed. It didn’t happen. I used all tools, tried all my tricks, worked my damned hardest and it didn’t work out. And I was blindsided because I was utterly convinced that this thing I was working on was going to happen. I felt it in my bones, I believed in it and in myself, with every fibre of my being. I saw it in visions, it felt right. But I was wrong. My intuition was wrong.
I spent all of yesterday trying to figure out what it was I wanted to say in this essay and I think the reason I couldn’t find the right thread to pull on was because I didn’t want to write what I have just written. That my intuition was wrong. It feels like the ultimate betrayal to my God, to my beliefs, to myself. It feels as if I’m asking for trouble. To be dismissed with but your intuition can’t be wrong.
And the thing is, maybe that’s correct. Maybe my intuition can’t be wrong. Maybe the thing I was striving for never was for me. But what is wrong, or least, worrying, is that I was able to so strongly convince myself that it was. That in my mind I was able to embed a future uncontrollable, into an absolute. It’s not that I was delusional to the possibility that the thing might not happen, I was very aware it was ambiguous of me to try. But I convinced myself I could do it, I convinced myself that I wanted it, all under the guise that it was written right there in my intuition.
This isn’t some THESE ARE THE DANGERS OF MANIFESTING ultimatum. I believe in manifesting. I believe in intuition. I just think we are sometimes too attached to specific outcomes that we can't hear what our intuition is actually telling us. In hindsight I’ve come to see that what I was trying to manifest those months ago was something my intuition was no less asking me to strive for, it was just the outcome that skewed my perception of whether or not I could trust my intuition or not. Because, as is always the case — without trying and ‘failing’ at what I did earlier this year, I wouldn’t have landed where I am today, working towards what I am working towards now.
I’m weighed down by questions of what if I am wrong again, what if I can’t make this happen either. And maybe I won’t. 2020 is one giant humble pie. But if what I want feels right, I have to trust that chasing it is right whilst not getting so caught up in the outcome. You do not spend your life sitting at a destination, you spend it in the unfolding of what is to be. Moving towards the thing is almost more important than achieving the thing. There is no guarantee you will achieve it, but you can always guarantee that pursuing it will take you somewhere. It may not be the place you had in mind or even saw in your visualisation, but that’s why they say ‘you never know what’s around the corner’. Because life isn’t so predictable, so controllable to be able to mould it exactly how you see fit, but that’s why the only thing you can do is listen and try to figure it out. You wouldn’t turn the page if you knew exactly what was going to happen next in the story.
This time I’m learning to make my vision of the future malleable enough to let the winds sway me towards all that may be for me instead. That, I definitely want.
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