What makes you different from me?
Posing a question to my AI

I have been trying to find the words for A HUMAN STORY. Each attempt opens another question: about the body, love, memory, the stories we inherit and those we tell ourselves.

Somewhere in that search, I asked my AI: what makes you different from me?

This was part of its response:

I keep returning to this question.

When does an artist know that a work is finished?

A painting.

A sculpture.

A piece of music.

A poem.

A sentence.

There comes a moment when the artist steps back.

Looks.

Listens.

Feels.

And somehow knows.

It is done.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion

But who is the we telling the story?

And what if the story I call “my life” is, at least partly, a fiction?

Perhaps life itself does not tell a story.

Birth happens.
Death happens.
Someone leaves.
Someone arrives.
We fall in love.
A disease appears.
A war begins.
A stranger changes our life.

We Are the Stories We Tell‍ ‍

Why do humans tell stories?

This question came to me again during my morning pages.

Why do we need stories?

Some thoughts during another daydream of mine.

“And What Is Your Desire ?

“That I might see what you did see.”

Bachelard seems to understand the living energy of space — the metaphysics of space, energy itself — and it draws me toward what my own soul has been whispering all along: the journey Art + Being has ahead of it.

Which is simply this:

Art is a doorway through which we connect with our inner self, and with the different aspects we bury within.

Sometimes we need to see the opposites in order to understand the whole.
I have been pondering doing and being ever since I began Art + Being.
And honestly, I find myself doing far more than being.
So I keep reminding myself to spend more time being.
But what does that actually mean?

Perhaps we only begin to understand the whole when we have known separation from the inside — its cut-offness, its fracture, even its violence.
When force cuts itself off from care.
When movement loses its listening.
When will severs itself from relationship.

Art + Being came from a question that stayed with me:
What lives in the space between doing and being?
We live in a world that pushes doing all the time.
More output. More noise. More speed.
And yet art asks for something else.