There is, of course, something to be said for such a thing—the desperate silence and crushing clarity of I know, and I now know that I do not know—the truest of the true awesome learning that if only for a moment, you understand. For artists and makers, there are times that it comes quick and fills you up, feet to throat to eyes to ears to weakened shoulders. There are slower times that are more terrible. Blinding in their coming and over just as swift or creeping slow until no voice that can be spoken can raise you up above the barest, even words that you can muster. These are things of beauty and these are things of kinship with us all.
As we ourselves enter this realm of Ancestor, knowers and teachers by our very presence, we are honor-bound to be present for those others learning or Making, be they our teachers or those we teach. In these moments we are together. Our lineages are inseparable. I am just the same a child and a friend of those who’ve held me as I’ve wept in joy or grief or pain on steel smeared, fire-pitted studio floors in the dead of night after the failures and the horrors that drowned me on my own, burned and bloody and so desperate as I’m also bound to those for whom I have done the same. We all must help in our own way. The works of our own hands are not ours alone. Much the same to all our making, in all the art or string or bread we eat, we are bound in duty to these moments of each other, blind and beautiful and bare. To deny witness with our brothers and our sisters and our mothers and our fathers and all others whom we love and love us when we are weak is desperate failure. We are all of all the moments and the pain of the survivors that we’ve witnessed. We are all the works of all the hands that built before us. We are all the foremothers and forebrothers of unknowable, unfathomable creations for which we now plant the seeds, and we must survive together or there will be no future. We must carry out our duty. There’s no excuse—and within it, we are glorious.
