Time Waits for No One

Part poem, part fear response, part procrastination, and entirely from the heart

Welcome to this Sunday’s note - where I try to embrace the messiness of self while grappling with writing a functional artist statement for upcoming application deadlines. (Spoiler - there are no actual helpful artist statement tips. Maybe next time?)

But first, a few lyrics from this Rolling Stones song…

Time Waits for No One

And time waits for no man, and it won't wait for me
Yes, time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me
Drink in your summer, gather your corn
The dreams of the night time will vanish by dawn

~ “Time Waits for No One”, Rolling Stones

I find the notion of time both troubling and freeing…

I’ve been thinking a lot about what art means to me, what I want my art to say or be, and what experiences, interactions, conversations, and comfort (or discomfort) it can invoke. So much of my creative energy continually returns to time - our perception of it, our human relationship to it, the scope of what it holds beyond our understanding, how we mark it, celebrate it, fear it, and its unrelenting march forward.

I consider the ideas prompting me to move forward. My attempts to understand the world around me, the people, the planet - all coalesce into hands always moving, layering pieces of my life into the fabric of my making in an attempt to find meaning, beauty, purpose, connection.

I stand in my studio with projects calling out to me, wanting to know my plans for them.

I confess. We have long conversations.

I can sum up my art (myself?) in the shifting piles of materials curated by time in a seemingly unending sea of detritus, patiently waiting to be chosen and embraced. They remind me of when and where they were found. The last purpose they held. Their dismantled bodies co-mingling with scribbled phrases and supply lists taunting them with what they could become. Who they are meant to be. The stories they are meant to tell.

I look toward the wall where a list of projects is fading on the chalkboard neatly mounted there. I’ve probably brushed by these carefully handwritten lines dozens of times, slowly adding to their deterioration. Hanging to the side, deadlines are marked in red on a large wall calendar. Duplicated again in the Google version, the planner, the fridge calendar shared by all. (Do other people just use one calendar?)

Instead of supplicating the desires of each pile to find a new life, I turn to the desk where my computer constantly waits with its beckoning glow. I know there is work to be done here, too.

Artist statements.

Choosing and preparing images.

Trying to hold everything that has come before and reduce it to 300 words of what is yet to come.

Defining the ephemeral.

Embracing the unimagined.

Watching time feed the rising tide.

I look at the statements of artists I admire and feel extraordinarily humbled. Their vision, laid bare in a few sentences, a few phrases, a few words. Simple yet all-encompassing. Neatly creating a dialogue between the artist, art, and viewer.

I’m lost in details, enamored by phrases I don’t precisely understand, searching for ideas just out of reach. Seeing a future of enormous possibilities while trying to understand the individual words that will unlock the meaning I know is there, if I look hard enough. I battle conflicting voices, verb tenses, and too many adverbs and adjectives fluttering just above the keyboard, waiting for an opportunity to disrupt. Unsuccessful in being succinct with too many words filling the page and the highlighted textbox waiting for a specific number of words. And too few that impart my meaning.

I try to come up for air every so often, but end up simply prolonging the agony (for me, for the reader?) and choose instead to continue mixing metaphors.

I swim with the stars, but I long to breach the surface of one universe to lap at the edges of another—an island—feel its entirety, the cohesion of an ecosystem created to sustain each contributing member—while acknowledging the deep water all around calling me back.

I accept I may never know the peace of a perfect paragraph that neatly finishes a thought. Maybe I’m never meant to feel complete. I am supposed to keep trying, reaching, stretching, expanding. Finding new universes along the way. Maybe a universe lives inside me, constantly pushing outward, not wanting to fall back into old ways of living, of creating.

When I mused, “What about Grad School?”, questions were asked.

When do you plan to retire? (Do artists ever retire?)

Did you really want to teach at University? (Maybe? Does that seem so odd?)

Why now? (If not now, then when?)

What will it offer? (Another universe to explore.)

All I know is that I feel this absolute need to find space for growth, experimentation, and connection, to untangle the web of chaos I have built around me, to defiantly re-insert myself into a timeline that was trying to leave me behind.

But for now, I am satisfied to procrastinate with this poem tribute to a song.

As summer is waning, I will drink in every last moment.

When Autumn arrives, I will gather my corn to sustain me through winter.

And as I dream through the long nights of brilliant futures full of possibility

I will acknowledge the awaiting dawn, beckoning me.

But it is not yet time to wake.

There is a universe inside expanding, creating new worlds

Tossing stars across the sky with each breath I take.

The sun will rise, and daylight break.

But not too soon. There is more yet to do. There is more yet in me.

“There is always more to do,” whispers the Meadowlark.

“I know,” I reply.

A melodic trill fills a sky,

streaked with black and gold.

Reaching beyond a horizon

That waits for me.

To creatively procrastinating,

~ Jennifer