creative vacations
Do you ever take time off just to play with your imagination all day?
I sit stomach-down on the floor, legs sprawled. Sun brushing my cheeks like I’m some kind of blank canvas. The turn of the light outside the glass windows tells me it is either late morning or early afternoon. I rip a page out of my notebook, turn a new one. Words don’t feel quite right yet. Drop of patience. Long breath.
Earlier, I flirted with the first floor. Toyed with my inner child on the wooden side balcony in some patio chair. Tried to let nature speak to me, assuming it would have something profound to say. When the discomfort of art-making, of agency, began to set in, I moved up here. Top floor. I am almost in-line with the pine trees.
Maybe they’ll whisper to me.
I found this place a week before, lucky me. The weekday rate, last minute discount on top, was affordable, considering what this place was: designed by Charles Moore, advertised as postmodern, but also, a treehouse. There are four stories. The first is an adjunct living room with one of those aesthetic floor-to-ceiling fireplaces available for people unlike me—the type of people who spend time in snow, in California, voluntarily. A few architecture books on the coffee table, stunning mountain peak views outside the tall windows. Old-school lamp in the corner. Second floor, a desk hidden behind a wall, rectangular, light wood table facing a painting. Some desert tree. A conference room of sorts, this floor. Not the kind I’m used to. I picture myself sitting there, discussing ideas of lore. Third floor, nook of the kitchen. Feels wrong to use it, so clean and impeccable. Maybe I will. A bathroom. Doors that open to more outside balconies. Endless places to sit and smell and ponder. Then, the top. Sleeping in the pines. A mustard yellow corner chair. Lamp overturned like a decaying Joshua Tree. A chair made for scrutinizing, analyzing.
I dig the tops of my toes into the floor. My fingers shake as I put pen to page—a sign. Memories, slightly painful and a touch unpleasant, but mostly dull, flow through the tips of my right hand. My handwriting is scraggly and jaded. Hardly readable. Words to be rewritten later for clarity. For now, it must be like this—imperfect, raw. My mind runs through Golden Gate Park, remembering how the combination of pizza and wet grass painted by the fog smelled after a long bike ride. Your hand in mine. How it used to be. In some half-made rom-com movie while the whole world was on hold. I recall how it felt to be completely enthralled. Always one step removed. The feeling of missing something while it was still happening. The presence of another person, constantly, without any connective longevity, time passing, joyous, enchanting, nothing real. I can feel where this is going, the songwriting—sometimes a single line requires long moments of contemplation, of staring at the wall. Reliving, in order not to dwell. It is in these slow, anxious moments of reflection that the art achieves its purpose. The art is merely a celebration of almost-stale nostalgia, a placeholder. A meeting with fear.
I fear the act of creating the art more than the content of the art itself.
I piece together some half-baked song, truly rule-breaking syntax. The meat present, without the knife. Worthy of my attention and utterly unusable. Do I dare open my mouth? I look around, as if someone may be watching. You’re in a house designed by Charles Moore, whoever that is, on some random bend, in some random place, a couple hours north of LA, remember? (No one is watching.)
Regarding singing: I can’t do it, but I can’t not do it either. It’s the fascinating conundrum of singing, and of writing, and of dancing, and of things that you can put on a page, or communicate with your body through your fingers or your limbs or your diaphragm. (We confuse doing with doing well, when the two are not the same.) I try belting a line, then I try it again in a soft whisper. I try to understand if the lyrics imply a grandiose kind of release, or more of a Phoebe Bridgers tone (raspy, old soul caught in a youthful body).
Deafening silence in the room, no backup acoustics. My tonal mistakes on a pedestal, judged by no one but me. Phone lying in some drawer somewhere, turned off. I test individual lines with different variations. Sometimes what fits for one word doesn’t fit for another. Leads me down intriguing paths, mixes of raspy softness, a pop-like melody, a screech. I want to return to my painting. Only for a split second. It sits idyl on the steel table on the kitchen-side balcony over layers of newspaper, conclusion already drawn out, some “fill in the numbers” type canvas. I crave the familiar comfort of completion. Of some empty participation certificate that no one else sees. Probably ugly too, printed out with some faux-Roman font.
But the outcome of the art itself is besides the point.
The point is that I am here. And I am thrilled. Feeling only comparable to a child right out of the womb. Sees its first toy. Maybe even a crawl one day. Nothing outside of these walls is relevant in this very moment. And to operate outside relevancy, from scratch, without any thought of where it may lead, but with commitment to the process of making the art anyway, over and over, even through fear, is a beautiful thing.
When I say I need a vacation, I am fooling you.
If a caveman’s most natural state of being is through movement, interaction, and creation, I fear I have plunged too far from the source.
A series of habits builds up over time when one is at work. Sometimes, these are physical sensations—a throbbing begins growing in the right side of my neck, exacerbated by the twists and turns made between monitor screens in a rush to get something done. A familiar ache in my lower back, a curvature forming. A mumbling in my joints. My body becomes confused why we aren’t playing sports all afternoon, why the hours pass without moving my legs and feet. My body reminds me of these habits when we return to the mat or the courts. I hear the creaks and the cracks as I bend my right knee forward and lift my left arm to the sky; I hear the confusion in my knees like a neglected dog as I plant in a split-stance on the asphalt surface to make contact with the tennis ball.
Other weeks pass where I move from home to work, and work to home without much acknowledgement or interaction with the worlds in between. It becomes evident when I feel a rush in my stomach as I wait in line for coffee, wondering if this feeling of urgency means my pending latte is useless. The barista asks how I am doing, and I don’t know what to say or how to talk, even though I talk for a living; it’s as if I have become accustomed to only talking in a certain way. Then, I leave, with shame, because I don’t particularly like this about myself—that I speak more naturally in conference rooms than in coffee shops.
At times, I fear that I am beginning to forget how to operate and complete outside of another human’s instruction. I must be told. Or worse: instinctual ideas originate on my own accord, only to be immediately conditioned by the outside world. I ask technology to provide clarity to my instincts. Autodidact no more. My patience for taking in new information lowers as weeks pass, and I start to lack perspective. I begin to operate in a tunnel, and anything that rears me off the course feels more like a catastrophe than a manageable and natural part of living. It’s a feeling of walking around the world aimlessly, going through the motions. Or worse: no feeling at all.
When I feel myself gravitating too far from the source, that is when I know it is time to take a creative vacation.
A few years ago, I started allocating vacation days solely to periods of undisrupted creation time. These creative vacations are usually two to three days long, sometimes attached on either end of a weekend. Though I don’t have to, and I don’t always, I’ll usually find a change of environment to remove myself from a place I associate with routine (and one that I find equally inspiring and mesmerizing). My creative vacations have proven to be cheaper and more refreshing (at least to my psyche) than traditional vacations where I may lie on a beach somewhere doing nothing. (Please, bear with me. This isn’t a war on rest. Or buying plane tickets to Cabo.)
My first creative vacation was a two-day stint in New York where I crashed with a friend for a few nights and putzed around East Village with no responsibilities. I sat in coffee shops, went to restaurants alone with intriguing interior decor and low-lit bars, and wrote. For two days, I pretended to be a writer in New York City. Other times, I’ve driven to random areas of California and settled into Airbnbs. (I typically book Airbnbs at the last minute and on weekdays, which allows me to take advantage of heavy discounts. I recommend this if you have the gift of spontaneity and a car.)
I always bring a variety of ammo—pens, notebooks, paint, books, miscellaneous art supplies—but there is never an intentional purpose or obligation to engage in a specific medium. Part of the magic is showing up and seeing what feels right in the moment, without any outside influence. To go in with a preconceived notion of what will be created tampers with the experiment. When I arrive, I tell my family and friends I am safe, and then I turn off my phone for a day, or a period of days. The removal of time is imperative—the human mind does not operate well within the limits of a passing clock. We’re much more accustomed to the movement of the sun. I’ll wake up when I wake up, sleep when I sleep.
What each creative vacation is: a gift of inconsequential failure. Rarely does one exist anymore in an environment with zero stakes. For days on end, I give myself permission to create whatever I want for no reason. Beautiful, ugly pieces of work. I work on my fiction novel or write songs about some past breakup for no reason other than I just want to. These days are a reminder that I am allowed to live many lives, and these lives don’t have to mean anything. I teach myself new things, or I don’t, and maybe some project that originates from a trip seeps into real life. Or it doesn’t, and stays tucked in a notebook that was only opened in a random Charles Moore cabin somewhere.
Who I am after a creative vacation is my favorite version of myself. I talk to strangers again at the coffee shop in the weeks following and on my daily walks in my neighborhood. I stop disassociating after work with a glass of wine or some reality TV show, and I read poems before bed and call my friends to discuss ideas of life while I cook an elaborate meal. Or, if I’m lucky, I am inspired enough by the origination of a creative project that I’ll continue tinkering on it into the late hours after a work day, running on nothing but my own awe. I remember what it is like to turn the dial up on my own accord, to do what feels scary. I begin to feel more in control of the rhythm of my life.
Creative vacations are a reminder of my agency; I can learn anything if I want to, and the things I want to do in life with my time don’t have to serve any greater purpose. People often confuse meaning and purpose. Meaning is emotive; purpose is a drive of function. My life can have meaning without the individual pieces always leading to a functional output or destination. The irony is, people who find beauty and who experience boosts of energy in acts of creation (the “meaning”) often naturally find themselves with more tangible purpose. These trips are as much of an experiment in human instinct as they are about sitting on the floor drawing doodles. And the energy from the experiment transfers and compounds, until a sense of childlike wonder, of innate problem-solving and creativity, of movement through the world with intention and clarity returns.
Call it a “vaca-gency” if you will.
I like that line “a gift of inconsequential failure.” If it makes its way into a song of yours, I’d ask that you share the lyrics here!