doily
You’re reading The Bound Report. Every few days, I get medieval (astrology) on you and boss you around to keep you accountable to your creative life. Thanks for being here.
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Excellence: a result of a quality of obsession, a concerted focus, drilling into alternating repetition and rest, exertion, extension, and rest.
Anticipation joins the commitment to sustained effort, fantasies of enjoying the powers lying on the other side of acquisition.
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Ages ago, in the thick of my digital nomad phase, I had rented an unfinished basement apartment in Williamsburg. A friend from California met up with me at the entrance to a stop on the L train, and we took a stroll around town.
The ambient smell of New York trashbags mixed with subway brake dust, sweat, and wafting traces of al fresco dining as we walked, aimless.
“How do you know when you’ve arrived?” I asked him, teetering on the edge of my month-to-month lease, aware of my capacity to keep the go going… (and I would—in less than a month I’d be moving to Seattle, but I didn’t know that yet)…
His answer was inconclusive, a word salad that failed to build worlds and missed the mark of the reassurance I sought.
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Another friend, home from the first rounds of the second Gulf War, once told me about soul jet lag… your physical body is “back home,” but it takes a while for your soul to catch up to you. I wish I had known in that moment of sharing how long his words would linger in my mind. Whenver I travel, I hear him say it to me all over again, and then I send out a question to my soul, where are you now? how long will it take you to come back to my body?
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Then the movie Arrival comes out, and I see it in the theater, leaving frustrated that I cannot read the book they launch in the plot. I still want to read that book, have it arrive in my mailbox, appear in my hands, enter my mind…
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I don’t think we ever arrive, even in our apparent arrivals. Even after we cross thresholds of being that establish excellence and execution of skill at the highest possible levels,
another level always looms, an unknown what-if-this-isn’t-it, but again, in the unknowing of that next, what if it is? what if you have arrived, past tense, and didn’t even know it? Now what?
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In a negative teleology, arrival is defined by departure, and arrival can only be certain if departure is guaranteed as a bookend, you have to leave to have arrived, or, put another way, nothing ever stays, it’s all a fiction of duration…
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What do you think? Do we ever arrive? Or are we just weaving ephemeral doilies til we leave the planet? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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This bound is a blip, never quite arriving (and also having arrived late!) before we get into Libra szn on Sept 22 at 5:43 AM PDT. We’ll still be in the same bound, though… one of the two places in the zodiac that provides continuity amidst abrupt change.
Want to work deeper with the bounds?
If you dig these Bound Report transmissions and want to join a cohort of creators in live conversation about the bounds and creative expression, I am opening the doors to the Leaps + Bounds lab for new members until Sept. 28.
We gather for biweekly 2-hour meetings on Saturdays at 11am Pacific for $25/mo. If you’ve got questions about the group work, send me a message! I’d love to welcome you to the conversation and work with you more deeply.
If a group lab isn’t your flavor but you want to see what the bounds are up to in your chart and how to work with them for your art, my calendar is also open!