001: a newsletter is not a newsletter
This is a weekly (?) newsletter (??) called practice as practice (!!) by Alex Wen (!?).
This will hopefully be a place for me to write process as many times as possible.
How it works: every week's dispatch will be a patchwork of different parts of the process, mostly writings and notes, but also photos, games, and more! Feel free to click into what is intriguing and skipping what is not. For this week, there are two parts, a flower is not a flower (which will be the main segment for most weeks), and forms/fragments. a flower is not a flower is a living archive of creative works, and forms/fragments are my essays and notes on art and media (which will eventually funnel into more specific collections, zines, blogs). Currently, they're all in various stages of progress, the sites are simple (and the ideas are raw), the hope is that with time, we'll see the sites become more functional, and the work being generated improve. I think it's kind of exciting; we are often so used to seeing a website or project presented in a finished state, but here, they are still taking shape!
Anyways, thanks for reading...on to the patchwork:
a flower is not a flower has been a phrase that has been bouncing around in my head for years since I read Thich Nhat Hanh using it as an allegory for interconnectedness. “It is made only of non-flower elements—sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower.” At the time, it was an essential phrase in my meditative practice, a way to tackle intense anxiety—how do I overcome the loneliness and isolation I felt, how do I confront the inevitability of death, how do we feel connected the same way a fish feels connected to their school? How can creativity be an answer to some of that?
a flower is not a flower is a manifesto of sorts. It might also be a structure or super-structure on how we might organize our creative projects. For now, it's an archive of some things I'm working on, some things I'm thinking about working on, and some things I've contributed towards with other people. But it's also much simpler than that, I think when I say a flower is not a flower, I think about what it means to dig a little deeper into the world around us, to think a little more about how things can be. I'm drawn to the idea of exploring our interconnectedness, or rejecting linearity. I want to lean into abundance and multitudes, muscles that I find are strengthened through both creative practice and engaging with creative work. a flower is not a flower is thinking about radical as in root, and how that intersects with creativity. How, at its core, creativity can be a means to bring about change, how creativity is a way of expression and communication.
Optimistically, I hope this grows directly and indirectly into more people exploring and sharing their process and practice in deeper ways as well. For other people to create self-archives and document, and write, and map—or simply to affirm those that are already doing so, or to support those exploring how they might organize their own processes. Maybe it will be a flower is not a flower for them too, or maybe something else, maybe a star is not a star, or a balloon is not a balloon. Maybe someone might even just say a flower is a flower.
We start the new year with an old piece, the next few weeks I'll be re-publishing a few essays from the last few years on here. In the future, forms/fragments will eventually just be a journal of essays, with them flowing from there to blogs, zines, etc.—all in due time. For now, Frank Ocean's often-overlooked visual album, Endless.
Music fears being confined into a space. To be labeled or categorized, is suffocating. That’s what makes Endless feel so liberating and soothing, even as it often traverses challenging—and seemingly disconnected—topics of war, technology, love, and so on.