Inspired by a tutorial by Rita. poetry ©Stacy Stephens
March, early morning
The house is quiet in the way it only gets past midnight, when the world outside has finally stopped its reaching and gone still. I've been sitting with my coffee — plain, from my own kitchen, in a mug I've held a hundred times — and thinking about life. Not in the anxious, churning way I sometimes do, but slowly. Deliberately. The way you turn a stone over in your hand just to feel the weight of it.
I've been thinking about the way I move through the world. My presence in it. The mark I leave behind — not in the meaningful sense, the legacy sense — but literally. What I take. What I consume. What I leave in my wake like a trail of small, unnecessary things.
I want to want less.
Not in the resigned way, not the hollow acceptance of someone who has simply stopped hoping. I want to be filled by less. To look at a simple thing — the slant of late light on the kitchen floor, a frayed sweater I've worn for years, a cup of coffee made with my own hands — and find it genuinely sufficient. Not merely enough. Enough has a thinness to it. I want abundance through simplicity, which I know sounds like a contradiction, but I think it is instead a kind of secret.
Less stuff means less weight. Less to keep up with, less to pay for, less to wish for in the blue hours of the night when wanting sneaks in through the cracks. I don't want my life to be measured in accumulations — piles of things that seemed important at the time of purchasing, that crowd corners and closets and the quiet edges of the mind. I want open space. I want room to breathe.
I know my work lives largely in a screen. My art, my words, my making — all of it travels through light and circuit and code. I don't apologize for that. But there is a wanting in me, deep and persistent, to also be of the earth. To touch it. To press my feet against the ground and remember that I am animal as much as I am artist, that I belong to something older and slower than any interface. The screen is where I make things. The earth is where I remember why.
I've left social media behind, and I don't miss it the way I thought I would. What I miss — if I'm honest — was never really there. I was looking for something true in a place that had very little truth to offer. Not because people are dishonest, but because the architecture of it rewards performance over presence. I would scroll and feel smaller rather than larger. Noisier inside rather than quieter. And the noise was the problem all along.
The blog is different. It is mine in the way a room of one's own is mine — not rented, not beholden to any algorithm's appetite. No one is deciding for me what I should see or want or buy. I decide what goes on the page, and I decide what I let in. That kind of sovereignty is not small. It is, in fact, enormous.
There is something in that choice — to curate my own inner life rather than outsourcing it to a feed — that feels continuous with all the rest of this wanting-less. Less noise. Less consumerism dressed as connection. Less scrolling past the lives of strangers who are also, quietly, scrolling past mine. More just being. More sitting with what is already here.
I want simple things. Food I've cooked myself, even if it's imperfect. That frayed sweater that knows the shape of me. Books. Films watched in the dark with my wife, in the particular peace of our own home. A few deep friendships that hold. I have never been built for glamour or accumulation. I have never wanted to keep up any appearance that wasn't genuinely mine. Maybe I am, at my most essential, a simpleton — and I mean that as a compliment I am finally ready to give myself.
I want to learn to inhabit myself more fully. To go forth in who I actually am, not who I might be convinced to perform. To carry less and feel more. To need only what is real.
The coffee is cooling now. The house is still quiet. And I find, sitting here in the small and sufficient circle of lamplight, that this — just this — is quite a lot.
