into the wilderness
recklessness in love, and now in art
In April of 2024, I began a year-long reinvention project in which I am blogging my progress each day, then summarizing with a newsletter article each week. This is week twenty-five.
Retrace your steps.
Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies
I pulled this card from the online Oblique Strategies deck this morning as I considered what to write about this week. A set of aphorisms developed by musician/artist Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies offer counterintuitive approaches to creative progress. Some examples are, “honor thy error as a hidden intuition,” “What to increase? What to reduce?”, and “State the problem in words as clearly as possible.”
I had already been wandering around in my past, so retracing the steps I took ten years ago and after that to where I am now seems useful.
Last week I dreamt about an ex-boyfriend Elijah1. He hadn’t appeared in my dreams, or in my life, for a long time. The last I heard from him in summer of 2023, he was moving to New York after taking a new job. He had been underemployed before that, for most of the time I knew him. I was happy for him, but didn’t want to re-establish communications. I said “congrats” and nothing more.
I thought more about him last week as I planned a trip to Salida, Colorado for Christmas. My three kids and I are doing a destination holiday this year. Our Christmas Eve and Christmas day celebrations will be just the four of us, a change from the extended family gatherings we’ve had in the past.
romance and chaos
Soon after I connected with Elijah on OkCupid in late 2014, I drove down to Salida where he was staying for New Year’s Eve. It was impulsive and risky. The roads were bad. I hardly knew him. I had never been to Salida before, never knew that you could drive south on highway 285 to get to the mountains, that you didn’t have to go west on I-70. When I was growing up here in Colorado, we traveled to more upscale places for our summer and winter vacations: Breckenridge, Keystone, Aspen.
Elijah introduced me to outdoor beauty I’d never seen: Crested Butte for skiing, the Holy Cross Wilderness for camping and hiking, Salida for that first New Year’s Eve together. He brought me terror too, though maybe it would be more accurate to say he unleashed the terror I had inside me. We had a tumultuous and unhappy relationship, both of us looking outside ourselves to the other for what we should have found inside. He didn’t have a stable employment situation, reliable income, or even a direction to follow. I didn’t have emotional stability or a firm sense of how I should show up in the world. For four years we tormented each other.
What we could agree on, where we found happiness together, was in the mountains.
ten years later
The end-of-history illusion makes us think that we won’t change much in the future, even though we’ve changed significantly in the past. We think that who we are right now is the person we authentically and truly are. But at every age we are changing, even though the rate of change slows down as we get older. Our preferences change, our lifestyles change, even our very personalities change.
Who I was in 2014 when I met Elijah isn’t who I am now. At that time, I was hungry to fall in love. I felt desperate to repartner after a painful divorce. I was ready to give everything for love, even, apparently, my very sanity. I sought creativity, inspiration, and a sense of wonder through romance. In this way, I was only living out a pattern I had used to cope with my life since I was a teenager. I was driven to find my place in the world vicariously through someone else, through a man, through someone who expressed the autonomy, competence, and genius I needed to embody myself.
Now that I’ve achieved the emotional and personal stability of post-menopausal late middle age, I miss the wild power that Elijah and I channeled together. That points to where I might go now: energy, intensity, and chaos through my own creations, through my painting, through the abstract landscapes that emerge from the interaction of mountain memory with paint, brushes, and canvas. Now I find inspiration within myself, not through endless conversations and interactions with a man. Those turned out only to be diversion and distraction from my true self, hits of dopamine that left me weak, diffuse, uncertain.
I have yet to fully commit myself to art. I suspect that’s the direction I should go, that’s the risk to take. That way I can honor that crazy mountain woman who drove down to Salida on slick roads to celebrate New Year’s Eve with a man she had just met, who crashed skiing the corn snow of spring chasing after Elijah, who bought a rental house for Elijah to live in thinking the relationship would work and she’d then have an income property for retirement, who lost herself in romance again and again, trying to find herself.
on recklessness
A poem from Rumi for today, a poem that takes me ten years into my past:
Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.
Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.
Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.
Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.
Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God's favorites,
for they neither put God to the test
nor knock at the door of gain and loss.— Jalal al-Din Rumi
Is it time again for recklessness, but the recklessness of art rather than romance?
Is it time to become an art monster, just like I was a love monster ten years ago?
week twenty-five posts
Sunday planning — Day 169: Week twenty-five planning
Monday money — Day 170: How to manage money dysmorphia
Tuesday book club — Day 171: Willfulness vs willingness
Wednesday advice — Day 172: Inspired and joyful, but not ambitious
Thursday thinker — Day 173: The contentment that comes from not wanting
Friday flash — Day 174: The contentment that comes from working hard
Saturday practice — Day 175: A trick to transform negative thoughts
Anne Zelenka is a painter, a mother, and a writer. She lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado with her mother, daughter, four cats, and two dogs.
Not his real name.