The Weight of the Ordinary

Solitude is not about silence.
Solitude is not loneliness.
It’s finding the signal in the noise.
It’s the ache in your chest when no one is left to impress.
No story to keep straight.
No image to refresh to hold someone’s gaze.
You sit in it—
Bare, bored maybe, raw—
And after a while,
The voices that aren’t yours
Start to fall away.

Art—your art—
Not the polished kind, begging for applause,
But the kind artists like Duchamp or Bansky show us.
A urinal, an aerosoled wall, a busted wheel
Because somebody dared to see it.

There is no right way to feel in solitude.
No right way to read a piece of art.
No critic, no friend, no god with a red pen.

It’s just you
And whatever rises when the noise dies down.
The meaning is not found
It is made
In the everyday

A cracked mug,
A weathered highway sign,
A silence that extends too long.

All of it is art
If you are brave enough to see it.
All of it is solitude
If you are brave enough to sit with it.

Solitude and art are not revelation,
But the decision to stay long enough
To see what’s been there all along.

Thumbnail image depicts the sculpture Levitated Mass (2012) by Michael Heizer. Image provided by The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.