flares of your future self exist in your observations

raw data: on being a visionary + a peculiar affinity for a crow

How we doing? We breathing? We living? Are we trying to be present and human? Hope so. I’m trying at least.

Welcome to this week’s installment of raw data — a zone where we discuss practical advice to living more artistically alongside a raw, poetic entry from my diary.

This week I want to discuss what it means to be a visionary. Meaning, you see something that other people can’t see and you want to bring it to life.

This is a subject that can be assembled and disassembled countless times. We can go into what makes a visionary, if all people can be visionaries, or if it’s something that can be taught. But, the truth is, I think we all experience the act of envisioning. We all see glimpses into our futures. We all decide how we pour our energy to make those visions come true.

Though, what I want to get into specifically, is deconstructing the idea that your visions exist in isolation from the rest of the world.

I find it can be really easy for me to think I am the only one who is experiencing, thinking, or feeling something. That my visions are entirely individual. That no one else is seeing a future I see.

We’re all a part of each others stories — whether we like it or not. Our lives are shared. Our experiences on Earth are deeply intertwined. We are ourselves because we are each other. There is no true individual. We are not cut, crystal clear from each other. We bleed into each other’s lifetimes. All the lives around us serve as textbooks for us to immerse ourselves in. Our visions are all a piece of a grander puzzle. My vision clicks into yours. And so on and so forth.

When I think of my artistic career, I don’t see any one artist who’s path I can directly follow. I have not seen anyone do what I want to do as a writer to my specific degree. And this gets discouraging, because I don’t see a clear path on how to achieve my visions.

Though instead of getting stuck on the idea that I have to “create everything for myself'“ — I’ve been instead thinking of all the different artists who inspire me. This mash of people who give me inspiration. And I look inside that inspiration, and I observe it.

I observe its glints, its sparkles. The way its light shines inside of me. I think of how I am affected. I write a list of all the things I love about this artist. I write a list of all the things I would change, that I would do better, that I would make more fit to who I am.

It is in these observations, I start forming a path.

Everything you want has been done in some way, shape, or form before. At least some small atom of it has already been accomplished. It’s up to you to find those atoms. To pick up those atoms in your reality. To study them. What did they do to make what they wanted real? Even though it differs from you, it is related.

What you want is already living inside your environment. The action of the visionary is picking up on the particles which are buzzing, which are in relation to the direction you want to go, and placing them together. Slowly building a process of realization by learning from the explorations of others. Just like how you are able to envision what is not here yet, you can use those same tools to lift what you do see into a new form.

Our art and our lives are collages of each other. We are missing if we do not include each other in this process. Nothing we do is alone.

Although it may feel like it, your journey is not alone.

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Here are some questions to guide you if you feel stuck/uninspired on your path forward :