A base to soft launch from.
Field Notes of Rahgah - 20260819-P1
Why did you come here?
Today starts something new: Field Notes of Rahgah, a wordless to near-wordless serial told one panel at a time. The panels carry the story. This section stays what it has always been: commentary on my practice and process.
I’ll level with you: I don’t know when I’ll have content to write about consciousness exploration. Sometimes I’ll have a month or longer of just everything going right. Ironically that tends to happen during Mercury Rx, it’s a working theory at the moment that’s going to take a while to explain.
Other times I end up feeling like I’m writing about the same thing over and over: recovery, fallow period, not having access, dealing with ego (a good one, actually, and I will use this series to get more into it), etc. Sounds like plenty, but when you’re pulling from direct experience and there’s a period of nothing for a couple months… it’s hard, and then it gets depressing, and so on.
Another thing I noticed: as my mind-to-hand connection has been returning, my own style has been evolving and re-establishing. It’s unconventional for this subject matter, but whatever, maybe that’s the pairing it always needed.
To do a loose worldbuilding series right into Field Notes like this feels natural. And calling it what it is kind of works for it: FIELD NOTES, they can be my own as originally intended or pretend they’re coming from our hero’s spaceship, I don’t know. I’ve written a lot about this without putting down any panel yet, but I needed a base to soft launch from, and this entry is definitely it.
Yea, I got tired of drawing the same motifs over and over in different compositions. When those motifs are on the neutral-to-negative/deficit side it gets old quickly, at least it does for me. It’s not productive. Once in a while is fine and a balance is good, but when I’m spotting a 1000-foot pattern? I’ve had enough of that.
These panels might espouse some of that as my practice unfolds, but ultimately it is productive as a whole.
There’s also another side to this. I think most people, me included, have a lot wrong about creativity. Probably has something to do with decades of cold, hard capitalism squeezing every cent out of every process under the damn sun. Anyways, yes, simply drawing and writing in any form and on any subject is practicing creativity.
When I spent a lot of time studying esoteric symbols, I was mostly copying. Then I found myself forcing new compositions to incorporate that content. Then I thought, again, what am I doing? In the creative act itself I’m telling myself that, yet again, I’m missing the point.
Creativity comes from within. Engaging in a meditative act of drawing, painting, and inking is being lost in the now, the present. The imaginal that drives this meditative process to its finish line is the flexing of the imagination muscle. That is 100% the most important aspect you can actually exercise, and it is crucial for non-verbal communication in the non-physical and in altered states activities.
Bottom line, fallow period or not: I need to create, it is a function that I can’t walk away from or quiet down. Every time I have tried, it ended up with burnout and just living like shit.
When I create, when I draw, when I write (documenting or not): I am whole. It’s the weirdest thing, but I could be doing this with a piece of charcoal or gouache, stick figures or figure drawing. It’s similar to my need to be physical, I think better when I am, same applies to this.