Don't shoplift the moment

On travel homework and slow-paced documentation

In the several weeks since I’ve written you last, I’ve passed several days in velvety quiet at a silent meditation retreat and countless hours drinking up the vast glens and lochs of the Scottish Highlands while riding in the passenger seat. Spaciousness settled into my bones as I befriended my dysregulated body during long sits on my meditation cushion and hiked rugged, grassy vistas in the Isle of Skye.

What started as an intentional week off from this newsletter while I traveled became a two week break after I got sick upon my return. Now I sit to write to you three weeks later, overwhelmed by how much I want to say and what I still want to hold quietly and observe.

Drawing one of the 30,000 lochs in Scotland

There is no better time than traveling to go off the grid from one’s normal life. As I change my cellular plan to my data-only eSIM, I almost look forward to missing some text messages that will only come through once I land at my home airport. I remember how younger me wanted to post any beautiful landscapes, fun murals, or unholy pastries as a way to be noticed. On some trips, a friend and I would go back to the hotel and each lay with our phones, dutifully posting our day’s recap to Instagram stories as if it were our bedtime assignment, our grades arriving in DMs as we woke up several hours later.

These days my travel homework takes the form of a saddle stitch notebook. I collect cafe business cards and museum brochures, tucking them into journal pages with glue tape and washi. With my paints and Neocolors I nudge landscapes into being, layers of hues shaping form.

Catching up on journaling while my husband watches Premier League

Writer and artist Kelcey Ervick shares how she found it impossible to sketch when traveling during her vacation last year. Instead she "marvelled, pondered, paid attention, discovered, and took a lot of pictures."

I too reach an inevitable point in every trip when I languish in drawing. This time it happens as we enter Isle of Skye, the cerulean blue sea glistening alongside the cool grassy greens and shiny black gravel. I put my pencils down agog. Skye is so beautiful that I am positive I cannot render it respectfully. Even photographs are paltry compared to the images reflected on my retina.

The longer we stay in Skye the less I think of what I want to capture and share. My interest turns toward the land as I learn about crofting culture, the issue of deforestation in the Highlands, and the large number of sheep (there are a million more sheep than humans in Scotland!) I marvel at the area’s artisans—weavers, tanners, painters, printmakers—and buy a few goods at Òr to remember them by.

During my silent retreat, meditation teacher Tara Mulay shared that her teacher Joseph Goldstein liked to say, “Don’t shoplift the moment.” Like many pithy phrases it felt both insightful and frustrating to try and decipher this line. The directive was to be present in the moment, not rushing by or holding too tightly to its pleasantness. But at what point does a person’s response to a moment shift towards shoplifting? And what about memory keeping and sketching, commonly used as tools for presence and documentation—could those turn into nefarious shoplifting acts as well?

I doubt there are any clear answers to this: it’s not like posting one photograph of your travels means you were present but posting ten in a row makes you a shoplifter. The act of documenting and sharing doesn’t immediately rob presence, but it does calcify pathways of pace and attention. Rewarding only what can be seen through photograph or drawing or heard through video ignores the remainder of the senses, and most of all, the heart and spirit.

I jokingly refer to travel journaling as homework, but it is really my personal practice. I delight in filling my trip journal with scraps of paper that would otherwise become trash. I’m able to remember more places and people and things I’ve learned.

After several trips of journaling, I now fully allow myself to take time. There are still twelve empty pages when I leave the UK, which I’ve been slowly filling since my return. I organize receipts and flip through photographs as I decide to draw some and print others. By prolonging the journaling process like this, I am better able to attune to what truly wants to be remembered, what remains long after travel’s end. Once the journal is complete, I’ll be sure to share parts of it with you.

While I was reflecting on presence in Scotland, SEE YOU passed 5,000 subscribers! I can’t say enough how grateful I am to each of you for reading, subscribing, and bestowing your attention.

Despite some efforts to make SEE YOU a creativity newsletter with a “marketable” value proposition, there really isn’t one. I share my art, I teach and give advice, I curate what I love. I work across a variety of mediums and resist niching down.

If I am just one person that can barely “focus on one thing”, I am sure you readers have lots of varying desires of what brought you here and what made you subscribe. If I had to guess at the universality that ties us together, it’s our devotion to creativity and curiosity regarding the challenges of making and sharing work. So I promise to keep showing up with devotion to creative practice, making space in my writing for questions to arise and answers to land. Thank you for joining me in this practice ꩜