In this newsletter:

• Creating from suffering or joy?

• This season’s BMC Mail Drop

• Things I’ve Been Enjoying

Buiti/Buenas!

In my early 20s, I had a conversation with a friend's father. He was in a position to advise others, someone that people turned to for wisdom. We were having a deep discussion about life and art when he confidently told me that suffering is necessary to creation, that essentially you can only create from a state of suffering, as if he was imparting a very special gem of spiritual knowledge to young, lil' me.

I disagreed with him.

Even back then, I believed that learning, creation, and growth can come from hardship and limitation, obviously, but to say that they couldn't come from joy was baffling to me. "But you can't have joy without the existence of suffering, you can't have light without the existence of darkness, is what he meant," you might be saying. It's not, which was evident in him being equally baffled by my pushback.

Over the last nearly 20 years, that conversation has hung in my mind like one of those crystals you hang in your window to refract light. Occasionally, I see the refraction, consider my ever growing life experiences, and reflect:

Does my disagreement with him hold up? Can you only create [or learn or grow] from suffering, or can it- should it- come from joy?

I do understand where this belief comes from, and I get why it is repeated in varying degrees of intensity. There is so much real suffering we experience in a lifetime, whether it's experienced first hand or witnessed from our screens. The desire to make sense of that is real. The desire to create something beautiful from the suffering we experience is real. The desire for some to justify the amount of suffering we see and feel is real.

Of course you can create beautiful things from that suffering. Of course it is valuable to create things from our painful experiences that help us process and change our views about our existence. I just personally don't believe the statement "you can't experience joy without experiencing suffering" is true. To me, they are not mutually exclusive, but they are also not dependent on each other to exist. Therefore, I also don't believe that you must experience suffering to be able to create, learn, or grow.

BUT there is a caveat here.

Through these years, I've seen a conflation of the natural tension that exists in the learning/growing/creative process and suffering. With illustration, I describe the ugly phase in a piece of artwork or the hard phase of learning a new skill or the jumbly, unsure period of a project as "painful but exquisite." We find this same natural tension in all growth and learning and creative processes. It's an exciting, frustrating, bumping-up-against-your-limits wrestle with yourself that is necessary to get to the next step or to the end. If you are in love with the process, you come to expect- even welcome- this tension; if you are not someone who loves the process (ahem, side eyeing the gen AI worshippers), you might mistake this as suffering. If you mischaracterize this exquisite tension as suffering, I understand more the existence of the belief you must experience suffering to be able to learn, grow, or create; I just don't believe process should be equated with suffering.

Setting that aside, the question still persisted:

Can you only create [or learn or grow] from suffering, or can it- should it- come from joy?

I've discussed before about how and why I finally focused on creating visual art: I wasn't able to access the creative part of my brain for 4 years due to chronic illness/disability. As I started to regain access to that part of me, visual art- a different direction of creativity than I'd committed to before- was the most accessible. And it helped me begin to process the suffering I'd been experiencing in the years prior. As I began processing, I caught the refracted light from that crystal in my mind window and started reflecting-

Did I need to experience all that suffering to finally get to visual art as a path? To create and grow in this way? Can I create what I create from joy? Would it have been even better to for me to have reached this path from a place of less trauma? What could I be creating now if I had experienced less suffering?

All of those questions didn't quite articulate what I was asking, so my answers weren't quite clear either. And then the day after David Lynch died, I came across a quote from him in Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity:

"..people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—or because of—his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great—I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had."

And I thought, Mr. Lynch, you articulate bastard. That's exactly what I had been trying to get at through my questions.

If I had a wider field of joy with fewer dead areas and hostile zones, more could bloom there. With more physical and emotional capacity, I could express myself more freely. My traumas haven't widened my empathy or emotions available for expression; they've restricted them. These restrictions hinder my ability to express myself fully, my ability to create more often and consistently, my ability to grow my art practice and business in ways that I could otherwise. I do what I can with what I have. And because I actively, wholeheartedly love the exquisite tension in the creative process, I engage with it, seek it out, and try to tend to the dead areas in my inner field with the intention of healing that land growing something from it. To create something beautiful from the suffering. And what I'm creating now- focusing on the land and flora and fauna and stories of my indigenous ancestors, listening and capturing my interpretation of how the land and those stories communicate with each other- heals those areas and brings me the happiness I have.

Borikén Mail Club

Second Season Mail Drop!

These are the postcards for this season’s Mail Drop! I’ll reveal June’s oracle card mini-print on June 1st. If you’d like to get April’s coquí postcard and behind the scenes/process content for the oracle deck, join the Borikén Mail Club by the end of this month!

If you’re already a member, last season’s Mail Drop has either already arrived or is on its way, and you have some BMC Members Only content about this month’s coquí postcard below! 🖤👇

➕➕ BMC Members Only ➕➕

Things I’ve been enjoying

Earlier I talked about the “exquisite tension” of the creation(/learning/growing) process, and I love this video that goes into how our brains move through the creative process. While he is a visual artist that makes videos for other visual artists, it isn’t only applicable to us. If you engage in any kind of creativity or learning, I highly suggest giving it a watch!

On rest:

What Does It Mean to Truly Rest for Your Health? | SELF

And when are we just swathing toxic productivity in soft pants and a robe?

And last, a couple of artist recommendations:

My dear friend Haley Brown has pre-orders open for her beautiful Tearwater Oracle deck until April 10th!

I also mentioned last month that Gabriel Whitney was soon launching a Kickstarter campaign for his new project, Vittles Noir: Fur and Shadows, The Noir Adventures of a Feline P.I. (Purrivate Investicat), it is live and funded! There are 20 days left to pledge and help him reach his stretch goals.

Boina Spiral | Mugs — TORO

Drink your morning coffee from a geometric Taino design mug hand illustrated by an artist in Puerto Rico