*Tippi Ocampo*

Journaling is something I’ve been doing since I first held a pencil and learned to put a sentence together. I never took a writing class, but I’ve been writing all my life–I have personal journals, travel journals, idea journals, gratitude journals, scrapbooks, sketchpads, notepads, along with a multitude of random bits of scribbled and doodled on pieces of paper. Writing and designing to me are no different, just varying forms coming from the same impetus to express and share. Here’s an entry from my old journal that I’m re-posting as it pretty much sums up what I’ve been feeling (again) these days…

——-

(First posted in 2008)

It’s been nine years since my ‘sabbatical’, since the fork in the road that diverged my path down a parallel reality where no roads existed.  But before that came the restlessness, the inner rumblings that made its way outward, propelling the change.

I’ve stood on shifting sands since then, learning to find my balance, discovering how to ride the movements of the ground like a wave.  Growth is inescapable, but in a world dead-set on predictability and stability, growth seems like the forebearer of chaos.  It shakes our foundations and erodes our ideas of ourselves, turning us, if momentarily, into shape-shifters.

Rock-solid means nothing when the grounds decide to move, and the inevitability of this change is predictable–so ironically, there is stability in that.  Embracing change, and our emerging selves, is a constant, continuous process…not a once-every-nine-years-life-changing-sabbatical.  Even supposedly immutable ‘institutions’ like our families, our beliefs, our lifelong commitments are, in reality, not the inimitable pyramids we imagine them to be, but sand dunes that are constantly being reshaped by the winds.

The images we have of ourselves–as child, as parent, as leader, as rebel, as spouse, as independent, as breadwinner, as artist–constantly appear and dissolve before our eyes, fusing themselves into one shimmering mirage.  Each minute, we are recreating ourselves, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes all of them, and sometimes making ourselves over into someone completely new.  The perceptions of others matter only as much as we allow them to matter, for even these can be made fluid and allowed to evaporate.  It is in this constant dissolution that I am starting to find myself, the mutable essence that shifts not for others’ pleasure, but because it is in our nature to expand, to grow and to evolve.

Now, in the midst of the winds, I stand blinded one minute, lifted up the next, and feel the inescapable force of change all around.  There is a new landscape emerging beneath my feet, and when the dust has settled, I have but to shake off my sandals, and a whole new world is waiting to be discovered.

*(Photo by: Noboru Komine)