EXCAVATING THE SEEDS

What happens when we don’t decide what the material means before we enter it?

In 2015, I invited an actor and a filmmaker into a room to experiment with an idea I had been carrying for years. I wanted to begin with something real rather than a predetermined narrative—and allow what emerged to influence what we created.

Before asking anyone else to do it, I turned the process on myself.

2015 ARCHIVE

WHATEVER COMES UP

An inquiry doesn’t have to begin with what is wrong. It can begin with something that has life in it. A character. A relationship. A desire. A question. A creative territory you can feel but cannot yet fully reach.

We begin there.

THERE IS SO MUCH LOVE

Sometimes the place that feels like the end is another beginning.

We don’t have to know immediately what something means. We can stay long enough to see where it goes.

THE STORY BECOMES A PERSON

A story can be true and still not contain the whole person.

The longer I stayed, the more the person I thought I was talking about became visible beyond the story I had been telling about him.

I THINK I COPIED THAT

And the next explanation doesn’t have to be the final one either.

Something can arrive with enormous conviction. We can still look again.

ELEVEN YEARS LATER

I watched the footage again.

The inquiry didn’t end when the camera stopped. It took me eighteen months before I could watch the footage. Eventually I transcribed it. Parts of what I discovered entered a book. Eleven years later, I returned to the footage again. The recording had not changed. I had.

The camera preserved the moment. It didn’t have to preserve my interpretation of it.

NOW IMAGINE THE CAMERA POINTED AT YOU.

Not to perform an answer. Not because something is wrong. But because there is something with life in it that you want to get closer to.

A character you cannot quite reach.

A relationship you don’t fully understand.

A question underneath the work.

A creative territory you can feel before you can name it.

We enter the inquiry for real. What emerges may remain entirely yours. Or, with your consent, something discovered there may eventually find another form—in a character, a scene, a story, a film.

Discovery does not create an obligation to use what is found.

The process can go deeply into personal material, but it is not therapy. It is a consent-based, non-clinical creative inquiry.

The container can be known. The discovery doesn’t have to be.