Doing It Yourself

The thing I love most about a DIY approach to life (in art-making, in organizing, etc...) is how it forces critical thought. Not being able to depend on an institution to provide blueprints for getting something done, or tech support along the way, DIY means you react to each new stage of a project and the demands it makes on you. You do this with whatever resources you have, the biggest ones usually being ingenuity, passion and adaptability.

Cash and time tend to be the resources most out of reach for DIY projects. There's a lot of us scrapping out here. It's one reason I really like Cleveland. There are a lot of people out here carving out lives for themselves by pitching in as much energy as they possibly can for their art or social vision and not demanding anything in return.

Where it gets difficult is in striking a healthy balance: how do we sustain energy over lengthy projects? How do we start new projects without jeopardizing the always precarious DIY ecosystems we already belong to?

I've been confronting the reality of my limited energy lately, and am a little sad about how there are bounds to how much can be accomplished-- that certain visions will fail if the people involved get distracted by new visions. That's an energetic economy hard to grapple with.

Several weeks have passed since the book release, and despite much list-making and a couple of readings, I am far behind on getting books into the hands of the many people and stores they are intended for. Just another illustration of how when you do it on your own, all the work is also your own, and each task take its allotted time, and that time may take up time allotted for something else.

It's becoming more and more crucial to me that people working as artists and visionaries of the ground-up variety pool our resources innovatively, lend hands to each other's efforts, live together, feed each other, raise each other's kids, and take turns taking out the trash. Each of those things take time, so each of them, whether little or big means so much to how well our visions take shape.

For a great forum on striking the balance between making a life and making a living, check out: www.passionsandsurvival.blogspot.com.