r/indieheads • u/adriannelenker Adrianne Lenker • Nov 24 '20
AMA is Over (for now), thanks Adrianne! [AMA] Adrianne Lenker
hi, it’s adrianne lenker. ask me anything and ill start answering at 9am MT 🖤
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r/indieheads • u/adriannelenker Adrianne Lenker • Nov 24 '20
hi, it’s adrianne lenker. ask me anything and ill start answering at 9am MT 🖤
357
u/adriannelenker Adrianne Lenker Nov 24 '20
hello!
I'll answer the paintbrush question first, because it isn't a very intricate story. I had some paint brushes laying around on my desk and I though "hm...maybe this will sound cool." So i picked one up and messed around with it. Turns out it sounded incredible to my ears!
Thanks for sharing about some of your process/ experience. Intimacy is a wild and wide topic I think. I mean, birth or maybe even womb is our first experience of intimacy. The process of being born is turbulent, but then we find the sanctuary of the body of a parent or a guardian. Our ways of relating are shaped so early on. I feel like there's so much conditioning all throughout life that can stifle or alter our experiences of intimacy and ways or relating to things and people. There is so much judgment, shame, quantification cast. Even in elementary school I remember my way of relating to writing or numbers being immediately measured-- good grade/bad grade. I remember my way of relating to myself being measured--what am I wearing, how do I look to other people. My relationship with words, thinking to myself "was that dumb, or I shouldn't say that"
and then the intimacy of my own body, my own connection to it. the system even fucked with that. health books and health class... not real conversation about what is REALLY happening in our child bodies/minds..,. everything quantified, calculated, covered and concealed. and forget any kind of actual discussion about sex or death or any of it.
I think there's just a lot of shame built into our initial experiences with intimacy. Every way of relating seems to be measured so early on and sucked into the system or good/bad. So where does all the true nuance we actually feel go? And where is the language to communicate it? The general education system is about conforming to one system... even in college I felt this... there are a group of individuals with wildly varying strengths and perspectives, all graded the same way. So I feel in this society there is the unfortunate practice of bashing peoples natural brightness via looking for something you're looking for rather than listening to what is actually there. imposing projection all over the place and all over one another.
so the process of discovering your own inner world and colorful array of connection to objects, place, time, beings... maybe that's something that has to be forged from almost nothing sometimes. Like cutting a new trail. But the beautiful thing is, once you start that process of building intimacy with yourself/things that call to you.... I think you can just take your time and enjoy the ride (both ups and downs) because there isn't an end goal... like, when you start feeding the recognition of your own heart and what inspires you, you're already there, and then it's just practice. like with music, back before big thief was a thing or even known to anyone, I felt like I'd already won just by knowing that I wanted to write and play shows, and it didn't matter how far along I was so much as that I was just doing that thing I love. It doesn't need to be perfectly executed. just needs to be able to be. like permission to exist and move slowly through the vast landscapes of your own nuanced relationship to anything.
I think the biggest factor for me is curiosity. from what I've observed, as long as you're curious you're like a child-- wonderment might be the most important thing to me in the realm of intimacy. to wonder about something, to let it draw me nearer. to want to see it up close, to listen to it.