My creative practice is my jiyū shūkyō (i.e., my religion and way of life) and, therefore, my main way of fulfilling my purpose statement. I see my work as imagination and re-imagination practiced as a religious discipline and an active pursuit of oneness with the universe.

My writing, walking, and photography practices are expressions of a walking poetics or even a walking spirituality articulated as follows:

Human autonomy and its expression are only possible through interconnection with the human and the non-human other, and this interconnection, like a walk, is ever-changing.

My poetics and creative practice emerged from what I call "the setting" as well as a loss of meaning earlier in my life. As someone who has to uproot myself from my childhood religion, the experience of nihilism and loss of pathos has been profound. Living in a Westernized culture with a growing sense of normal nihilism, where religious values are diminishing in worth, makes this worse.

My poetics, as currently articulated, is heavily influenced by Shin'ichirō Imaoka's jiyū shūkyō and Heidegger's concept of "poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal" illustrated by Henry David Thoreau's life and Walden as explained in the book The Plain Sense of Things by James C. Edwards.

Ultimate goal

I want my creative practice to be synergistic (i.e., a process toward self-actualization and transcendence). I want my creative practice to be individually fulfilling yet communing toward kapwa, society, and santinakpan.

Below, I shall describe the following:

1. Self-actualization (How I want to feel + what I want to achieve during and after creation)
2. Transcendence (What I want others to achieve and feel after experiencing my creation)
3. An illustration of how I might go about with my creative practice

Self-actualization

What I want to feel + achieve

Independence

I want to have as much creative freedom as possible. I want to explore topics that I'm deeply interested in. I want to pursue projects that I feel most resonant with.

Pleasure

I want to enjoy the creative process. I use curiosity and pleasure as guide to determine what to do next. This requires that my structures are flexible enough to allow me to experience pleasure when working.

Sustainability

While pursuing my creative practice, I want to be able to support myself with a source of income that provides enough money, feels good, and ideally closer to joy. I want a livelihood that doesn't rob me of the time I need for my creative practice.

Also, I want my projects to require little to no financing. If there is any need for funding, the money comes from my own pocket or from the generous support of my community. The creative artifacts created from the process are also lean and bootstrapped. Most of them will be shared for free and those that shall be sold shall be low cost. Earnings from these projects are used to support new ones making my creative process as self-sustainable as possible.

Wisdom

I want my creative acts to cultivate understanding of the world as it really is. I want them to nurture a deep friendship with wisdom, a friendship that helps me understand reality, uncover truth, and use it to act appropriately at each moment.

Impact

I want to see the effects of my work on other people's lives. I want to put myself in the position to see and understand how my work affects others as often as possible.

Community

While there will be aspects of my work that require solitude, I want to feel as connected with others as possible throughout my creative process. I want my works to be shared with a community, for free or supported through low costs. Their design and distribution are meant to build real connections between me and my audience. Additionally, I want to be surrounded with people who support the life I want to live. I want to have mentors, peers, and an audience. I want to have an intimate circle of support. I want to be part of communities that ground me to my purpose, vision, and mission, while challenging me to expand my horizons.

Meaning

I want my creative process to elevate my experience, and I want my creative artifacts to help my audience value their own experiences. I want my works to help people realize that ordinary objects and experiences are deeply meaningful.

Liberation

My work espouses a radical partiality to change. My creative process liberates me from the constraints of culture and the outside world but is also liberative to others. The positions I take on work is inquiring, freeing, and ever-changing.

Transcendence

What I want my audience to feel + achieve

I want my work to have an effect on the following people:

• my ideal audience persona
• my audience and community
• my ideal mentors and peers

I want my audience to feel and experience the following when engaging with my works:

• movement
• being outdoors in the world
• being in different positions
• existential
• feeling like they want to do something similar
• connection with themselves
• connection with their neighbor
• connection with society
• connection with the nonhuman world
• oneness with the universe

Transcendence in my work itself

I aspire for my creative practice to propel me from mere self-actualization to transcendence (i.e., communion with the santinakpan and everything within it). I try to do this by constantly interrogating myself how the content, form, and process of my creative practice relates to santinakpan.

Content

While I shall attempt to create "a sincere and honest account" of my life, my content always ought to recognize or even put to center my relationship to santinakpan.

Form

My way of writing and all decisions related to this (how my work ultimately sounds, looks, and feels) will always contend with structures that put me in constant conversation with the whole. What literary traditions and forms should I explore and use in my works? How can my choice of form reflect my spiritual, philosophical stance?

Process

I want the process of writing, creating, and sharing the artifacts of my creativity to be a way for me to truly be near others and ultimately be in communion with the santinakpan. I want to get closer to the natural world, society, and people during the act of writing. I want to think about my reader when I write. I want to produce creative artifacts that I distribute directly to my readers. I want to build a readership I know by their names, faces, and lives.

"Poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal"

Playing around Heidegger's concept of "poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal," I'm experimenting with trying to incorporate the following into my creative practice:

• Creating a "simple and sincere account" of my life. Sincerity is transparency. My work aspires to reveal to me and my readers the overall reality or stream-bed that contains and directs the flow of my life through time so that as it gains a specific contour. This reality and stream-bed is not absolute reality but rather the specific conditions of my life, my locale, and my society. My work as a writer is to describe this particular reality in the lens of a specific life being affected by it. However, my work is more than autobiographical—it is also philosophical and historical. That said, I will never claim that my imagination of reality is a necessity that could represent and speak to everyone.
• Creative practice driven by imagination. The art I want to engage in isn't driven by intellect but by imagination. This is because the reality that gives shape to our lives is made of images, usually inherited. I find, understand, and articulate that reality by being present to the here (present location) and now (present time) and using my imagination to reveal it (instilling and drenching). I refer to this process as mindful imaginative contemplation.
• Re-imagining the world. Practicing mindful imaginative contemplation involves re-imagining the world. Using imagination to create a "simple sincere account of my life" means that I could re-create existing images or even create my own images. Under the seeming solidness of reality is the fluid water of imagination. But re-imagining could only happen if I separate my ordinary ways of looking at reality (and how I share this with others) and welcome new ways of looking at it. I prioritize parts of my life that are dark and resist illumination as it is in these areas where I could develop my poetic faculty.
• Aspiring for mastery. When engaging in mindful imaginative contemplation and writing words or creating images that help me re-imagine reality, I need to remind myself that I engage in a discipline, where there is a right way of doing things or arriving at a finality for a given project. Therefore, I aspire for mastery. I aspire to find just the right words or images to speak to and of my condition. I aspire to "get it right." This disciplined approach to my creative practice is what makes it religious. It also infuses my life with pathos. However, this aspiration for mastery and proper living is also in dialectic with my aspiration for freedom.
• Regular practice. My main religious and creative practice involves this constant re-imagination of my life (the ordinariness of it) and the reality containing it. This involves a constant flooding of new imagery. Since imagination happens spontaneously, the practice mainly involves creating the environment and mental space for imagination to come through. Here is where walking, routines, and a life management system enter. It is important to emphasize that this process doesn't end, that I am under this discipline and experiment constantly because the images and tropes that give condition to our lives will always be supplanted with new ones.
• Resist die Technik. All the characteristics outlined above contribute to helping me build a life and a creative practice that resists just being another thing in the mall (i.e., devalued by normal nihilism). My life and creative practice becomes infused with meaning and pathos and I'm able to live with purpose.

My poetics drive my creative practice.