The Garden

We hear it all the time. “This person is a genius.” “This thing is genius.”

But there’s a third state you don’t hear much about.

The place of genius.

Coming from twenty years in music, I only knew the first two. The anointed ones. The rest of us hoping we might bump into it by accident.

I spent a summer writing poems - memories and small moments from childhood. I wrote three times a day like it was prayer, sitting by a window looking out at the scorched desert in Andalucía.

Here I sensed a place between logic and instinct. A small garden between two states, where ideas, images and tiny details you never noticed before begin to show up.

There, I met myself. A child. The one who always saw things. He showed me what he saw, and I had enough craft to put it together. It felt like he’d been waiting for me to notice.

I didn’t reinvent myself or go searching for a true voice. It had always been there. I’d just been waiting in the wrong place.

If genius is a place we visit, then the real question is access.

The boy I met was pre ambition, pre performance. He taught me not to try, but to allow.

Then we wait together and see what shows up.

Brian Deady