Decay and Rise by musical artist and creator Courtney Nord is emphatically gorgeous. Its unmitigated honesty and brutal hope make it both a clarion of empowerment and an oasis of understanding. Not a single one of us escapes life without scars. For some, the scars are external and easy to point to. Others are able to walk around disguised as “normal,” their scars hidden from view. What Decay and Rise reveals so poignantly is that being bruised but also perfect and beautiful is the essence of being human.
Below, I offer the following selections from Courtney’s book to impart the emotional cadence of this special creation. Variations in spacing and alignment are intentional and are meant to roughly correspond to their original in Decay and Rise, although they are not mimicked precisely here due to technical limitations. If you like what you read, you will appreciate Courtney’s specific choices of font, visual emphasis, spacing, etc., even more.
We begin and end with only
ourselves, instruments of our being. This book is dedicated to just that. This book is dedicated to the self
If you believe in yourself,
that alone will take you where you yearn to be
As a
poetry book, the nature of these writings
is poetic, this means sentence structure,
spacing, and spelling/ grammar is all
artistically derived and to be taken into
interpretation by the reader. Raw
material with no editing is to be expected, thank you
Quick, intuitive, no order and as honest as the bird of a thought flies into my mind sings then lets me go.
But nobody speaks the language of my
soul, I haven’t found them, yet
The self does not hold the water but drinks it, retains it.
Our minds need the essence more than we can think the
conscious thought of needing it.
Every time I saw the Smoke thicken the sky
from all the fires up in northern California, I couldn’t help
but go inward and see my own surplus of death that
needed to be burnt and sent away into the sky.
The smell always got me excited like the fourth of July and
the smoky air then it almost felt like a celebration a
clearing a restoration and the abundance of super rich
condensed nutrients from the ashes on the soil were my
pot of gold
I use this metaphor to turn shit to gold I presume.
By chance you could be happier and better off than you can
possibly imagine at this moment right now. Fathom
That’s where your future lies
How we write our past is how we create our future
Maybe my own certainty of this foggy cloud is what made
it so golden
We are made to
repress ourselves as to not seem flashy, but we are
made to look and always be sad and tired because then
they can sell us a fix.
There is no fix.
We are whole, feel it.