What is your name, and what does it hold?

If anyone asked what prompted me to start my Instagram accounts, I doubt I could give out a straight answer. But I suppose I should start with a name.

My grandfather used to say men tend to live up to their names and it is a philosophy I have clung to for as long as I can remember without fail. I was reading Siddhartha at the time. There is a passage alluding to the river; how it exists in the past, in the present and future, constantly flowing:

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.

In short, it is a book and story that has become a part of me as it exists from here on. In Sanskrit, the name itself is derived from two words “siddha” and “artha” which loosely translates to “he who has reached enlightenment”, “he who has attained his goal” Whatever goal I was to attain or clarity hoping to find, I felt I hadn’t either, and so the first name was cut to Sidd.

Long is personally rooted. It is paying homage to my ancestry. To my grandfather and his father before him who sailed from the east and settled in the west. It is Chinese for dragon, which is the year my daughter was born in. As it turns out, I birth dragons in my spare time. With Sidd Long, I had a name. A name had to mean something. A name must carry value for anything to ever be attached to a name, I thought. And in a daze I found the reason I had always been writing. I was constantly escaping whatever reality I stumbled into. Sometimes I was a dreamer, other times a historian. But the most important thing I have learn in this space is that people seldom write things as they were but rather how we wish for them to be. It’s not terrible, but it’s also not entirely great. I see things how I see them and sometimes not much beyond that.

At times I wonder if it’s one of the many things wrong with the world. No one is seeing beyond the things they can see. When you’re in your twenties, you think you’re going to change the world. But then you get a little bit older, and you realize that the world might not change. You grow a little more and let life punch you straight in the gut and think, the only change that exists is the one that comes from intent, from a choice, the choice to learn how to take a punch, or punch life back square in the jaw. I’ve had my share and though I’ve never been the one to throw the first punch, I think about all of the ways in which we are all longing for things. Starving, I say.

Over the past few years, my life’s journey has helped me encounter many of the ways I have been starving. And through running my @sidd_long and @wordswith_kings accounts, and communicating one on one with so many of you, I’m learning all the ways we’ve been malnourished, deprived.

Through these realizations, these conversations, this river flowing two ways, I’ve realized the potential in transforming the page @words_with_kings into something more than just words. Into images. Into landscapes and portraits. Into a moment that expands beyond an Instagram account and into the world. Into something that seeks to find the true Art of Poetry (in Latin, Ars Poetica).

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be inviting you to explore with me, how we might feed all the ways we’re starving, all the ways we’ve not been fed. So please join me on this journey, and let’s have a big feast together on the other side.

Roger Zea aka Sidd Long aka Words With Kings

Update 11/1/19 - Roger is now Ars Poetica’s Community Manager! Learn more about his work with us here, or…