Being an Artist
“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these -- to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do” (Estés, “You Were Made for This”).
To me, an artist is someone who tends to the callings and urgings of soul with creative attention and purpose. It’s not a name applied only to those who paint, dance, direct movies, or sculpt. It’s inclusive of teachers and philosophers and chefs and plumbers. It’s inclusive of any activities that contribute to this process of meaning making. Anyone who brings attention to how the flow of meaning in their lives can be shaped towards a spiritual, creative output is an artist, doing art.
For many years, I had a mistaken belief that I could not call myself an artist unless I was actively smudging pastels on paper or crafting a poem with best words in best order. I imagined for years that I stopped being an artist whenever too much time passed between me and a hearty writing session. I was so stringent about what counted as real writing that I didn’t even allow myself to credit mind-dumping in a daily journal as “art” unless I determined that what I had written was actively beautiful or shapely or pleasing.
I’m not exactly sure when the tide turned in my understanding. I can remember two pivotal occasions when I gave myself permission to think of myself as an artist even when it had seemed I was not.
The first is when I took a course called Oracular Writing. The teacher, a poet, introduced the idea that an essential part of the arc of being a writer was the time when ideas were percolating and stirring within, possibly in an unnoticed way in the darkness of incubation. She explained that when someone put words to paper, it was in fact only one part –possibly not even the most important – of the act of creation as a writer. Being a writer and artist began in the darkness, in the void, in the unseen realms, and therefore I could think of myself as an artist all the time, not just when the pen was moving on the page or my fingers flew over the keyboard.
This idea was deeply encouraging to me. Although putting words to page was a crucial step, indeed, doing so was only possible when there was something to draw upon from within, and that within space was vaster than I had previously acknowledged. I began to see that everything I felt, thought, and did contributed to the storehouse of knowledge I could draw upon when it did come time to write. I would never again confine my writer’s identity as deriving only from the sliver of time when I was sitting in my nook and spilling the scrawl.
The second occasion that taught me to claim artist as my identity is when I participated in a digital story-telling workshop in the early years of my high school teaching career. I crafted a script and called the story “Little Green Poems”. The piece was about giving myself permission to call myself an artist for my work as a teacher. I had finally begun to understand that showing up for young people and giving them the inspiration to consider themselves capable of expressing their ideas with clarity and insight, was, in fact, a deeply soulful act of creation on my part. The result of my attention and effort as an educator did not produce a painting or a musical score or a bronze statue, but it didn’t need to. It produced human beings with an enriched self-understanding and will to believe that what they had to say in writing was of value. My own acknowledgement of my artistry as a teacher allowed me to reevaluate all those years of my efforts not as a distraction from my cultivation as an artist, but an expansion and fulfillment of that identity and purpose. While my longing to educate young people on the subject of writing for an English classroom has shifted into a passion for dream work, that longing, like being an artist, has permission to reinvent itself without losing its core essence.
