2 posts tagged “hopes”

"You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say." — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s worlds are apt for any artist. Whatever the artform or medium the true artist pursues her or his creation not for the purpose of simply bringing this one project to fruition, but because she or she is committed to the process of manifesting ideas into physical form accessible to others through sight, sound, touch, taste and even smell.  

The experience of applying structure to the what lives in one’s heart and mind requires not only commitment to attending to one’s bursts of inspiration, but also ascertaining the skills necessary to render comprehensible the dream-like concepts and hopes of one’s mind, and images that so enrapt one’s thoughts. The artist adept at her or his craft delivers them in a manner that stimulates the observer, taster, listener, reader.  
She or he brings into form a work that when the admire, in physically touching the artist’s creation, is moved in other, more aesthetic and less measurable, but no less potent ways. The admirer as did the artist come to know the artist, as did the artist her or himself, in completing this leg of the process.

So much of what we as artists create is a recreation of who we are, our identity that is forever changing and evolving.  Just as each story the author weaves is autobiographical, each song the musician either writes or reinterprets in her or his understanding of the music, and each painting the painter completes, is but one more rung on the ladder toward defining not only their purpose in having committed themselves to their chosen artistry but also in discovering and revealing their need to create. And with that they are given a wider glimpse and perspective of the one directive that so drives their inspiration.

Author and poet, David Mura, says that, “… when the writer discovers why she or he is writing,” realizes the larger story that is coming through them, “…that writer is then able to write all the smaller stories they imagine and are drawn to write.” [David Mura, author of Turning Japanese:  Memoirs of an Sansei, , Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity, After We Lost Our Way, Angels for the Burning, The Color of Desire: Poems.]

As artists we live in the macrocosm of our hopes, dreams and wishes held within the microcosm of our imagination. These creative desires manifest themselves and all their comprising aspects the various projects we perceive within and bring to completion in physical form. We experience these desires in their early stages of their appearance as inspiration.

Inspiration is our need, the urge within us, to tell these smaller stories, paintings, and piece of music that form a mosaic to the larger end of clarifying for ourselves and others to see why we create.  The compilations of our work, the body of our creative endeavors are in essence an ode, or rather numerous variations on a larger theme of who we are, and our need to bring life to what would otherwise remain a wish or thought hidden in our memory.

To create something just for the sake of completing that one creation is myopic and gives short shrift to the intricate and complex beings we are.  No one painting can express the essential nature of an artist, both as a human being and a person who has experienced and followed through on the compulsion to bring form to the chaos of yearnings of their heart and soul.

For those who say,"I had not the energy nor the desire to persist,” perhaps what lay embedded in their words is, “I lacked the strength to discover and experience who I really am.”
A human individual is never a means to an end, rather the end of long sought after revelations, the creations of which the artist’s hand unveil during each step of utilizing their craft and skills.

Today I had no idea what I would write about in this blog.  And then one of my children asked me to help them decipher a Tarot card layout they had made for themselves.  It was in essence a reading. And my child needed my assistance.

On helping them understand the nature of the layout—three cards from left to right and representing past, present and future, I was drawn back into a world that I had not visited in a quite a while.

 
I entered graduate school to study psychology in the early stages of pregnancy with this particular child who had asked for my assistance. I took my first class in Jungian psychology as this child gestated inside me—embarked upon my dream—that of learning about and coming to understand the inner workings of the human mind. 

After their birth and for the next four years I moved through my graduate program—a wife and mother of two studying what was at that time my passion. During this time I entered into my own process of healing, that of allowing myself to go back and explore areas of the human psyche and soul—mine—that I had always relished the idea of exploring.

In addition to studying dreams and images, I began to work with the Tarot as one of my attempts to heal while ascertaining the skills to  become a psychotherapist--one who would assist others in their desire to heal. Carl Jung utilized astrology and Tarot with his clients. And so one summer, when this child was little more than three years old, I ventured on an experience of learning to swim—a major feat for someone who lost his or her only sibling to drowning. Once learning to swim I swam every day. After showering and drying I would then return home, and there each afternoon following my hour in the pool I gave myself a Tarot reading. This is how I came to understand Tarot.

All that I had learned and discovered during that summer and the years that followed, came flooding back when my child—that child who had been only three and who now stands taller than me—laid before me the three cards their fingers had pulled from the Tarot deck, and asked for my assistance in helping them decipher what the cards meant in the scheme of their life. 

It has been over ten years since that summer when I swam each day and gave myself readings.  Over ensuing years I began process painting, an experience that for many years followed an hour after again swimming.  Swimming, exerting my body safely through the water, something my deceased brother never learned to do, and engaging in the breathing that swimming requires, has always, and still remains a very healing experience for me. Incidentally, while my father was an experienced swimmer, my mother remained terrified of the water throughout her life.

My learning to swim was a major part of my individuation process toward becoming the person I was destined to be, my experience of connecting with the person inside me that I had hidden for over three decades. That my child felt the freedom and the safety to ask me to assist them in their attempt to come to know who they are, uncover their identity—that child who is now a teenager—touched me immensely.

Upon sharing my knowledge with them—what I knew of the meanings each card held and symbolized, we then together referred to the book that accompanied this set of Tarot cards.  And so the learning began again. But this time with a knowledge and wisdom I did not possess a decade and a half ago.

 While examining the cards, and then the two of us reading the meanings the accompanying text attached to each card, I began to see my child in a whole new light—not one that shattered or threatening our past, rather a here-and-now experience adding substance and stature, and grounding our relationship, as my child moves into young adulthood.

It was a creative moment. One in which I, having surrendered to a child’s request, came to not only see that child in greater depth and emotional texture, but also wherein my own past and present came into clearer view.

For that I am thankful. And also for the fodder of real life experience that gave me a subject and focus for writing this blog.

The artist, while committed to her or his mission of creating, must never remain so focused on their work that she or he forgets the existence of those closest to them. We must never lose the ability to surrender to the needs of those living with with us and in our care--individuals whose very lives attach purpose and meaning to our life and work as artists whose work mirrors life, hopes and dreams.

For in these persons—our friends and family—lay the greatest of ideas and the inspiration for what we will create.