The walk of becoming, the journey in time that begins with the first delicate emergence of creative potential, is a long one. We do not become the artist overnight. I’m not sure if we ever become it. Perhaps it is an aspiration, an ideal, an archetype that we call upon and embody. Something which we are only in being and becoming.
To create art is a healing process. To transform struggle and suffering into beauty affirms life. Participating in some small measure in the beautifying of being, attuning to the rhythm of the Moment and the gathering of things: this is the dialogos of the artist.
The body of the artist may suffer greatly and yet, in his being that instrument, his suffering is redeemed. To be like the medieval stone mason who piously laboured for decades in the birthing of a Cathedral that will never be completed in his lifetime. There is something in this for us. The call to a vessel or an ark that bears us through time by virtue of being beyond any single generation. What would it be to find beauty, dignity and sacredness in one’s work and being? To be and be towards...What Cathedrals might we build together and envision? Not of stone but of speech, of music, of our hearts and our minds, with the devotion of our living in the world. Could we, in all this—in being all in—let it all go? To labour and love in the knowledge that all form must die and change and that our greatest loves and enterprises will ultimately disappear into that horizon.
Share this post