Dear Artist,
This last month I’ve had the tremendous privilege of teaching a group of artists my most popular online course, Teethkiss. These artists have been brave, vulnerable and committed to action. These artists laid out their guts in front of me and attempted to organize them into a pattern of their own desire and creation.
It was a really, really good time and I’m sad that it’s done for now.
During the last week of class, I taught a lesson that I gave as a presentation around 6 years ago. It was called “Return to Wonder”. I have shared it as a class for my paid subscribers here.
Tucked at the very end of that presentation was a piece of writing I made in a stream of consciousness flow state. Here’s the catch: I never actually shared that piece of writing. At the time I did the presentation, I suddenly became too self-conscious and decided to nix it. But I did share it with my class this month, and I’d like to share it with you now. My hope is that it pierces whatever haze needs piercing, and reaches straight through to your artist heart in order to march you toward making, making, making.
Why? Because we need you. We need your art, your heart, your imagination and creative power right now so much. We need it to come together, to build a new world and to know the beauties of the world in which you have lived.
Here is the piece:
Look, the more I know, the less I know. The more I search, the more I wonder. What was at the bottom of my pain, waiting for me? More pain, and more pain, and more after that. And every time I swallowed the pain pill with courage and grace, every time I said,
“Yes, ok. I will drink from that cup, I won’t pretend.” What happened? My heart got bigger. My compassion grew deeper and wider like an ocean and river at once. My eyes softened to the light constantly trying to illuminate me and you and all.
Light.
That source that dos not discriminate, but touches all surfaces according to their shape in new and ever-changing nuanced patterns. At every deepening layer of heartache I became better able to feel light graze my tear-tracked cheeks — pointing me in the direction of trees.
Glorious, talking, communicating trees. Have they been there all this time? Spreading their branches, offering me hugs? How many have I missed? What else has been here all this time, all this time?
I can touch the infinite once a day. I can have my heart broken and this make me more beautiful. I can be with each devastating or ecstatic, or unsure emotion as it comes, knowing they are a weather system of sorts. Knowing they will shift, because the laws of the universe say they must. And often when they do, they will leave me with a gift. They will leave my shape changed, as if changed by the wind every day. Bent, expansive and graceful, I receive. I unfurl again and again and again and the shape I am in from moment to moment to moment is more true to my nature than any shape before it. It is a shape that has more room for love and less for judgement.
I don’t believe in up or down, I just believe in depth. I believe both the sky and the ocean are topless, bottomless middles until they run into and merge with one another — lovers and reflections. Within, both the bird and the fish soar and swim until they collide, recognizing their wings in the others fins — honoring whatever helps each being move with the elemental.
I don’t know what will happen, only that death is coming. But maybe it’s not death, maybe it’s just another door like every terrible thing before it — the portal to new, to elsewhere. I know the only thing I have is this moment. This one, resounding invitation to show up completely. To make myself a transparent thing for experience to pass through, for love to conduct.
I don’t want to fix you or anyone because I no longer believe we are broken. I want to witness you if given the chance in a way that affirms whatever infinity is inside you. In a way that says: you’re ok. Or — you’re not. But you are here. I can’t get in there to know, under your skin to know exactly what it is like. That’s the very terribly lonely thing. But it is also the thing that we have in common: this bodily separation. It’s the thing that makes us strive to create. That makes us reach for each other. Makes us make art to say something about what each of our in heres is. These screams to be witnessed, to be connected.
And it does happen. We DO connect. Again and again it happens. That vibrating, tingly, alchemizing thing. A oneness after so much separation. Finally a oneness. Because a song or a painting or a picture holds the exact soul and emotion of the artist who made it as they were making it. We somehow recognize ourselves in that transference. I don’t know how or why it works. I don’t have the science to prove it. Just the galleries and libraries. The churches, museums, the streets, the fields, my own saved life, my own broken heart.
However different the expression, however lonely and inside and withheld we might be — when a human manages to get out of their own way and let whatever song is begging to be let out of their lungs out, we STOP. We say, there she is. There he is. There they are and here I am. Maybe that’s enough.
I can’t promise you riches or recognition, immortality or fame, but I wouldn’t want to. Because if you do not know how to be in this moment, how to stand tall, heart out and revealed to feel whatever the now is offering you, no amount of money or success will penetrate your singularity and isolation. Your soul will starve and you will be lost in a sea of discontent and disconnect. The only incentive I’m offering is the want to be here. Expression can give you that. Creative presence can make you want to live.