caring
It's difficult to care. It might be the hardest thing there is.
To expose your heart to danger, to the inevitability of it breaking. To move on after the loss. After the catastrophe. After someone, or something, is gone of taken away carelessly.
It's much safer to back yourself into a corner. To brick yourself into a wall. To paint yourself into a memory. A tapestry. A still life in memoriam of way you used to be.
But we are made of movements. Of events. Of happenings. Trillions of infinitesimal paradoxes in an ever-turning dance of becoming.
The "human experience", Maria Popova says, "is the constant collision between our wishes and reality". It's "defining aspect" is found at a stark and obtrusive merger. Between the "sharp violation of our expectations," and the utter "demolition of our plans."
This is why everything we make, everything we create, is not made of paint, or paper, or sentences, but of all our experiences.
When, whether in elation or agony, you find a way to keep on caring enough to make things; that’s what makes you an artist. It's what makes you a maker. It's what make you human.
And, it's what turns your life into poetry.
ICAD - Day 44-46 - most of teh collages featured in this newsletter are available for purchase here.
P.P.S -
published a great article based on a comments section conversation we had and was kind enough to include one of my collages in it. Both are below:
Without a doubt, without those experiences, good or bad, paper cuts would be nothing more than that.
"To expose your heart to danger, to the inevitability of it breaking. To move on after the loss. After the catastrophe. After someone, or something, is gone of taken away carelessly."
Yeah, it's a tough one. I think self-knowledge and wisdom is probably the way. Weird example perhaps, but I always think about Dumbledore's empathy and civility in all circumstances. How in the world did he do that? I think it comes from a place of knowing one's self well enough, and having enough faith in others: for him, those are greater than the very reasonable fears that are always up there in the attic.