You are an artist by nature
You are an artist by nature.
You might not know how to dance (me).
You might not paint or draw or thread your hand along a line of sweet prose…
You may not weave words together in imaginative and beautiful ways.
You may not sew or knit or bring flavours together in a dish served up to those you love.
You may not sing or rhyme or deliver impassioned speeches.
You may not sit before photoshop or fresco or indesign.
You may not bring stories and characters to life on stage or screen.
But you do have the ultimate artist's tool: Your body.
But you do have the well of an artist's inspiration: Your soul.
But you do have the hub of an artist's creative ideas: Your mind.
You are an artist, and your life is your canvas, is your stage, is your page, is your recording device, is the meal your preparing, is the sweater your knitting, is the prose you are writing…
Paul wrote to his friends in Ephesus and, in one of my favourite translations of this verse, said:
"We have become [Gods] poetry, a re-created people…"
We'll get to this verse tomorrow and re-define a little, but today, let's stay here first:
You are an artist.
Sometimes we get stuck not because something is too hard, a situation is too devastating, we are too in shock and trauma and pain, things seem to be above our pay grade, we're at a loose end and don't know which way to go, we can't tease out the solution to the problem - it seems that no matter what we do, nothing will work - although these sensations can feel very real and very true.
Sometimes we get stuck because we forget that we are artists, and that this is part of the process. We see being stuck as an obstacle rather than a pathway. We see being stuck as a sign that we're not capable, or we've made a wrong choice, or we've failed. We make 'being stuck' bigger than what it is. We catastrophise about it, read into it, and make it a monument to our inability to be good at life.
But what does it mean to be good at life if it doesn't mean going through seasons of stuckness like they are also taking you somewhere good and true and distilled and wise?
What does it mean to be successful at life or a job or in a relationship or whatever it is if you don't face some knots that you have to untangle, some valleys that you have to plod your way through, some walls that you have to scale, some oceans that you have to sail… Success isn't ease, and art isn't easy.
Rumi said:
"Inside is an artist you don't know about."
Henry Moore said:
"To be an artist is to believe in life."
So let me ask you, what do you believe about yourself and this stuckness?
It seems to me you have a few choices:
You can believe that you're stuck, and it's hard, and your pretty powerless, and you're not sure you can get out, and being stuck sucks, and it means somewhere along the way you went wrong, and now you have to fix it, but it's too hard, too messy, too effed up. So you stay in this stuckness like it's a prison, like you're trapped.
Or, you can believe that you're an artist, that this stuckness is not a sentence, it's not a disciplinary action, a consequence of wrong-doing or misstepping. You can believe more generously about who you are and what stuckness is and how, together, you just might create the next chapter of the masterpiece that is your life. This isn't a prison; it's a pathway, it's a page with some currently non-descript squiggles on it, a song half written, a speech not yet delivered, a stage right before it's danced upon… I wonder what you will create from this pregnant, gestating, yet-to-birthed place that you're in?
After all, you are Divine poetry… your life is an expression of the untenable… will you grace the world with your prose? Or stay locked in a prison that isn't really one?
CREATIVE PROMPT: Stuckness isn't a consequence, a prison, or a place of failure. What you believe about yourself and what being stuck means directly impacts and influences your experience of it. What do you believe stuckness says about yourself and your life? In what ways could you re-write that belief to create something more generous, gracious, human and real?
Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco
From this week’s series, "Creative Prompts", with a subscription, in the App.
