Both poem and painting offer their combined visions – rimed with pathos and irony – as an enduring truth of life: the world often doesn’t notice us. This understanding has been a crucial urge for most of what I’ve written in fifty years. Mine has been a life of noticing and being a witness. Most writers’ lives are.
– Richard Ford, Between Them
This is your assignment.
Feel all the things. Feel the hard things. The inexplicable things, the things that make you disavow humanity’s capacity for redemption. Feel all the maddening paradoxes. Feel overwhelmed, crazy. Feel uncertain. Feel angry. Feel afraid. Feel powerless. Feel frozen. And then FOCUS.
Pick up your pen. Pick up your paintbrush. Pick up your damn chin. Put your two calloused hands on the turntables, in the clay, on the strings. Get behind the camera. Look for that pinprick of light. Look for the truth (yes, it is a thing—it still exists.)
Focus on that light. Enlarge it. Reveal the fierce urgency of now. Reveal how shattered we are, how capable of being repaired. But don’t lament the break. Nothing new would be built if things were never broken. A wise man once said: there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. Get after that light.
This is your assignment.
-Wendy MacNaughton and Courtney E. Martin
I love these gorgeous words that I found on Being Rudri.
All art holds the knowledge that we’re both living and dying at the same time. It can hold it.
-Marie Howe
Every moment of life holds that knowledge, too.
There is in Celtic mythology the notion of “thin places” in the universe where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the vocation of the wise and the good – and for those that find them, the clearest communication between the temporal and eternal.
Mountains and rivers are particularly favored as thin places marking invariably as they do, the horizontal and perpendicular frontiers. But perhaps the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery.
~ Rev. Peter Gomes
Another gorgeous passage I saw (I had read it before, and actually think often of thin places, but I had forgotten the specific passage) on the absolutely perfect First Sip.
To take what there is, and to use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived – to dig deep into the actual and to get something out of that – this doubtless is the right way to live.
-Henry James