Creation itself was the fall. A burst into the thorny beauty of the real. Annie Dillard
Thank you, Annie Dillard.
Creation can also feel like our own failure.
That’s unfortunate and usually unspoken.
Thorniness can be piercing, a reminder that we are still alive at all - creating instead of merely consuming.
Would we rather be in the waxy, overlit region of the unreal… at a mall?
Choose your fall wisely, for in thorny beauty is where we remember we are still on alive time, not dead time.
Creation is a gift. It’s a sacrament, a returning to the world.
Creation is a dance between the maker and the made. There is an I who makes, who gives birth. And there is another I who reflects on what she makes.
Last year, I made a painting that captures this dance. Swirls of grey matter evoke a skeleton, an X-ray, and the inside of a nearby galaxy. In its abstraction, it embodies the mystery and complexity of the creative process.
In the end, what matters?
What matters is having created it. But I agree with Seth Godin that what makes it art is that it’s shared.
Marcus Aurelius writes what I often need to hear.
When I look for them, I find them.
He writes: “No one can implicate you in their ugliness.”
We consent to be implicated.
We don’t have to be undone by bad actors, assholes, or people who aren’t interested.
We don’t need to be steadily unwound by the world. We can keep a quiet landscape, an inner hospitality, and a friendliness with possibility and being surprised.
I recommend this.
What ARE we implicated in, then?
We are implicated in what nails and hammers we choose to hammer with.
The intersection of implicated and not implicated invite us to take a friendly seat and figure out what hammers, nails, and undoneness might be going on right below our level of consciousness.
