covid and the call to create
I am a child of the sixties. Born into a family of three, each of us were tightly labeled; the artist, the academic, the tradesman. Would you agree that this was not uncommon for our generation? Or maybe this is still happening. We do love labels.
In any case, for the majority of my young life I vacillated between my call to create and my belief that the artist role was already occupied by my elder brother. And, like many, I was also convinced that the life of an artist was not practical. So, I gave up on my youthful dreams of acting, writing, painting. Of course I dabbled, I constantly felt the faint call but I would quickly silence it with a hefty list of have-to’s and shoulds. Or, I would find ways to “legitimately” express my creative force; decorating my home, cooking, parenting, event planning, photography, project management.
But I never gave myself seriously to the creative process of an artist. To carving out time that was sacred and meaningful…to hanging out in my right brain, to muse, to create for the sake of creating. Like it was my day job. I had potential but I continuously allowed the inner critic to talk me out of taking my inner artist seriously while holding it lightly. I would not challenge the critic and therefore I did not have to acknowledge and grow the artist. It was either too insignificant or too precious and either way it felt out of reach. I played it safe while aching every time I heard the call.
Don’t get me wrong, I have had an amazing life and feel very proud and fortunate for overcoming many hurdles and experiencing the thrill of accomplishment. But this is not about that. This is about marginalizing an aspect of myself that had a voice and that I kept muting. The artist.
Then Covid. The collective shock, the isolation that we all experienced in different ways. For me, living alone in a new city, far away from my immediate family and friends. The experience was like entering into a long bardo, an in-between state. I had set out to work on a single project, to take some time away to reevaluate where I was going at this stage of life and instead I was stuck. Basically snowed-in by an invisible and deadly force. An avalanche of global proportions. And I felt frozen, trapped and more alone than I had felt in many years. Even now, writing about it, I have a visceral experience.
Yet it was this very stuckness, is that a word, that provided my inner artist the opportunity to get my attention and to finally be heard. Not being able to busy myself with familiar and unquestioned distractions I now had this thing call TIME. Time, space and no excuses. And yes, at times it was excruciating but it was also an enormous gift. If I could just stop resisting and start exploring. So one person’s sourdough is another person’s paintbrush.
And that’s how this all started. What started as a desperate act of a trapped aging sorta academic became the portal into the world of the artist and to my exploration and passion for mid-life creativity. Thanks to some great instructors and books I have learned so much about art techniques, drawing and creative processes and that is good. Even more important is that I have gotten to know myself in a new way. I am able to approach this stage of life in the same way I approached that first canvas; with fear of failure, courage, excitement, a sense of possibility. Numerous canvases later, with many do-overs, experiments and epiphanies later, through the act of creating, of listening to the inner artist, I have found myself filled with a sense that I have more to say and more ways to say it and more importantly more ways to serve in this world.
I want this for you. If you want this for you, we need to talk.