Bravery

Being high up in the air provides you with such healthy perspective, pushing you into a kind of silence that is hard to find anymore. My aunt says she talks to my grandfather in the clouds. She always chooses a window seat for this reason, to sit as close to him as possible. I find meaning in the smallest of things. I have always been this way.

We are traveling back from Switzerland now, where I installed something that took numerous years to arrive in me. Countless hours spent learning about light and stones, relationship, and how the days move along, then countless more learning a material I find very to the point. Trial and error and over and over again to find the right process to express a lifetime of ideas about a simple thing that compels me in a deeply purposeful way. Then (maybe most importantly) to feel brave enough to let that thing be born. I understand that artists do brave work in this way.

For the art that calls to me, I am often met with people who don’t understand the purity of thought that goes into a piece of work. Instead, they climb onto my scaffolding as I am preparing the final details before leaving a part of myself somewhere else, and they question me as if I am a number on a spreadsheet in need of crossing off rather than the very soul inside of which the work was nurtured and then subsequently born. That is raw bravery, standing humbly and calmly against the kind of thinking that threatens the very essence of my life. I smile, take a deep breath in, and let the experience wash over me like the frigid ocean water does when I take a February swim in Maine. I meet the moment as I would any moment, certain of the song in my heart and my simple reason to sing it.

The work, the creation of it, the embodiment of it, and a life lived in truth are very reasons I have to be. They fill my bones and deliver me back home to count the freshly-opened poppies with my children who I have missed! They are my greatest creations in life, and they know all about counting delights and meeting everyday in kind. May they learn to understand themselves purely and to walk boldly into the world each day, therefore inspiring others to do the same.