We are accustomed to looking at objects.  We need to become accustomed to seeing spaces between and around objects as if they, too, were solid.  Seeing spaces can free us from deadly assumptions.  Spaces can help us understand where connections are made.*
(Corita Kent)

One of the ways Corita Kent would encourage her art students to draw a chair was by drawing the spaces.  These are part of chairness, too.  This illustrates how the unseen spaces between the things we often notice about ourselves are also who we are, part of our stories, making our stories more than good-enough.

(*From Corita Kent and Jan Snowden’s Learning by Heart.)

You have the right to remain silent. But I hope you won’t. The world conspires to hold us back, but it can’t do that without our permission. […} What do you sound like when you sound like you?*
(Seth Godin)

It’s always an evolving conversation between self and society. It’s always balancing tensions and trying to live life in grace and balance.**
(David Brooks)

It’s astonishing how we can so quickly identify the voice of someone calling us, but there’s way more to a voice’s uniqueness than this. We are all capable of speaking out new things from the depths of our lives, from the things that have caught our attention and captivated us.

And yet we have learnt that life is more straightforward if we keep quiet or sound like everyone else, but that’s survival rather than thriving. We are meant to add our voices to the great conversation taking place between the richness of individual lives and the richness of society. This is nothing less than a a quest of mythological proportions, as mythologist Joseph points to in the hero’s journey:

The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealised, unutilised potential in yourself.^

We can use our voices to drown others out or to ask a question and open a space for listening. I choose the latter.

(*From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)
(**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(^From Joseph Campbellll’s The Hero’s Journey.)

There is a constant struggle [for the committed person] to live as an effective giver and receiver of gifts. There are millions of people around us whose lives are defined by generosity and service. Personal being [Emmanuel] Mournier continues, is essentially generous. But our society does not teach us how to be an effective giver of gifts. The schools don’t emphasise it. The popular culture is confused about it.*
(David Brooks)

Art is what we call it when we’re able to create something new that changes someone.**
(Seth Godin)

What better reason could there be for continually searching for ways and means to improve and develop ourselves than to become more generous?

Then Godspeed as you enter your art.

(*From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(**From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)

This is art. Not painting, but art: the act of doing something that might not work, simply because it’s a generous things to do. The combination of talent, skill, craft, and point of view that brings new light to old problems.*
(Seth Godin)

A committed life involves some common struggles. It is, for example, a constant struggle to see people at their full depths. In the business of daily life there is the constant temptation to see the other person as an object and not a whole.**
(David Brooks)

Many of us will find our way and purpose in life by noticing a problem others do not, even though we may all be looking at the same thing.

Where others pass by, you decide to commit and bring your talent, skill, craft and way of seeing to bear.

You must trust that if this is so then there will also be the elegant solution within you. When you recognise this it comes to life, but it also needs form, and life and form equals beauty.

When this happens you will have begun a great struggle, not only with the forces surrounding the problem you have noticed, but also those within, as Richard Rohr recognises:

What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change.^

We will find many reasons for not turning the life of our elegant solution into form, the thing that will shape our lives – our True Self.

By heart I mean the place emotions meet reason, mobilise the will, and shape identity.^^

(*From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)
(**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)
(^^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.*
(Maria Popova)

Genius is looking at things in an unhabitual way.**
(Corita Kent)

Whatever it is that lights you up – with curiosity, interest, pushing in deeper, leaping, failing, starting over, commitment – that is the light of your attention we all can benefit from.

You need to not only figure out what kind of light is yours but make sure you do not cover it up or hide it away. Let it be your identity and bring it to others:

Julia Cameron’s morning pages help unlock something inside. Not the muse or a magic mystical power, but simply the truth of your chosen identity. If you do something creative each day, you’re now a creative person. Not a blocked person, not a striving person, not an untalented person. A creative person.^

I take from these words of Seth Godin that to begin the day with some journaling about your light identity is a good place to start because your are owning it, but it will also identify moves you can actually make happen. Journal about your light and then shine … for someone or somemany.

(*From Maria Popova’s Figuring.)
(*From Corita Kent and Jan Snowden’s Learning By Heart.)
(^From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)

The human soul is hungry for beauty: we seek it everywhere – in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves.  No one would desire not to be beautiful.  When we experience the beautiful there is a sense of homecoming.*
(John O’Donohue)

An individual who has become a person has staged a rebellion. She rebels against the individualistic ethos and all the systems of impersonalism.**
(David Brooks)

Perhaps beauty becomes possible when we rebel against all that disconnects us from each other, our world, and from ourselves. Beauty, then, is found in connection – wherever, whatever, whoever. And everyone has a capacity for beauty.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.)
(**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)

Finding something can mean “rescuing it from oblivion,” he mused, which is a “kind of noble act. […] You’ll never know unless you take a look.”*
(Rob Walker and Davy Rothbart)

When you get past making labels for things, it is possible to combine and transform elements into new things. Look at the thing util their import, identity, are, use, and description have dissolved.**
(Corita Kent)

Davy Rothbart may be referring to the detritus others pass by and Corita Kent pondering what lies beneath the labels we give things but their words work even better for people. Finding the hidden treasure that exist in all people. Treasure they may not even know exists themselves.

It’s hard to look beyond old labels and descriptions, but once we do and discover what has been hidden and unknown, we also find persons of new possibility.

(*Davy Rothbart, quoted in Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.)
(**From Corita Kent and Jan Snowden’s Learning by Heart.)

Devorah teaches philosophy at London University and is a follower of Spinoza. I asked if she would sit for me so that I might draw her. I’ve never been drawn! she replied. And then she started talking , questioning, wondering, and I drew her.*
(John Berger)

You don’t climb up to your True Self. You fall into it, so don’t avoid all falling.**
(Richard Rohr)

I’ve been reading through accounts of scientists working on challenges they may never see the results of in their lifetime. This kind of commitment comes from a deeper place than the mind; it comes from hearts and souls.

We must find the thing that gives us such joy, that extends the reach of your lives, helping us to see ourselves ad our work differently. Rainer Maria Rilke writes,

Art always promises the most distant and then even more remote future, and for this reason the crowd that passionately reaches for the nearest future will always be of an iconoclastic bent.^

I found myself wondering whether Devorah began to see herself differently when drawn by artist John Berger.

I wonder how identifying our art helps us to see ourselves differently, together with the work that we must do.

(*From John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)
(^From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.*
(Henry Moore)

This is the real artistic secret of the master, that he erases material with form […].**
(Friedrich Schiller)

We are creatures who turn this into that.

Each one on a different teleological journey, shifting and stretching.

Beyond each horizon …

another horizon.

So we grow so that we find that,

All you have is what you are and what you give.^

And this is enough.

(*Henry Moore, quoted in David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(**From Friedrich Schiller’s On The Aesthetic Education of Man.)
(^”Shevek” in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain.)

At first glance nothing seems to be more contradictory than the tendencies of these two impulses, the one striving for change, and the other for immutability.*
(Friedrich Schiller)

We need both journeys: the outward into exploration and adventure, the inward into reflection and nurture. The both/and is where we find the strongest evidence of life.

(*From Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man.)