Art is not only made from things that “spark joy.” Art is also made out of what is ugly or repulsive to us. Part of the artist’s job is to help today up the place, to make order out of chaos, to turn trash into treasure, to show us beauty where we can’t see it.*
(Austin Kleon)

There are two Greek words that can mean “joint.” The first is arthron. “The arthron connecting the hand and arm is the wrist,” says Aristotle. […] The second word, harmos, also means a joint in the body […] but more commonly denotes the joints made by artisans: the mason building a wall, the shipwright fitting planks, the metal worker soldering a seam, the carpenter fastening a door – all these craftsmen are making harmoi.**
(Lewis Hyde)

There are flexible joints and fixed joints, but no joint is permanent, immovable, all can be separated, and tricksters are those who exploit these points.

They’re the ars or artists who work at the joints to create something new, often making things worse first of all – at least for those who want nothing to be tampered with – before finding something new to bring into being.

Not this or that, but the other thing we hadn’t imagined before.

(*From Austin Kleon’s Keep Going.)
(**From Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World.)

Many powerful organisations fear a truth teller. They work hard to avoid being confronted by an individual who sees the world as it is and by a person who cares enough to change things.*
(Seth Godin)

Inner scorecards are essential for individuals and organisations alike. What are you proud of that others would find unremarkable?**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

There’s a lot of information and knowledge out there that people measure and score in all kinds of ways. And we may not figure in all of this.

What is most important is try to find out more about ourselves and to do something with this.

We overestimate the importance of the things others measure and underestimate what matters to us. The best way is to try it out and see what happens:

Commitment, sacrifice, boldness and confrontation.^

By the way, I’ve just been reminded this morning that we perhaps know about 6% of everything that exists. Something to remember before we get all clever about something out there or in here.

(*From Seth Godin’s What To Do It’s Your Turn.)
(From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling Blog: The Inner Scorecard.)
(^Tim DeChristopher, quoted in Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)

Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can be here seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.*
(Nan Shepherd)

That’s how you’re going to fix the world – with your own gifts and talents.**
(Ken Sleight)

The words in my doodle are an adaptation of some found in Psalm 119.

The words we have inside us are really important for what follows. It’s why who we are can be more important than what we do because they lead us to a more primal contribution.

When we know who we are, we find our words, and our words guide us.

(*From Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.)
(**Ken Sleight, quoted in Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)

Art isn’t painting or canvas or prettiness. Art is work that matters. It’s entirely possible that you’re an artist. Everyone can be, if we choose.*
(Seth Godin)

I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognise it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak pf ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.**
(Joseph Campbell)

New to Edinburgh back in 2006, I began connecting with people and groups in the city. One of these was a group of artists who’d meet together to see what they were up to and how each was doing.

There were poets, painters, script writers, and what did I do? The first thing that came to mind was, I’m a people artist.

I help people to figure out how to live their lives as a form of art.

There’s a little more to art being the output of whatever we take in, but that’s basically it.

We notice something different, get really interested in it, figure out how to make something of this and, through trial and error, produce something artfully that is both useful and beautiful.

That’s art.

Back in 2006, I didn’t know just how true my words would become.

See where your art takes you.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: A useful definition of art.)
(**From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)

Melodrama is not the result of overexpression but of undermotivation. Not writing too big, but writing with too little desire.*
(Robert McKee)

The call of the wild is not what you hear but what you follow.**
(Terry Tempest Williams)

Robert McKee’s words are true for a story-script because they are true for life.

We all know people who live melodramatically, upset by many small things but unmoved by the big things they could make a difference in. We know because life is about trying not to become melodramatic.

The person who makes no effort to discover and pursue the thing that really matters to them is truly lost, in danger of coming to the end of their days bound up by smallness and full of regret.

Another day without following our wild is forms another cord from which it will be more difficult to escape. Seth Godin reminds us of how helpful today is:

we can begin today on changing the internal limits we place upon ourselves.^

One way to escape these cords comes from noticing and playing with the tears in reality that are all around us, often seen as mess and chaos but are the world as it is:

Perhaps, then, what a lucky find reveals first is neither cosmos nor chaos but the mind of the finder. It might even be better to drop “cosmos” and “chaos,” and simply say that a chance event is a little bit of the world as it is – a world always larger and more complicated than our cosmologies – and that smart luck is a kind of responsive intelligence invoked by whatever happens.^^

I include these words from Lewis Hyde because they connect with what Seth Godin says about changing our internal limits. Our ability to interact with this far-larger-than-we-imagined-world is formed by us. Hyde goes on to write this about people who are able to engage in such a world:

But notice that in addition to having a ready structure of ideas, the prepared mind is ready for what happens. It has its own theories, but it attends as well to the anomaly that does not fit them. We therefore get this paradox: with smart luck, the prepared mind is prepared for what it is not prepared for. It has a kind of openness, holding its ideas lightly, and willing to have them exposed to impurity and the unintended.^^

Developing this openness of mind – a general curiosity to everything and a specific curiosity to something, leads to an openness of the heart and, so, to our motivation, leading to an openness of the will – then we’re moving in the call of the wild.

(*From Robert McKee’s blog: How to Avoid the Curse of Melodrama.)
(**From Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: Approaching the limits.)
(^^From Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World.)

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.*
(William Shakespeare)

Choosing what we rehearse is a way of choosing who we will become.**
(Seth Godin)

I meet people through my work who know what they want to do but are waiting for something to happen.

Every day they could be practising what they love so they’re ready when the moment comes. They would also discover they can be makers of these moments, too.

I know because I found out the hard way.

(*From William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Memories of memories.)

Interiority refers to a richer perceptual universe and awareness of self.*
(Peter Senge)

Adam was asleep at one critical moment in the time of creation. It signifies that Adam cannot establish his own self identity and his place in the cosmos unless he makes important reference to the one who put him into a “deep sleep.”**
(Kosuke Koyama)

Push is about our responsibility to develop the self, to be fit to tackle what we have an inkling that we must.

Pull is allowing ourselves to receive the help we will need make this possible.

We each need to have push and pull in our lives.

To have push with no pull is to be incomplete in what it means to be an interdependent contributor.

To have pull with no push is to have nothing to bring when we arrive.

Lewis Hyde finds manifestations of the Trickster character in different cultures, including Hermes, Loki and Eshu, tearing a hole in our ordered worlds or exploiting those they come upon by accident (they know the accidental is reality). Trickster, then, is:

the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world.^

When such a person turns up, playing with the lines we form with our words, pictures and ideas, we must be grateful.

Those who are pushing themselves and allowing others to pull them become those who can be the pull for others, opening up new worlds.

(*From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(**From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)
(^From Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World.)

If you truly want to get unstuck, if you want to move to higher ground or do something more worthwhile, the first question to ask is, “Am I willing to be unreasonable, at least for a while?”*
(Seth Godin)

A kairós is a penetrable opening in the weaving of cloth, the weaving of time, the weaving of fate.**
(Lewis Hyde)

There can be moments when our world opens to something else, something different, a possibility for becoming unstuck.

“Dibsy” McLintock was 28 years old, weighing 40 stones, and looking at an early death, but his story was heard by personal trainer Mike Hind who offered to help him shed 19 stones and run the Great North Run. I was listening to Dibsy speak on the radio, telling of how he couldn’t turn down the best trainer in the UK when he called. It would mean a total change of lifestyle but it would literally save his life.

What was breaking into Dibsy’s life was another reality when he was so stuck – something unreasonable, something accidental (what if Mike Hind hadn’t heard his story?).

This is only one picture of being stuck. There are boring jobs, bad relationships, meaningless days, too many choices – these are the reasonable things that make up our days. When the accidental comes along, and it will, we must be ready to move through the tear that appears in our world and into a different reality.

It is possible to make these things happen, too, or at least prepare ourselves for the holes-in-the-reasonable when they appear. It’s what I hope my dreamwhispering work is all about.

The important thing is not to turn down the new, unfamiliar, unreasonable kairós moment when it opens to us.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Being stuck is reasonable.)
(**From Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World.)

As in the case of lines, you are likely to stop when you are no longer sure you should go further – at the rear edge of the region of uncertainty.*
(Daniel Kahneman)

Even within cultures strong on destiny, and social order and laws, there are trickster characters who help the people to playfully question the lines and to cross them.

We all need to find these tricksters and to learn how to be tricksters to others.

(*From Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.)

More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens.*
(Lewis Hyde)

we’re not seeing all the things we’re not learning, not engaging with, not creating, because we’re so busy learning like it’s 1904**
(Seth Godin)

In the first and second parts of my accidental artist posts, I was thinking about how important it is to be a participant rather than an audience member, and being open to and paying attention to the “noise” of distraction.

The thing is, the more we participate the more we become artists because we are being open to all that is, not some limited essence of is-ness, and we are learning how to be playful.

In his lovely children’s story and (adult fable) The Dot, Peter Reynolds has his protagonist Vashti exclaiming to her teacher:

I just CAN’T draw!^

Here’s how the story unfolds:

Her teacher smiled.

Just make a mark and see where it leads you.

Vashti grabbed a felt-tipped pen and gave the paper a good, strong jab.

There!

Her teacher picked up the paper and studied it carefully.

Hmmmmm.

She pushed the paper towards Vashti and quietly said, Now sign it.^

As the story continues to unfold, Vashti finds that her teacher has framed her dot and hung it on the wall. Vashti finds herself thinking she can do better than that and begins to draw and paint all manner of dots, even one without a dot.

The story tells me of how a distraction can become our art.

Someone has commented on my posts that they can never understand them and now they just skip over them.

That’s okay, you can’t distract everyone, but for those willing to explore the noise, the accidental and the distractive, there’s a whole new way of looking at things open to us.

(*From Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Computer education is an oxymoron.)
(^From Peter Reynolds’ The Dot.)