What The Work Alone Can Give

Dear Creative Friend,

One of the great gifts of your practice is the connection it will yield. When you are ready to show what you have made, you call out from your hermitage that you are ready. Your voice carries across the air, inviting others to come and see what you have made.

You have brought something forward into the world that hums at your own resonant pitch. You want to make it louder, to see if this art will make others vibrate the way it has for you. You want to magnify that feeling. You want to take delight in others receiving what has come from you, offered as a gift.

The work may strike awe, or it might confront and challenge. It calms, agitates, brings forth laughter or tears. Whatever the effect, you want others to encounter a strong feeling, because the work’s final satisfaction is finding an echo in another. It has contributed to your awakening. Perhaps it will do the same for someone else.

It is good to want this. Offering your work is a profound act of courage, and there are many good reasons for doing it. But there is also a shadow. It is a mistake to believe the recognition you receive will add to what the work can offer. You will not be healed or made happy by the approval of others — that power belongs to the work alone.

Your work, when done, resolves into a resonance that brings you to the heart of things. There will be times when the work leaves you lonely, confused, or frustrated. In those moments, you will want to share it before it is ready. When that happens, ask yourself: am I offering a work of healing, or am I asking others to tend to my fear?

If it is the latter, return to the work and ask what it still requires of you. Be patient with yourself in this process. Self-consciousness will constrict you — you might make bold, agitated edits when the work asks for tenderness, or go light-handed when it asks for a wild leap in a new direction. Loosen your grip and soften your gaze, until your heart opens on its own. Believe there is always a way through, even if it lies on a part of the map you have never seen before.

The work will always know something you don’t yet know about yourself. Let it teach you before you ask it to prove you worthy of love. Return to your hermitage. Sit with what you’ve made until you can feel its resonance without needing another to confirm it is real.

Honor the work by letting it find its frequency in you. And then, from that place of grounded confidence, send the work into the wild. It will do this same work in others. And you will have shared the gift of being awake, and of helping someone else wake up too.

Notes from the Studio

I’ve released a few new paintings, including this one I finished last week. There are some aesthetic elements here that are tying some of my loose threads. I’m looking forward to following these breadcrumbs.