How to Heal: He(art)

We are, all of us, meant to create. We are creat-ures, thus it is evident in the world around us that as a spider spins a web, a bird builds a nest, humans are possessed of a spiritual and biological mandate to spin and build a world of beauty and function. The human distinction is the ability to make symbols. Symbolism is the art of investing the world around us with meaning by expressing the invisible or intangible through visible or sensuous representation.
This is the simplest, the least unsettling definition of art and creativity. From this definition, we have come to believe and to thoroughly accept without question that art belongs to those who paint the paintings, write the words, and mold the clay, into those representations of the intangible and the invisible. Art has therefore been divided into those who do and those who don't.

The reinstatement of art into every one of our lives, both in our ability to receive and to recreate it, is to return to living with meaning. Creativity is, like evolution, like all growth and change, an irrepressible force in nature. Thus far, only humans have attempted to turn away from this call, and a case can be made that it is this turning away that is the cause of so much of our pain, suffering, and longing. This suffering, however, is the result of confusion and misdirection, not hapless circumstance.

Art, like science, philosophy, and civility, is our best defense against the insupportable weight of all that we don't know. If we could disperse the weight among us citizen artists, come up with a more inclusive outlook, we could lighten the formidable load of ignorance. In the broadest sense, art is a response in whatever form it takes--an expression of the love and beauty and terror as it is given to us through the visible bounty of Nature—that pulls us further out of the mire. Creativity is anything that fosters that indwelling spirit, any creation or activity that advances the progression of the unimpedable energy of growth that is life. The replication of that love and beauty, the balm that soothes the terror, or the release provided by the recognition of that terror, is our task, is the way of art and creativity, a whole-some response to existence.

Whether you are a fireman, a pathologist, a babysitter, or a banker, you must be an artist. Must be means, first of all, the recognition of this as your identity, as in, "Oh, you must be an artist..." Secondly, must be makes it imperative. You must respond to the dignity evolving out of creaturehood toward a greater man, toward God, and remain fearless as well as awe-struck by the vast implications. In the meeting of this challenge, you will be recognized by a light in the eye of those you encounter, as extraordinary.

This is a quote from something I wrote many years ago. I do not include the title, because my anonymity would be over. Here, on this blog, I need to keep that. I recently read The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship: A Toltec Wisdom Book, by Don Miguel Ruiz, in one sitting. It changed my life. Books do that for me, from time to time. It isn't really a book about relationships. It's about self-love, essentially, which is to me, essentially, the only thing we need to do for ourselves and for the rest of the world. Yet it is a difficult task. It doesn't have to be difficult, but we cannot seem to help but make it difficult for ourselves.

If there is such a thing as codependency (I mean, is it really so different from what ails most everybody on the planet?), this lies at the bottom, this sense of not being enough, which means that you have abandoned yourself in various ways and degrees, that the love you seek in relationships is nothing more and nothing less than the love you must come to find within yourself. But to say that to someone who does not know this experience fully or persistently, is similar to saying to an addict--"You need to quit using drugs, now," whatever the drug of choice. Duh.

So for love and art, the flint, the creative spark of our lives, here is the exhortation:

"This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: MUST I...(fill it in)? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple 'I must,' then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse." - Rainer Maria Rilke.

This is how you heal.