Im touched by the messages both public and private from Facebook friends, both those I know and those I know virtually, thanking me for my stories, or glimpses of life as I move through it. I love to write as much as I love to watch, to look for tales and anecdote- to find connections in lifes chaotic adventure. In many ways my art and design work, really anything Im struggling with creatively, is enhanced and clarified through these glimpses. Watching them and taking the kinds of mental notes needed to produce a biography of a moment in time is a powerful exercise in self discovery. It marks your place, like a dot on a paper without boundaries. To choose not to watch, to be in such a hurry that I cannot linger when something magical is about to happen, to be worried about my own life and what people expect of me so much that I walk away and miss something, would be- for me at least- a kind of dismissal of life and all its mystery. I let things happen. Good things and bad things. Then I write about them. I write so that there is a dot on my paper. I write so that in time when I stand back and look at my dot filled paper I begin to see what a stargazer finds in the night sky; patterns. So here is the hook. When you choose to write, to live your life from dot to dot and tell your story, you become suspect. My Facebook page grew quickly as I wrote the stories that caught my son and I in a hurricane of love and fear as his mother died of breast cancer in 2009 and 2010. People stepped up to the mike-rophone and told me how much they loved my stories. They felt close to me, connected, and even inspired by them. But like a flood pushed by a strong gale, the pain eventually receded and the stories of my life quickly balanced again. Suddenly I was spewing over politics, or discussing religion, or gender, or, god forbid, whats wrong with America. I used the magic of hundreds of stories unfolding around me to discuss the pain and joy of life from my perspective- just as I had done during Lizs slow disappearance. That Christmas I was sitting in the warm living room of family, surrounded by the aromas of a holiday kitchen and the quiet shuffling of feet in socks coming in for coffee and a warm spot on the sofa. One of these friends, one who had been very open about loving my stories during Lizs struggle with cancer, in-boxed me. She said she had to decide to block me and all my posts because she could not bear to read things offensive to her beliefs. I suppose she meant that, as a Christ follower, she could not touch or be near someone who was not pure. Pure in the way she viewed herself. She will never know how much her comment hurt me that day. But it didnt stop there. Over the next year I was blocked, un-friended, and taken off the news feeds of hundreds of real-time friends- people I saw and kissed and hugged at market events. People who love me only when my life experiences uplift them and their own world views. Thats painful. Any artist, designer, creator, writer, musician understands this pain well. It is part of finding your center, and it quickly helps you discover a very small intimate protective family of people you can trust- with anything. It reminds you that real love is in short supply, and that most people who ask you how you find these moments and how you discover the creative dots connected in your life experience, and how it is that those things become vision in your work, have only one thing standing between them and the magic. Themselves.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 13:38:46 +0000
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