The Direction of Intention

310.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Roger and I are sitting in the back of the theatre. The performance is over and the audience is slowly leaving. Roger sets down his pen and his note pad. Roger directed this production, Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, and he took notes throughout the performance. He is quiet, clearly meditating on something and I ask what is on his mind. He says, “I work really hard at the details, at making the production and performances specific. I think that 97% of what I do is lost on the audience. They only get a little bit of it, maybe only 3 percent.” He lapses again into silence and I see a thought strike him, his head literally bobs at the impact.

“What?” I ask.

He smiles and responds, “It just occurred to me that it is not the same 3 percent.” He can see that I don’t understand so he continues, “Each person in the audience might only get 3 percent of what I intend, but it’s not the same 3 percent as the person sitting next to them. They see a different 3 percent. The work matters in a different way to different people.”

Another lapse of silence and then Roger stands and says, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what they get. It only matters that I have done my best to give them my 100 percent. To offer my best work, that’s all I can do.”

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235.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

[continued from 234]

From the archives as I mine previous writing to inform my current pondering, here is part 2 of a remake and an update of a ghost-of-rants-past:

What if you will never be valued? What if other people find no worth in what you do? Does that mean it is not worth doing? Should Van Gogh have put down his brushes? He was a pariah in his time. To what post do you hitch your story of value and self worth?

It is a story.

We all want to be valued for what we do. All of us want to be paid; it is how our culture demonstrates value. However, as an artist, the odds are against it regardless of the scope of your talent and dedication to your craft. If you’ve ever been to a casting call in NYC you’ll know what I mean.

We live in the age of technology and that affords everyone with a mouse and a keyboard the opportunity to design, to photograph, to movie-make, and to manipulate images and sounds and perceptions. It opens the artist door broadly; it overturns the mistaken notion that artistry is only for the few.

It is the rare arts organization (or artist) that makes a living through the sales of what it produces –ticket sales will never pay for cost of the play. Donations, grants, not-for-profit status and cheap payrolls make the arts viable in a free market economy. The artist is the last to be paid and is usually paid the least. If you are an artist, you will create anyway.

We live and create in a culture that has managed to link morality to money, to make a commodity of it’s prophets and sacred days, and that has convinced itself that the greatest act of citizenship is to buy stuff. It is upside down and that is precisely why we need artists! Think about it, in this nation of immigrants we yammer on and on about things like family values as if those values were simple, absolute, articulated and expected from all people in every family, regardless of ethnicity, religious preference or sexual orientation. We celebrate the individual but insist on conformity.

What we value as a culture is at best conflicted and complex and as artists we are meant to embody, engage and explore that conflict and complexity. So value your art and do your work. Stand in the conflict. Put your fingers around the complexity and begin to mold it. Launch your work out into the world because you value it – it’s your responsibility to maintain the balance between what you create and how it is offered. Focus on what you bring and not on what you get. The rest is out of your control and fretting about it takes energy that you could otherwise use to create.

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234.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

In another blog in another life I wrote some rants to artists – meaning, of course, that I wrote them to myself. As I set up my new business I have been reviewing the archives and I came upon my rants. Here is a remake and an update of a ghost-of-rants-past (it is Halloween, after all). Read the word “art” as also meaning “life:”

What if you will never be understood? What if trying to be understood was a fool’s errand, a waste of your precious energy? Consider this for a moment: all great art lives beyond the rational; it transcends the world of data and fact, of the linear sequential and the prescription, and it reaches into places where words cannot go. You can’t measure it, quantify it, or contain it. You can engage with it. It only has meaning in relationship.

It seems to me the power of the arts (life) is in NOT being understood; moving beyond understanding is the point, not the problem. Trying to be understood is really a mask covering the need to be liked or appreciated. Like yourself. Appreciate yourself. What other people like or don’t like is none of your business. Besides, you are the only one who will ever really understand yourself – no one else has access to your internal workings. No one else really knows what you believe. Free yourself from the attachment to what others think and pour your energy into what you bring to life – and bring it.

As my mentor, Tom, used to say, “You will know the power of your work by the size of the tide that rises against it.” Some people may appreciate you and your work, others will not. That is beyond your control. What is within your control is your capacity to do your work. You can cut your ears off investing in what others may or may not think about what you create or you can do your work and offer it to the world. Trying to be liked or understood will knock you off your artistic rails; you’ll lose sight of the essential and trade it for the superficial. It will make you timid. Stop trying to be understood and do your work. Stop trying to be liked and offer your work as if it might actually change someone’s life – because it might.

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146.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

My dear Sam, poet, photographer and lover of life, is working on a presentation for coaches entitled The Art of Coaching. In preparation he asked a few lovely questions of his artist friends. He asked us not to think about it but to respond with our first thoughts. His questions were: under what conditions does an artist flourish? What do you notice about the environment around you and in you when you are at your best artist self?

Here was my no-thought response:

It is perhaps too simple but this is what I know and experience: the artist in me becomes present (it is all about presence; artistry is not something you do as much as something you are)- there is no past or future, just what is before me (and in me) in that moment and we are not separate: the poem or the painting or the story and I are one fluid thing. The world (my seeing) moves from nouns to verbs, from object focused to process focused. When I am present the environment, my seeing of my environment, comes “alive;” the colors are more intense, the sounds and textures of my space richer and clearer. I guess, in my artist self, there ceases to be a separation between me and my environment, I am not moving through a day, I am in the day. All concepts of “time” disappear. I am the creator, the creating, and the created.

Artists flourish when the emphasis in life is moved from “answer seeking” and placed on “question engagement” – the capacity to explore, engage,…to sit solidly in uncertainty: that is the environment (and I think it is an internal environment) necessary for humans to flourish and fulfill their creative impulse.

Like me, Sam believes that all humans are infinitely creative. He’s dedicated his life to helping people reacquaint themselves with the inner artist that they sent packing too many years ago to remember.
The coaches attending his session are lucky, indeed. I’ve cautioned him to hide all the crayons in the hotel as his session might inspire all of those over-serious pucker-faced adults to sit on the floor and doodle on the walls.

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104.
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I’m having the oddest experience and am a little off balance. I opened a time capsule today – a capsule that I packed with great care and attention more than a decade ago. A few moments ago, I opened the lid. There was lots of stuff in the box but nothing that I remember putting in it – instead I found many things that I remember leaving out precisely because they were not essential. What happened?

Many years ago I burned most of my paintings but before I did, I carefully chose 20 or so of my favorites, rolled them, sealed them in a box, and sent them to a friend. He promised I would never have to see them again. Recently, after more than a decade, I was ready to reclaim those paintings and my friend sent them back to me. This was the box I opened the today.

The paintings that I found rolled in the box were not the great paintings I remember selecting, in fact, most were pieces, had I not burned them, I would have painted over – only the canvas was worth saving!

I burned the paintings on a beach at a fire pit and people helped me – people I did not know, walking by, recognized what I was doing and wordlessly helped me. They held vigil with me by the flames. They helped me stack the paintings on the fire. An elderly man helped me carry a painting from my truck – it was the last painting in the truck that day – I remember it vividly – and together we set it on the flames. Today, I pulled this painting from the box.

The universe is a trickster that reminds me to laugh, to not attach too strongly to what I remember, to let my gods run like sand through my hands. Over three long days in 2000 I let go of my paintings and my idea of myself. Today, I let go of those things all over again – only this time there was no need for fire. I can laugh.

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102.
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I know why there are so many artists and poets in Nebraska. It is the sky. There is a lot of it and it changes dramatically by the minute. I’ve been here almost a week and I can no longer count the times that I’ve been stopped in my tracks by the ballet that happens there.

All the way down 2nd Avenue, P-Diddy and I screamed like we were kids on a roller coaster, the lightning storm was a terrifying and brilliant ride. The clouds help me understand the Greek plays, the grey roiling angry power of Zeus and moments later all is forgiven, pink roses blossom and I am breathless. The base thunder shook my hotel and by the time I got outside to stand in it the sun was on my face and I wondered if I had imagined it.

Patti and I stood by the rental car long after the gas pump had turned off and watched the sky flicker and crackle with lightning too far away to hear. It went on and on and on, I held my breath for several minutes of sky dancing. It was the best fireworks display I’d ever seen, so brilliant, in fact, that we didn’t speak a word. We couldn’t. It was beyond words, beyond our capacity to capture or contain. It demanded our presence.

It is the sky, this “beyond” quality, this requirement of presence that inspires so many artists and poets in Nebraska. Presence and Beyond; It is the artist’s job to stand in the midst of such awesome power and open the trail for others.

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