Art is there for us to make beauty out of the human experience.

The thing that I have always wanted more than anything, is to be an artist. To make work that is of value to our culture—so that it can show culture what it misses about nature.  I see it as my duty to share the shadow of my particular experience, instinctively knowing that it reflects the experience of others. Maybe not everyone. But at least a few thousand or maybe even millions of others. That is still a very small percentage of people who live on this planet. I can’t move forward through life with out needing to make something out of it—on some mornings I feel anger, and then underneath that, a deep wounding. A feeling of being misunderstood, small, as if I am turning into dust. And then a need to turn that feeling into something beautiful, something that suggests the mystery of its wholeness—its beauty and struggle. A poem, perhaps. A song. On some days I want to propel myself into the spotlight—letting a certain rowdy energy flow through me in the form of song, rock-n-roll abandon. A voice that carries with it the repressed rebellion of my teenage years mixed with rage for growing up female, and almost never feeling seen for all that I really am. Sometimes the scientist shows up, and wants to explain away this feeling—to understand it and put it in its proper context, to measure it. To find a solution. Sometimes I want to track something until it becomes just another aspect of nature’s design.

Sometimes, I want to sit in a deep and fulfilled silence. Opening up to the sensual information that permeates my entire body. I want to let this happen, while images-- me lying face up in the a sea that is filled with the disintegrated words and thoughts in my head. This too, is art. I am coming to see that all experience of humanity is art when we open our eyes just a little bit wider, and we let wonder back in. When we let the child’s eyes, and the woman's instincts, and the man’s power, when we let all of our experience back into our awareness, we are moving into life as art. When we make choices about our awareness—what we want to put our attention on in any given moment, we are living life as art. When we soften into, even just for a moment, the inexpressible longing that emanates from our heart. This too, is art. For when we engage in the soul, as Thomas Moore writes, we are creating ourselves. The transient & elusive material of the soul is unreachable, except by through art. Jung saw this process as alchemy, though he did not think of it as art. I do.

There is anger in me about something. It is the split between art and life. It is the split between artists and non-artists. That art is somehow reserved for the special people in life, and the rest of us, well we just drone through life, asleep. I refuse to accept this piece of culture that we have inherited. I am ready to change culture by magnifying, elevating the beauty of the everyday experience into art. Everything can be art. Who believed this? Andy Warhol. I believe he was very misunderstood.  Many people forgot what a humanist he really was. His message of art was that we are all artists—and that is what he attracted to him—underdog dreamers who wanted their first chance to be elevated. The mistake he made, and they made, was that his ego got in the way, and he didn’t empower his followers. He didn’t tell them that it wasn't his duty to make them a star. It was up to each of them to find the star within themselves. This mistake cost lives, even his own. In religion, it has been the same way, but to a much higher degree of destruction. The greatest artists, just as the greatest spiritual teachers of humanity, knew the secret was in all of us. And yet, our culture cuts us off from seeing that only that special person over there is gifted, and we must worship him in order to be free. That is absolutely incorrect, and I know this with all certainty. The true message of those heroes that we adore, that we feel inclined to worship, was that god is everyone of us. The art that flows out, that is god. The love, that is god. Our essential nature is all the same. The way it looks, and the way we access it, the way we express it—there are a billion ways, a trillion ways. But we are all artists, or can be if we choose, all we have to do is realize that this is so.