Arting For Good

February 15, 2015
Day 291

Have you ever watched water trickle slowly over the face of a rock?  Not the way a major waterfall flows in a rushing torrent, but the kind that just happens to exist?  There's much less of a single act, and more a collection of individual streams. 

I've seen this happen so often in life.  Factors of all shapes and sizes meander through the forest of my day, and they all suddenly collide in a stream, a result pool around my feet.  It could be the various ingredients of a good or bad day, or perhaps just the causal relationship of an ultimate effect, the chance meetings or circumstantial happenings which reveal a singular moment. 

My writing career has worked this way, I've learned, except it's taken me many years to see it.  A stream of finely honed skill turns this way and that, picking up speed until it crosses the edge of the rock.  A second stream of artistic choice and preference merges in from another direction, and it too begins to cascade forward.  Still another stream of consciousness and purpose rushes in with the others.  All of these and more come together, slowly over time, to produce the entire pool of written results all around me. 

As any artist can tell you, the finished product is always loved and mourned in equal measure.  Once we decide a painting, song, book, or performance is complete, we hand it over to the world with a smile, hoping that what we've created will create something new in our audience.  Our purposes for making art will vary, just as the many streams of a flowing waterfall will differ in scope and source, but they all reach that one pool at the bottom.  They all cascade over into that one new source of art.

When I write, I write for good.  I write to achieve an effect in someone, to inspire or excite them--sometimes if I'm lucky, at the same time.  I write for good.  I write for the good feeling I hope to achieve in my readers, to reach the part of their soul that smiles or cries with grateful appreciation for the way my words have affected them.  Sometimes I succeed magnificently, and other times I fail miserably.  My writing will not always touch that perfect place I reach for, but I reach for it all the time anyway.  And in the end, when all the streams of all the possibilities of all the hopes and dreams come washing down into that one pool of new effect, my art is done for good.  It's over. 

Art is about harnessing all this energy, all these streams of everything we've ever known and ever hoped to create.  It's about being and building, forming and filling, moving and making.  And when all these streams of all these energies rush over the sides of all the creative waterfalls we work through, there arrives the point when we just let go and trust.  We finish.  We marvel at the results.  We appreciate what manifested through our hands.  We say goodbye one last time before we dive back in to all the streams above, through which we build and form and make again.