Art As Sustenance

Here we are. I am in the last week of sessions with dear clients before I prepare for a 10-week sabbatical where I will take a pause from client work while I travel across the continent with my family. I didn’t anticipate that saying good-bye to clients would feel so big, but it has been significant. And I find myself wanting to leave people with some words of wisdom, yet without knowing how to express the gratitude and hope I have for them. So, I turn to art.

I’ve added another thing to my to-do list in the past week, which might sound counter-intuitive as I have a million things to get done before we leave, but it has been helping to center me: water coloring, drawing plants, and reading poems. That’s where I go. It’s what I do when there is a lot going on at once. When things feel a little too much or I can’t find the right words, I lean into art.

In graduate school when I would be drowning in all the textbooks, clinical studies, heart-wrenching stories of people’s lives, I would go to the library and find the poetry section and grab a book (usually Mary Oliver). I’d open it up to find a single poem, usually just a paragraph. There I could find some solace, for somehow the poetry could make sense of all the complexity in this life.

And then my husband sent me this clip of Ethan Hawk talking about the value and importance of art:

Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live and they're not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg's poems or anybody's poems. Until... their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don't love you any more and all of a sudden you're desperate for making sense out of this life and "has anybody felt this bad before, how did they come out of this cloud?"

Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can't even see straight ... and that's when art's not a luxury, it's sustenance.

And so, I continue to find ways in which art sustains me and encourage those I see to turn toward art — it could be even just creativity and nature. That is, I suppose, where much art is inspired from. And we are a part of it all.

A poem for you, reader:

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

– Wendell Berry