The field of creative possibility
Where the action is…
For most of my life I have reluctantly called myself an artist, for lack of a better term. What other self-description is as nonspecific and allows as much room for play, in every sense? If someone at a cocktail party (a cocktail party?) says, ‟What do you do,” and you say, ‟I’m a human being,” they’ll think you’re a jerk. If you say, ‟I’m an artist,” they may still think you’re a jerk, but it takes the edge off.
My reluctance towards using that label arose in part from a negative stereotype I’ve carried around most of my life: ‘artist’ as narcissist with delusions of grandeur. Dunt esk.
Like all stereotypes, that one is ludicrously oversimplified and flat. The three-dimensional truth is that there is no category of self-identification, other than human, which protects anyone from being, well, human.
I’m over that prejudice and still wrestling with what it means to be an artist. I know a lot less about it than my cat knows about being a cat.
Here’s my current definition of artist: human with the awareness that every moment offers an opportunity for close attention and creative action. And also that the beauty and brokenness of this world require us not only to pay close attention to the music behind the din of fear but also to be receivers/ amplifiers by which this music can be heard by others.
I use the term artist to express a sense of responsibility to life… a responsibility to stay open to new information, to feel deeply, to recognize that although life is a mystery I cannot contain or control, I have the potential to meet it with creative intention and presence. I use it to remember that the door to the present, to the presence, is never locked.
I call myself an artist to invoke and accept the moment-by-moment redemption that allows me to accept my failures with grace and good humor — to move beyond incompleteness, beyond failure, into the field of creative possibility, where the action is.
"...creative attention and presence." I like it! I like it!