Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise us to the divine.
Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise us to the divine.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
How devoted to your artistic expression are you?
Do you expend your energy being perfunctory or exemplary?
Are you committed to understanding the vehicle through which your art expresses itself to the nth degree? Do you break all the rules, expecting to find new pastures, or are you content to continue in a safe territory where everything you are producing is on par with everything else you have successfully accomplished in the past?
Creativity is not art. Creativity is a deep-seated love affair that consumes you with every ounce of its being. It grabs your attention in moments where you would be best served staying focused. It is a mistress who calls your name at all the inopportune moments, and yet, you come willingly just for having been called.
Creativity channels from Source and when it arrives, you are hard-pressed to do anything but enable its expression through your physical being. It is your essence calling to you from another dimension, giving you personal access to the secrets of the universe and you have milliseconds to register and record those ideas before they disappear into the vapor.
Beethoven writes about it in today’s aphorism and is even more direct to the point when he wrote, “The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.”
Mozart was equally vocal on the topic, “All I insist on, and nothing else, is that you show the whole world that you are not afraid. Be silent, if you choose; but when it is necessary, speak – and speak in such a way that people will remember it.”
Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest genius of them all, was consumed by this. “I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.”
And Vincent Van Gogh shared, “I have put my heart and soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.”
These sentiments are not isolated. If you read about Picasso, Dali, and others, you will find the same confession from each of them… Creativity is the most demanding of all pursuits and sometimes, the least rewarding. Each of these masters laments not ever having lived up to what they had in their mind. Each of them are grasping to express the thoughts that Source has enabled them to channel.
We, the audience, marvel at their miraculous accomplishments, but an artist is never truly satisfied with any work of art. Those seeds of dissatisfaction become the germination of the next.
And so it goes.
Happy Friday!
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