How to See Yourself As An Artist

Are you an artist? You're probably thinking, "no, not me." Here in the West, we've been taught to squelch our creative impulse — especially at work. In other cultures people live as natural artisans, creating sand paintings and song, poetry and architecture, drumming and dancing in tune with the rhythms of the Earth.

We too can allow our inner artist to live out loud. As soon as we surrender our resistance to seeing what we do as art-in-action, we become artists.

Succulence: Your Natural State

Inspirational author and artist SARK has been demonstrating how to live juicy for decades. From a 200-square-foot self-described "magic cottage" in the heart of San Francisco, she writes all her books by hand, in a profusion of colors. Each SARK creation is a feast for the senses. She says, "My name has become synonymous with transformation, color, healing, movement & FUN."

I framed and hung her inaugural poster, How to Be An Artist, on my home office wall as I launched my first business. Her invitation to "Make signs that say yes! and post them all over your house" invoked my own creative impulse. Each night before bed, I'd face my office (set up in a corner of my tiny apartment living room) and give it the thumbs up sign. A simple, powerful, YES! for success. My business prospered.

Sarah Ban Breathnach, author of Simple Abundance, writes, "Creation has three layers: the labor, the craft, and the elevation. She who works with only her hands is a laborer; she who works with her hands and her head is a craftswoman; she who works with her hands, her head and her heart is an artist." READ MORE

Beyond Visible Light

In order to stretch into the unknown, we must be able to imagine the unimaginable ~ like colors we've never seen. In my June newsletter, What Shines (now available as a trio of pdf eBooks, with a special bonus offer for June!), I wrote that it's "notoriously difficult to explore what we can't conceive, such as colors beyond the visible spectrum."

Yet Santa Fe glass artist Paul White, whose first spoken word was "light", responds that he's already gone there in meditation. So, what do colors we've never seen "look" like? Here's Paul's insight:

"In my mind's eye the colors have been somewhat velvety and more of the feeling of color. I'd say the colors are something like the dichroic glass I work with but deeper somehow. There was always a warmth to them."

According to my computer's dictionary, "dichroic" means "showing different colors when viewed from different directions, or (more generally) having different absorption coefficients for light polarized in different directions."

Intriguingly, I myself had been trying to imagine colors of a, well, different color ~ it had never occurred to me that the color could become multidimensional, changing hue according to perception and direction. This is precisely the kind of quantum leap we need to make as we "excavate the boulders of belief that cloud our consciousness," as I wrote in the newsletter.

Paul, thank you for your prismatic contribution to our collective evolution, refracting clarity!