RESPONSIBILITY

March 30 2013Well, bien!  We are back from Paris, having once again gladly left city life to return to our country ways, feeling more and more how nourished we are by the land.Taking the train from Paris yesterday I didn’t just look out the window, it was more like I was projecting my spirit out into the passing landscape, much the way for years, when I was painting large, I would hurl myself metaphysically through the canvas in order to meet the mystery of myself as it melded with the muse.And so the hours passed, along with fields and streams, woods and farms and once in a while a solitary figure accompanied by a dog, the two beings walking in their companionable solitude and I was with them and loved them. And I loved every invisible person tending the land for us. Seeing in the, at times, dilapidated farm buildings, the struggle these souls live, in order to husband the land and their flocks and crops. I thought how unfair it is that they must pay the exorbitant price of heat and fuel, which is, compared to their earnings, so out of proportion. I thought about the Parisian shoes and chocolates just purchased and had a desire to be rid of them in exchange for cheese and vegetables, milk, fruit and bread. It seemed to me, in that moment, how impoverishment comes in different forms, whether it is the poverty of those who work the land or that of the rich whose hunger for the material keeps pushing the price of survival out of reach for the masses. If only we would pay more for good food and less for all the plastic-wrapped crap that is soiling the soil. And although I have no god to pray to nonetheless I prayed to the universe to protect the land and those who work it.It has been more than 2 weeks since I have written and between a rusty nib and a busy mind the words are struggling to find their order. Which is interesting as, in a note to myself a week ago, I wrote that perhaps the need to write is coming to an end, which just goes to show what utter rot I’m capable of penning when I get caught up in the need for absolute certainty; in this most recent example, the need to be absolutely certain that writing is a waste of time in that it is always a search for absolute truth and, moreover, the need to have those truths read, recognized and validated by one’s readers. It is in those moments when I doubt the attainability of such ego strokes that I most want to chuck it in. And then I tell myself I’m going to retreat to the land and become one of the invisibles, unseen but imagined from a train window.But that is not the way of an artist. Someone once asked me how do you know if you’re an artist and I replied, you have no choice. I know many an artist, myself included, who during periods of frustration with the work, or the painful rejection of it, try to give up being an artist…but it’s useless. To try and cut off one’s creative response to life is like cutting off air to the lungs and blood to the heart.The longer one lives as an artist the more humility and respect one gains for both one’s initial responses and to the larger process of bringing a work to completion. Which is why Joel and I just turned down a commission for a collaborative project, the idea of which had initially excited us, but the reality of which held no creative response for us.  We took a day trip this week from Paris to a town on the Normandy coast, the town being the subject of the proposed project. We had already come up with an interesting concept, but after a few hours spent in the place, during which time we were both unusually quiet not to say completely un-effusive, we returned to Paris, each of us wondering what the other was thinking. Yet is really was no surprise to find out that neither of us had the heart for this project and while we deeply regretted having to disappoint those who had so generously commissioned us, we stuck to our guns and felt the relief of accepting our response. As a friend of mine once said, “Are you will to disappoint others in order to remain true to yourself?”As artists it is our job to “feel our way around,” which means that we not only have to open ourselves fully to the daily world around us but we have to be willing to accept the truth of our responses even when they are neither pretty nor convenient. We have to have the courage and faith that by honoring our feelings - even when, as in this case, it means letting go of a nice chunk of change - that we will be all right. The universe always provides a way forward; not always as quickly as we might like and often in ways we could never have imagined.Likewise, I believe that as hard as the struggle is for those who work the land, their intuitive response to it and their creative endeavor will continue to be rewarded in ways that acquiring monetary wealth will never equal.