06 Jul My art is living
Make your life (like this potter shaping clay) is what I say to you through my example and my work.
My art is living.
This is a far more radical statement than it may seem on the surface. (And yes, it’s also a pun.)
Somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century, the left fatally surrendered the aesthetic to the right….[: f]eeling, imagination, the priority of local affections and unarguable allegiances, a subliminally nurturing cultural tradition….[If t]he political left…seeks to evolve its own discourse of place, body, inheritance, sensuous need, it will find itself miming the cultural forms of its opponents; if it does not do so it will appear bereft of a body, marooned with a purely rationalist politics that has cut loose from the intimate affective depths of the poetic. (Terry Eagleton, Nationalism Colonialism and Literature, p. 34)
“The intimate depths of the poetic” are where I live. They’re where you live, too–and if you don’t know that, you’ve been “cut loose” in a way you may scarcely have realized–but which immediately you see once I point to it.
Can you say, “My art is living,” and mean it?
My daily life is my art.
I live as a work of art. You can see it, can’t you, for example, in “How I Get So Divinely Much Done”? The degree to which I love and value my daily life shows through in the loving detail I share about my day-to-day (which I sanctify as “ritual”).
I live a handcrafted life.
I co-create it with
-
- Nature and the Universe
- fates and fortunes and other people
- Mystery and Absurdity
- routine and must-do
- hygge and Hygeia in making and keeping a home I actually want to live in.
And I dance with going off-schedule, off my diet, out of my mind.
Sometimes, my curation is a flop, a failure of timing or collaboration. Infested with vermin. Exhausted and eaten away at the core. Diminished by self-comparison with others. I mean these things literally and metaphorically and if you know me, you know that I mean those are the same. The presence of vermin means a weakened energy state. Cleaning is cleansing. Comparison with others is exhausting. Eaten away at the core means making art of that apple.
Part of a mural: “Süße Sünde” by Onur and Wes21, 2015, Prinzenstraße 19, Berlin-Kreuzberg, Germany.
My thoughtwork is my art.
Inspired by some of my favorite modern artists,
I create works of art for my social media and for you, reading this.
Deeply inspired by my soul-colleague SLART to identify myself as an artist, my life as both my art and my medium, I claim my creation as societally, socially, and individually transformational.
A quilt of four social media posts of mine combining text, color, typeface, and image.
This goes for my individual programs, too–my Claim Your Calling program, my private yearlong coaching group, my book Structure Magic. My writerly blog. All marry images with text for teaching and transformation. The briefest exploratory meeting, my every coaching session and fundraising training are imbued with this magic.
It
Is
Art.
(Thanks, SLART!)
Other people’s lives are my art, too!
I am part and partner in a lot of people’s lives: they ask for advice, coaching, consulting, editing, and collaboration. What I contribute is artistic, artful, and also artless, in the first meaning of that word: honest and sincere.
I give ideas, words, and images to my people who ask for them. And my intuition channels creativity on their behalf; I am a garden-variety shaman.
The Magician card in the Tarot, copyright-free image by Pamela Colman Smith from Wikimedia Commons.
Sometimes we work in guided meditation in the dreaming, sometimes in a reality we share on the phone or Zoom or email. Sometimes mail!
Edward Brewtnall, Where Next?
Experimentation is key to my art
The way I make art from life–mine and other people’s–is through experimentation.
You may think of experimentation as something only scientists do, and you’d be wrong. Artists are constantly experimenting.
What makes me an unusual coach and consultant, writer, philosopher, and live-r, is my commitment and openness to experimentation.
I experiment with only one variable at a time if I possibly can. This is a principle I got from the scientific method, true. But because what I am experimenting with is real life, sometimes I experiment with more than one variable at a time. I keep it to as few as possible.
Then, I change and tweak and polish that variable until it comes out right. You can see how this would work with writing; that’s just called “editing.”
But you can edit life, too.
Try it! (Experiment with it, is what I’m saying! do you get me?) See my “How I Get So Divinely Much Done” post for ideas of how you want to live and what you could change about your life to include some of the kinds of variables I’m talking about in there that you want in your life.
Then change one thing at a time. If you have your life ritualized so you know roughly what time and in what order you do a lot of your life, it is easy to substitute one thing for another, to take one thing out of your routine and put another in its place.
It is even easier to attach one thing to another! If you have a life you like, and you want to build one new thing at a time into it, attach the new thing to something you’re already doing. Say you want to create a bedtime ritual to help you sleep better. Think of one component at a time, then attach that component to what you already do at bedtime. For me, it is brushing my teeth. I now have a small suite of things I do that all got attached to brushing my teeth.
How this plays out at work (and that’s a pun)
In my work, I have thoughtwork + coaching + consulting + editing. Those are my areas of work. In thoughtwork (described above), I regularly experiment with attracting more people to my coaching, for example. The variables are elegance, authenticity, passion, and precision. I track every week how many views, likes, comments, and shares I get each week on my LinkedIn posts (my only social media channel besides YouTube).
This is a huge learning curve for me, and the experimentation therefore swings wildly between amazing and utter failure. I sometimes get no more than 12 views on a post! But then there was one (a share of this post from my writerly blog) that got over 1000!
I can’t pander–that would violate the variable of authenticity. But I can certainly experiment with how to create thoughtwork that is authentic to me that attracts more people.
This is a kind of playing with work.
In coaching, this plays out as an agreement with my soul-colleague who is coaching with me to try something new for a specific while. It may be a new behavior, new thought, new ritual in their daily routine, and it can even be not doing something. Since we are in close touch weekly as well as monthly or more in our coaching appointments, I keep track of what variable they’re experimenting with and ask them about it. We check in and talk about it in depth to see if it is achieving the desired result (more time, more money flow, more happiness with self and daily life are common desired results).
Detachment
Spiritual detachment permits me to experiment and to create.
Artists have forever channeled Spirit. This is nothing new.
What I allow to flow naturally from me is creative but I sometimes “dam it,” as I put it here.
Also, experimentation takes detachment so you can see what the variables are in your life that you can change–nearly all of them! Looking at our lives with detachment helps us see so much more clearly.
I create naturally. So, my still small voice does not need to tune me into my art. I rely on it to get me out of its way.
Detachment is a creative force though it’s seldom touted as such.
When we detach from all that holds us back through [pick one:] meditation, self-observation, witnessing, focusing (in the Eugene Gendlin use of that word), centering prayer, visualization–we are so much bigger than we thought we were. As Walt Whitman said, we “contain multitudes.” Many of these multitudes are quite useful! They are who and what I use when I do my work and co-create their lives with others at their request.
Importantly, detachment also helps me embrace my identity as a creator-artist yet feel unattached to it. This whole Creation/creation comes from somewhere uncreated and unmanifest. This pure Being is where we live and have our own Being. So when we create, we do so just as Being:
Pure Being, thinking to itself, “May I become the waters,” becomes the waters. Thinking to itself, “May I become the mountains,” becomes the mountains. “May I become the galaxies,” becomes the galaxies. Pure Being, undisturbed, silent, eternal, is the state of bliss. A flicker of though tin this state, a little disturbance, and out of it the whole universe manifests. (Deepak Chopra, Creating Affluence, p. 83)
This is not to say that art is effortless. It must take even Pure Being a little time and energy to create the mountains. But it does help normalize the idea that everything we think into being is creation.
This is how art can be living.
I find, having embraced my creator-artist identity, it has become much easier consciously to create and then step back into my normal state of Pure Being. (This is my one and only spiritual practice, resting in Being.)
Nature makes art through me.
I collaborate with Nature when I want something to shift in my personal environment. Here’s a post I wrote about that. And this video interview is an accessible way to learn about a longer article I have published as well about a body of work called Perelandra. By the way, I don’t mean the book by C.S. Lewis. If you do click the Perelandra link and feel overwhelmed, however, try the video I’m suggesting first. There’s a link to the longer article in the video which might be a good, very first step, introduction to co-creating with Nature.
Why didn’t I see this before?
I grew up with a visual and performing artist mother and gave birth to a visual and performing artist child. I have a creative writing degree. I thought I needed to create visual or performing art or fiction in order to “count” as an artist.
Since my twenties, and probably before, I had an agenda for myself, and never measured up.
I could call myself many good things but never an artist. This is where SLART has in to give me permission to look–really look–at my practice, and what I create, and embrace it. Note: I do not claim this as SLART’s mission, although he might feel it is, in part; his mission is much greater. It is what I have done with his art, thought, living.
Suddenly, I can see and claim–to myself first and most importantly–that this is art. (These creations I’ve named in this post.)
It looks like art. It feels the way art feels when I look at it. It feels the way artists (starting with SLART) describe their practice when I do it.
It.
Counts!
While I’ve loved their work for decades, finding precedent for my work in other artists was something I did only after admitting to myself I’m an artist. It’s great to see in retrospect how my work resembles theirs–but they didn’t give me permission. SLART did, and I did. Conceptual art, language art, and situational art (see bulleted list of artists above in these genres) help me see how my art resembles theirs.
Beauty
As I’ve just said, there were many reasons I did not recognize my art as life. One was the tyranny of beauty.
Don’t get me wrong: I love beauty. I extol it, luxuriate in it, and eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. (Or whatever that second meal is called that we eat; we still don’t have a name for it. We eat twice a day–in the morning and at 3pm.)
But so much of living is not beautiful in any traditional or typical or even recognizable way if your lens on beauty is too narrow. My government seldom creates recognizable beauty. My fellow citizens and I often do not. Much of the world is creating ugliness. But here’s the thing:
Ugliness
Is
Beauty
Too.
I don’t just mean art brut. I mean poverty and horror. Scarcity, and that plastic island in the Pacific we have created. I mean the world after Gaza. I mean racism and white supremacy. Ableism. Cruelty and abuse. Most -isms.
Why do we hound those who come to us with hands full of difficult beauty? Why can we not imagine ourselves out of despair, out of helplessness, into authentic desire? (Jeannette Winterson, Art Objects, p. 116)
Difficult beauty is still beauty.
Beauty is the very stuff of Life. It is what everyday life is made of, and Life itself. It is truth, as Keats said, but not the kind neatly packaged in a greeting card. It’s not even the kind of beauty you find in many places art is sold, and I refrain from putting quotation marks around that kind of “art” only out of respect for my own self-discovery: this, too, is art, so I shall not diminish anyone else’s.
But a lot of the time, I find that kind of beauty–the kind that is easily packaged and sold–hideous in what it omits, glosses over, glazes our eyes to.
Nearly everything has its own beauty, and often several kinds if you look at it closely.
So the tyranny of beauty has been broken in my heart, and I have SLART and myself and you to thank. And to find beautiful. And to find art.
What difference does it make?
The difference this huge discovery makes is unfolding. Right now, it gives me tremendous power to re-see, redefine, re-understand everything I am doing in this world. You, my reader, already know much more than most about what that is. Stay tuned. It is already percolating through my inner creation, my spiritual practice, and just beginning to show up in my writing, daily living, and thoughtwork.
What matters is now you understand my opening quote because you’ve lived it with me here in this blog post: the importance of not just
Feeling, imagination, the priority of local affections and unarguable allegiances, a subliminally nurturing cultural tradition
but of claiming those things for ourselves as our living which is deeply, intimately aesthetic.
In a word:
Art.
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