“When you look at your life closely, you can begin to see the beauty of your journey and how past experiences can guide you today,”
 –Silvia de Vries, True Colours 

I should probably come with a label pasted onto my forehead: 

“Warning, Falls Frequently In Love.”

I just can’t help it, my heart tends towards crush. Which is why I’ve started a new feature at Magpie Girl, my Current Crush. Rather than run a blogroll, I’ve chosen to feature one Crush every month or so. You’ll be able to discover a great artist-writer right there, in the pink square to the right. And before my fickle heart finds someone else to flirt with, my Current Crush will be featured in an interview or guest post.

Somehow the Fates brought me Silvia de Vries, writer, photographer, and keeper of all things beautiful. Silvia and I met in the blogosphere, and as soon as we realized we were in the same time zone, we became fast friends. We chat on line at about once a week, and she always inspires me to a more intentional, more inspired way of living.

Silvia has a special eye and documents the gentle beauty of everyday life through words and images at Flickr and at her blog, True Colours. After a stay in Finland Silvia’s recent journey has brought her home to the Hague. I love how she portrays the light and feel of Scandinavia-a uniquely beautiful landscape with a hard-to-capture soul. (I can’t wait for our rendevous in Amsterdam….and we’re planning an EU Soulsister’s Retreat together!)

Slivia’s been my crush since I started announcing my Current Crush few months ago. Before she goes, she’s been so kind as to share her thoughts on the intersection between photography and writing, and how life abroad has affected her work.

How do you know when you are being compelled to create something? What does it feel like in your body/heart/mind? Read the rest of this entry »

I may not be a rock star, but Eden recently took my portrait…

So I went to a photography exhibit yesterday, with my dear friend Michelle, who is always willing to go on artist dates with me in all corners of Copenhagen or in the any-where-remotely-near vicinity. It was an exhibit of rock-star portraits by Danish photographer Søren Solkær Starbridge, and while I am neither an afficianado of rock stars or photography, I enjoyed it very much. (Mabel, Michelle’s 15 year old daughter will attest to just how low I have of a rock star IQ. This is how it went with her: “What?! You don’t know Arctic Monkeys? Come, on? Arctic. Monkeys. No? How about that guy, you know that guy right? The lead singer of Dirty Pretty Things…? Geez!)

While we were at the exhibit we watched an interview with the artist for few minutes (it was in Danish and I quickly got lost), and we bumped into him while he wandered the joint telling the curator which signage needed to be fixed before the closing reception this weekend. Watching him move, and breathe and have his being caused me to think of something I’ve observed of late amongst my arty world.

In the blogosphere there are a lot of women artists and writers my age. These are people who have turned-or re-turned-to the world of art they had previously set aside.  This return is often out of a desire to keep their sanity in-tact through the infancy and preschool eras;  or because they have finally gotten old enough to ignore their parents advice to “do something with your (practical) degree”;  or because they have found their footing in their third or fourth decade and are ready to start following their Muse before their souls atrophy into nothingness. These women-myself included-tend to have a way of speaking about their work in very apologetic terms. We say thing like: “I’m dabbling in photography,” or “I’m not really a writer, I just blog,” or “I’ve started painting, but I’m not that good.”

I hear this kind of thing over and over again, and then… sometimes… I see it change. Sometimes, one of these arty women friends will cross over some invisible boundary and step into their power. They start acknowledging their title and say things like: “I am a photographer,” or when someone asks them what they ‘do’, the say “I am a writer” with less hesitation – or maybe with none at all. And then eventually, they start speaking like a professional – the way Søren Solkær Starbridge talks, or Kara Walker, or Robert Wilson. They speak authoritatively about their art, their intent, and their methodologies. They explain how their work developed and where they think it will progress to next. They accept compliments graciously without downplaying their skill. And they receive critique with gratitude and detachment – because they’ve learned it’s not about their personhood but rather about their work, and it will make their work better.

I’m not sure where this boundary is located, or how one steps over it. I think that for me as a writer and as a minister, I drift back and forth across that border line in an sort of developmental dance. Still, I find more and more that I live on the confident side of that line. I think it’s important – very important-to learn how to get into that unapologetic place. It is a place where you do not hem and haw about what you are doing; where you do not downplay your skill or your talent; where you are both passionate and matter-of-fact; where you can say with authority “I am  a writer. I specialize in creative spirituality. I work on line.”  And I don’t think you can get there until you realize that the authority to name yourself lies within yourself. Sure, professional recognition is nice. It’s lovely to have the affirmation of colleagues, to have an official job title, to receive an appropriate wage, to win an award. But you know what? A lot of us are never going to see that in a cut-and-dried way. We live in a world on the fringe – a world of art and passion and verve. That world doesn’t have a lot of professional clubs. It doesn’t often offer a steady paycheck with the taxes taken out in neat little columns and vacation accruing on the sidebar. And even where it does, we’ll, we aren’t any of us going to get there by being apologetic about who we are compelled to be.

So let’s stop. Let’s stop hemming and hawing. Let’s stop doing a soft shoe around who we are and what we call ourselves. Let’s learn to take both critiques and compliments. Let’s put our name on the door.  Be who you are becoming. Start now.

What one sentence describes with authority what it is that you do? It’s okay, you can change it later as you change. But write one down now and try it on for size. We can’t wait to see what it is!