“Where is that place for me? For you? For the creative community of us — we, the ladies who art. Where is the seam that weaves together our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger?”
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These are emerging thoughts and I share them with not an un-small amount of trepidation. But they won’t leave me alone, these wonderings, and I need all the contributors to The Giant Pool of Wisdom to help me out.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately — off and on for years really — about this odd and wonderful bubble we live in. On good-humor days I think of it as something like “the women’s creative empowerment community.” I like it, this loose group of wonderful women who are finding their voice, expressing their creativity, and rebuilding their spirituality in the studio instead of the sanctuary. (Or as I like to think of it, the studio has become the sanctuary.) I love working in this milieu. I know, that I know, that I know these are my people. And nothing gives me more joy than teaching and learning in this world.
On cynical-humor days I think of myself as “the middle-class middle-aged white woman doing crafts.” Do you know what I mean? Kind of cushy, and whiney, and little bit frivolous. It makes me think of all those Jane Austen novels. How all the female characters embroidered, or did crewel work, or played the harpsichord. “The womanly arts,” they were called. It was what women did when they weren’t allowed to do anything else. Correction, it was what privileged women did when then didn’t have to do anything else (and also, they weren’t allowed. A combination then.) On cynical days I substitute “embroidery, crewel work, and harpsichord” with “mixed media collage, photography, and guitar lessons” and I feel a little–well, frivolous.
Then I get my feminist dander up and I remember that women’s work has always been downgraded. The most amazing intricate needle and tapestry work would be referred to as “craft” while oil paintings done in the all-male studios of yore were classified as “art.” Even now, women are severely under-represented in galleries and museums, as the film Who Does She Think She Is so passionately demonstrates. This distinction is still there — it’s changing, true — but it’s still there. And it bothers me.
But in addition to this feminist outrage, more than the slight discomfort I feel around my so-called cushy life, I am deeply bothered by the imbalance that I feel between two worlds I admire and desire: The introspective and necessary world of self-fulfillment and self-expression. And the equally necessary world of charity and social justice. I feel…unsatisfied…with the extent to which these two worlds intertwine. And I see other creative women trying to find a way to tie the two together as well. There are ripples out there, and rumors of another way. We are exploring. We are finding the connection.
It’s already so hard to make a living, to make your art, to raise your kids, to tell your story, and to be in a relationship. How can we possibly do any more? (Throw in all these mysterious “women’s diseases” like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and migraines and it gets even harder.) And yet, and yet….
I guess it’s that I feel, YES, your story is important. Yes, you, white girl with the two kids and the minivan. You story, your creative dreams are essential to the universe. But so are our African sisters’, so are our Latina sisters’, so is every sisters’. And how do they find the strength to tell their stories, after a day of trying to make ends meet. How do we help? How do we partner? How do we teach and learn from each other?
I keep thinking about Fredrick Beuchner’s famous quote about vocation from Wishful Thinking:
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Where is that place for me? For you? For the creative community of us — we, the ladies who art. Where is the seam that weaves together our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger?
In the excellent but now defunct television series Joan of Arcadia, God tells Joan that she has suffered from “a crisis of imagination.” I think that might be it. In spite of all our creativity, I think we are suffering from a crisis of imagination. I think there is more.
Recently, I’ve been listening to Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, a freaking brilliant adaptation of the Jane Austen novel in which the characters do not practice “The Womanly Arts,” but rather are trained in “The Deadly Arts.” The art of combat. The art of defense. These are not little women. These are Warrior Girls. How can we be warrior girls for our sisters? How can champion their right to be in this world?
Really I have very little idea. But I know it’s always a good plan to take a step. It might not be the step that works out, but it will lead you to the next, and the next, until you find the path. So my step, right now, is to put both feet quite firmly on one particular stepping stone. I will announce that I have fallen in love with the Apparent Project, a program run by people I know and adore in Haiti. Through the Apparent Project, Shelley and Corrigan Clay, who are artists, feed street kids, house kids who were forced to be left behind due to poverty, adopt orphans into their own family, and help women learn skills to support their families. I am head-over-heels with this small, grassroots program— in much the same way that I am in love with art. But I can you imagine me, the migraineur, in Haiti? No. Help. At. All.
So I will do what little I can. I will give ten percent of whatever profit I make this year – from my upcoming EBooks and Ecourses and whatever else might come my way—I will give ten percent of that profit to Haiti. And, whenever I can think of a way to encourage others to chip-in, through the A Year Without Clothes Pledge, or any other thing that crosses my path, I will do so. I will not have a crisis of imagination. I will learn to connect the dots.
It won’t be much. But perhaps this is the practice that will open the door, the rehearsal that will shine light on the solution to this hunger in my life. To be a mother, and an artist…and a warrior girl for others.
Do you think we can find the way? Let’s jump.
Click here to contribute to the chip-in for the Apparent Project, or tell us your ideas in the comments below. Thank you for being here!