It Takes a Lifetime to Create a Masterpiece

I'm listening to Bette Midler's The Rose on an iPod as I write.

On Friday night, a few friends were at my friend's Ruby's place helping out just prior to her first public showing of her artwork in over twenty-one years. She had the book Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach lying next to her printer open to this page (I've condensed it down to this gem):

"The other day a friend and I were talking about the difficulty that most of us have in grasping the concept that we are artists - that life is our canvas...

Whatever you're about to do today can be transformed into art, if your heart is open and you're willing to be the Great Creator's conduit. Women are artists of the everyday...

As an artist I have come to know that there are three very different layers to creation: the labor, the craft, and the elevation. St. Francis of Assisi explains the creative process this way: the woman who works with her hands only is a laborer; the woman who works with her hands and her head is a craftswoman; the woman who works with her hands, her head, and her heart is an artist...

It takes a lifetime to create the work of art for which we were born: an authentic life."

Women and small boys seem to comprise the majority of the visitors to Ruby's plein air gathering of art (as part of Silicon Valley Open Studios; there's still next weekend too). Ruby's ten-year-old daughter warmly greets visitors with her Hello Kitty-inspired kid's guestbook and fluffy purple-feathered ballpoint.

And I'd give the women the lilac-colored flyers about the upcoming women's art salons on the summer full moons. And they shyly share the art they kept hidden - the English Lit major now a psychotherapist that 'writes for herself', the ninety-year-old photographer that stopped exhibiting after a cutting remark forty years ago, the woman with pastel sketches, the potter, the jewelry-maker, the painters, everywoman was an artist once we drew her out.

And the women shared their ideas for the salons: a mother-daugher showcase, a kid's salon preceding where boys and girls can share their work (thanks to storyteller Kevin and his mom for the idea). Women we'd just met would freely offer their gardens as venues of the Garden of Eden-inspired salons.

I hadn't intended to conduct market research, but the conversations drew people out. A woman with her two kids on her way back to LA stopped off highway 85 for gas and happen to spot the sunflower-yellow sign. "These salons would work in LA too." Yes, yes, I'd already envisioned that. Everyone that came by volunteered a part of themselves, and we laughed, mostly we laughed this weekend.

I absolutely love Anaïs Nin, and although this particular quote is almost cliched, I'd like to share it now in case it's fresh for you:

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. - Anaïs Nin

At the end of the show, Ruby twirled around with a red rose to Bette Midler's The Rose.  We danced with her, we danced for her.

It's the heart afraid of breaking
that never learns to dance

It's the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance...

"I've been in hiding for twenty-one years...," Ruby murmurs. Tears of joy stream her face. Stream my face.

Later that evening, sitting in our own garden, with members of our weekly Daring to Live An Authentic Life group I shared, "I've been in hiding all my life. I wore this dress because I haven't worn it since that summer in Italy 2003. When we meditated tonight I tasted the breeze, the voices of neighborhood children cheering with joy at a softball game carried by the wind, the birds, the morning dove." 

I shared that I picked up Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays on Ruby's bookcase at dawn Sunday (I spent the whole weekend) and sitting in the garden hammock surrounded by her son's soccer balls I opened the book right to Emerson's classic Art essay. Right at this line: "Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a romance." I am transported reading the essay while I sip earl grey and nibbled buttermilk toast.

Of course this sultry Sunday mother's day evening our group reads aloud the beginning of Eckhart Tolle's book, A New Earth, where he shares that flowers are the enlightenment of plants.

"Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless." - Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

And so it is with art. With our simple sublime Work of Art closer than your own breath.

and the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live

When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long
and you think that love is only
for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter far beneath the bitter snows
lies the seed
that with the sun's love
in the spring
becomes the rose

photo: Me, Ruby and daughter at the end of Sunday, and before the rose petal dance. Congratulations Ruby on your coming out party. I love you.

Comments

[Brad Munson]

Great picture, Evelyn, and great thought (good to meet you). Synchronicity is an amazing thing; Tolle's book and *Simple Abundance* are both in the bedside stack for my wife's reading, and she's poked me a couple of time, and, aboutthe wonders she's found there. I came across your blog from sustainablog, and I can see your family and mine have a great deal in common. i'll be back to read more ...

Brad

[Marilyn]

Great photo...and wonderful venture...

[Mosaic]

yeah!your right,i have also mine and it took me 3 months.to make my master piece.

[Cara Fletcher]

It's true that it can a whole lifetime for an artist to create his masterpiece.My grandfather was an artist and he created the work of his life when he was 65.