Attend to Your Life and You Make it Art

Dear Friend,

It's that one phrase you wrote in your letter. I return to those four words often, thinking, feel along them, lean up against them, ponder what they mean. You wrote me those handful of upending words in your exuberant scroll, black ink dancing with exclamation marks:

Your LIFE IS ART!

And I nearly grabbed a pen right there, to, quick, write you back, asking if you knew about the grime edged around the lining of the dishwasher, the layer of dust atop of my stackable dryer? The way my mudroom closet insists on being a kiltered disarray of failed (but zealous) organizational attempts, the way my oven burns at the craters of igneous rock littered across its belly. I wanted to tell you, for all our washed floors and sparkly toilets, I know some corners, some crannies, that you might not deem art.

But perhaps you, wise friend, would. Maybe it's just me who is still learning that it's not perfection that makes one's life a work of art. It's how one sees. It's taking me a lifetime to wrap the corners of my heart around it: beauty isn't a product to be be found in the material world. It's a function of the way the eye and soul work together.

Therein is the making of art.




So somedays I remember and my eyes frame my basket of mismatched socks, my soul frames the legos that breed like rabbits. Somedays I remember that in the working out of a one-piece life, this weaving God's making of my life, a cloth of seamless avodah, the whole of life becomes beauty.

Parts of a life can't be cut up or amputated in the framing. When you frame a life as art, frame the whole of it. Really, all lives are art when rightly seen.

All lives become masterful still lifes when we still to see the moments as beauty.

Artists once only deemed the noble, the laces and velvets, the grand, worthy of luscious paint strokes. It was radically revolutionary to lay down rich colors for a bowl fruit, a woman pouring out milk. But the masters discovered that the essence of art isn't subject-matter. (Frame the legos! the dust bunnies!) Subject-matter is secondary to seeing all matter with fresh eyes, seeing and feeling holy God in this holy moment.

Life becomes art when we attend to the colors of now.

So, you too, my exuberant writing friend, pick up your moments. They're all frameable!

God only paints exquisite brushstrokes.


Related: Free Admission
Unframed Art

Last in this week's series on Paying attention
Part One:Soul ADD
Part Two:Part Two: One way to Better Pay Attention to Life
Photos: still life from here