What Remains

musings on creativity and the evolution of our lives

What remains when the things we have built and relied on no longer feel like the centre of our life?

For most of my years as an artist, I have thought about my work in terms of making. I make paintings and drawings. I make books, essays and classes. Fortunately I am also making a modest living from my making, which is a huge caveat when living life as an artist, and it took me many years to arrive here. Building something meaningful from a life spent paying attention—there is nothing wrong with that. All of these things have given me purpose, the most amazing community, and a way to contribute to the world that feels right.

I have been writing about this a lot, I fear, but it’s pervasive and insistent: something has been shifting in me and around me. I can’t be the only one feeling this way.

Perhaps it is my age, now early in my seventh decade on this planet. Perhaps it is what I am being taught by chronic illness, even though I have taken a big leap toward managing my symptoms, and I wishfully refuse to allow it to change who I am at my core. And maybe, probably, it is simply the natural unfolding of my life. Whatever the reason, I find myself less interested in what the work produces and more interested in what it does within me. From all the studies of the human spirit I have done, through all of the books by the greatest thinkers and philosophers that I have read and considered, there is always this thread running through: the change we want to see in the world has to begin within us.

When my body has been at its worst this past year, when fatigue has settled over everything like a heavy blanket, I have noticed something consistent: writing has often felt beyond my reach and even reading has sometimes required more energy than I’ve had. Yet somehow, almost every day, I have still found my way to a sketchbook and not to create anything important, not to create anything worth sharing—just to make a few marks. Such comfort in a line curving into another line, a small pattern repeating itself across a page and the familiar movement of pen or pencil against paper.

Again and again, I return to it.

This has led me to wonder whether our innate creativity is much deeper and much more distilled than I once believed. I think of the first expressions of human communication that were written down. As far as we have discovered, they were not words, but they were pre-language symbols and images made with lines on a cave wall. I imagine these marking connected us in ways that fed us and sheltered us and kept us safe. That makes me wonder if creativity’s greatest purpose is not expression or achievement, but connection. I mean, connection to ourselves, yes, but also connection to the world around us, at one time very near and in today’s world, near and very very far. I am believing it is the kind of connection to something that exists beneath productivity, ambition, and all the stories we tell ourselves about success.

Here is another question. Who was I before I became an artist? I don’t mean my job, but who was I essentially. Who was I before the books and exhibitions and classes, before anyone knew my name and before I had any idea of what I was capable of? Even before I started to study and write poetry? The answer, I think, is that I was simply a person who loved to notice things.

I was a child enchanted by sparkles and who dreamed of moonlight on snow. I was a collector of feathers, seashells, bark, crystals, bird’s eggs, bits of moss and stones. I was someone who felt wonder standing beneath trees and watching the leaves flutter againstt the blue sky. I was someone who drew because drawing felt good. I was a person who went to great lengths to save the life of even the tiniest bug, and who bent down to let a frightened mouse crawl into my open hands so I could take them safely outside.

A question for you…who is the self inside you that is patiently waiting to be remembered?

The older I get, the more I suspect that much of life is not about becoming something new or better or more successful. It is more about never forgetting to return to what was always there, with attention, tenderness, curiosity and wonder. Returning to the quiet practices that help us remember who we are beneath all the roles we must play to get by in the world, so we don’t just get by, but thrive.

We all encounter a threshold moment sooner or later. A child leaves home and suddenly the identity of a mother and her nest begins to unweave and change. Maybe a long career comes to an end and we find ourselves wondering who we are without the work that shaped our days. A loved one dies, and we have no idea how to carry on without them. No matter how hard we try, marriages can end, or a life-changing diagnosis can arrive or a long-held dream can quietly dissolve. These turning points can feel disorienting because something familiar is being asked to release its hold. Here is what I am wondering…what if they are not endings so much as invitations, crossings that ask us to discover what remains when the old structures no longer define us.

What remains when the foundation falls away?

What nourishes me when everything else feels so damn difficult?

What is the smallest creative act that helps me remember myself?

So many questions.

Friends, I hope you are doing okay. Would love to hear from you. What is on your mind this day? And thank you, always, for being here.