One of the broadest roads to mental, emotional, physical and spiritual strength is the creative arts, and I just came across a wonderful quote.....
Vincent Van Gogh: "If you hear a voice within you saying "You can't paint!", then by all means, paint - and that voice will be silenced."
Amen, brother. If I had a dollar for every client who has shied away from creativity because of the fear of criticism/perceived failure, I would be sitting on a beach in Tahiti for two months every year.....
When I tell people I paint, they assume that I am beloved by hundreds of fans, who eagerly buy my stuff. Nope. I create stuff that I either love and hang up or decide "Nah, that doesn't warm my heart" and throw it out or paint over it. Who cares? It's the process of doing art that is the fun, that processes all the frustrations or joys of the day, week, life, into - something that has never existed before.
You will never be so close to utter bliss in any other context, as when you are overcome by transcendence - that out-of-yourself feeling you get when you are the presence of beauty so intense it makes your teeth ache and tears form, or when you behold your newborn child, or when you hold another form of creation in your hands. Sometimes what comes out of me and onto the page poleaxes me to the point where I can hardly breathe. *I* created that. And it is a Something that has never existed before. It came out of my consciousness and took form on the written page,or the collection of paints or the juxtaposition of images torn from magazines and added to by ink and colored pencil,
Until you do this, and do it regularly enough that you can get past your fears and start to feel transcendence, you will never really understand what the Biblical authors (and the original Babylonian authors) meant when they imagined the Creator looking on its handiwork and proclaiming it Good. Not an artistic judgment, that. No, Good meant that undefinable feeling you get when you look on something and it is just 100% just-the-way-it-is harmonious and Right, in an ineffable way that only your soul and the soul of the universe understands.
Get some cheap watercolors ($3.99, I swear to you) and play. Buy craft-quality acrylics for $1.50 each. Create. You deserve to feel so good you cry. Then make another appointment with yourself and do it again.
