Ever had that moment when you suddenly think, ‘Far out! What happened to me?’
You’re wondering where your ‘life’ went. You’re wondering where the real YOU went?
I’ve had those moments, many times, such as when I realised I couldn’t lead the life in the corporate world any more. And most recently, when I declared to my husband across the kitchen sink, ‘I’m an artist without any art!’ like it was a national crisis.
A tad melodramatic, sure. But this is what our inner artists do. We ALL have an inner artist and if we don’t pay attention to them, they will start shouting at us louder and louder until we listen to them and do what they want… which is to feed, nurture and love them. (Think of your inner artist as a toddler or a dog and you’re pretty much on the money.) To the inner artist, having no art in my life WAS a crisis, akin to a lack of oxygen. My husband (quite used to me by now) merely said, ‘Well you need to go out and find some.’
So I did. I reclaimed a part of myself that’s been sad for more than 9 years, which was when I stopped going to African drumming classes. The reasons I stopped going were all very logical–we moved inland to ‘the bush’ and I simply had no access to a drumming circle. Then we moved to the Sunshine Coast last year (for the very reason of accessing artistic and lifestyle goodness) but now having a toddler and big, conflicting work schedules for both my husband and me, it just didn’t happen.
But finally, it has. And it felt GOOOOOD. Oh man, my soul (my inner artist) was so, so happy and has been all day today and especially so while I was working on my latest manuscript.
It is the central tenant of being an artist that we must
FILL THE WELL BEFORE WE DRAW FROM IT.
In other words, we cannot make art (in my case, novels) if we aren’t first nourishing ourselves with the sights, sounds and experiences we need to then be able to draw from.
Our inner artists are constantly telling us what they want; it’s just that we don’t always listen. That moment when you think, where did my life go, is just a call to action to change something, to make a minor adjustment in the course this ship is sailing.
What’s yours saying?
Josephine Moon 