"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 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 in this 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!
Life only paints exquisite brushstrokes."
Photo of Noise Coalition
