For Art's Sake

a devotional for late winter

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Thank you for joining us!

First, this week I’m celebrating ONE YEAR on Substack, and I can hardly believe it!

I’ll have more to say on that later this week, but I wanted to share with everyone that longtime The Wildroot Parables community-member

Megan Meyer

is now writing on Substack at her new newsletter, Holy HSP! She writes about the trait of High Sensitivity from a strong biblical basis, and I really think you would all enjoy her calm and encouraging space over there.

She’s been here from the beginning and I know she has touched so many hearts in this little corner of the Internet, so go check her out!

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Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:

On our essay last week, when I bared my soul about my own “false starts” in my writing this year,

Scoot

commented:

I have often found, ideas for which I have great ambitions, God will tap my brakes for me. The idea won't die, but will be dormant, until He warms the cold creative soil of my mind and allows the idea to sprout. His timing, not mine.

Phew! Deeply convicting, Scoot, and thank you for the timely words! Scoot writes a deeply insightful and creative Catholic-based newsletter here on Substack called

The Peasant Times-Dispatch

. Check it out!

If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!

Now, on with this week’s devotional…

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what is art
but an expression of breath
of thought, 
movement of hand
eye
feet
and color;

art, then
is the thing we make
when we fall
helpless
before the sheer force
of Creation;

Creator breathes life
into the nostrils of our first father
and 
(on instinct)
he exhales
a song.

Visual art is not something I spent much time playing with. I drew as a child, like most children do. I doodled all through school and well into my twenties. But I convinced myself very early on that I am a writer, not an artist (as if it would be anathema to do both).

My mom is an incredible visual artist in various media, most notably watercolor (I know I’m biased, but really, check her out). And growing up I was friends with the “art kids” in school, but I wasn’t one myself.

And no one told me that I wasn’t an artist. I wasn’t bullied or pushed out of art. I’m not an undiscovered genius. The closest I ever came to being discouraged from artistic endeavors was when a teacher in a drawing class at community college made an offhanded, well-intentioned critique that my style was, “A bit cartoony.” But honestly, that didn’t even really sting. I didn’t have aspirations to be an artist, so I didn’t take it personally.

I think, like so many of us, I was doing the very grown-up thing of looking around, realizing that I didn’t want to “pursue art” as a career, and therefore decided that it wasn’t worth pursuing or practicing at all. No money? No passion? No point.

But that’s not how humans are wired deep down, is it?

I think humans have an echo of creation deep within our bones, and it lurks in various guises. When it’s frustrated, it can even come out as destruction. But we all have the desire to create simply for the sake of it, even if it’s hard to justify it in our “make money to live” world.

Even though writing is my passion and my craft, art was always lurking under the surface, simply for the joy of it. It just took me a while to find my medium. Turns out, an impulse purchase of a twelve-pack of cheap oil pastels changed all that for me and lit a flame I didn’t realize I was waiting for.

These quickening days of spring I find myself pulling out a sheet of paper and playing with pastels, enjoying the forgiving nature of them, the way colors blend together, the textures and forms you can make. I feel like a kid again, but with an adult’s gratitude for the gift of art as magic, as ceremony. An offering on an unexpected altar.

But I’m human, and infected with self-doubt. So over and over again, I ask myself, “Why am I dedicating time to making this? Will I sell it? Will I pursue this as a craft? What is the point?”

But the answer comes back, every time the same:

What does it matter? All I’m doing is lending my voice to the sound all children of Creator-God have deep at our core: the song of creation, purely for the sake of singing.

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