Making art is about learning, transmuting our experience into a tangible something. Making gives us the opportunity to hold something up, to examine, contemplate, and communicate with.

The real reward from creating is learning more about what gestures at everything This Whole Thing even is. It’s in, as Vonnegut says, the becoming. It’s transmuting the impossibly tangled mess of being a tiny flawed human in this infinite universe into a tangible something, and holding it out in the palm of our hands to examine and contemplate and communicate with. It’s the internal clarifying of our inherent confusion, the articulating of our awe and enchantment, the distillation of big questions and difficult problems. It’s the looking right into the devastating reality of our perpetual uncertainty and place in this vast cosmos, shaping the nebulous mystery of it all in to words or form or sound, and then investigating it from this side, and then from that. The real gold is in the reclamation of our attention, in focusing ourselves back to the living, the making, the unfolding, the mystery, the process of turning our existence into a thing beyond ourselves (View Highlight)