Seth Godin's recent e-newsletter asked "What is your job?" Not "what's your title?" but "what are the day-to-day things you do"? And it got me thinking about what it means to make art-experiences - whether it's writing, or photos, or psychotherapy - and that got me thinking about vulnerability. Here's Brene Brown (via Brainpickings) on vulnerability
Vulnerability isn’t good or bad. It’s not what we call a dark emotion, nor is it always a light, positive experience. Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living.
In a way, maybe the spring here in New York has got me thinking about this all too. The cherry blossoms and magnolias, the tulips and pansies: they are all riotous at the moment and really the epitome of vulnerability. They're so fragile and tender, but they're just all out there. And despite their very ephemeral nature, they seem to celebrate their "here-ness".
It seems to me art-making is all about documenting this vein, this essential life-source of all that's precious, tender, and ephemeral. We all know this on a gut-level when a loved one gets sick or when we're in an emergency. Everything suddenly distils to the essence of life, and we perceive, as if for the first time, our vulnerability. That, I think, is why it can feel like waking up from a dream. It happens in our human lives and it happens to our planet. And on that note, I'll leave you with this amazing project by Rachel Sussman who is documenting the world's oldest living things.
Joanna Macy talks about this in terms of Uncertainty. Here she is on the amazing podcast Onbeing.
Or as my daughter put it in a recent conversation: "Mommy, am I alive?" "Yes," I say. She looks around at the park and says, "Are the plants alive?" "Yes," I say. She thinks about this a minute says, "So everything around us is all alive?"
photo attribution: By jjron (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) via Wikipedia Commons
