The Art You May Become

“Art is the conversation between lovers. Art offers an opening for the heart. True art makes the divine silence in the soul break into applause.” — Hafiz

Life, when lived truly, from a pure heart, is Art. In fact, it is the essential art that inspires all the others.

What is the art of your life?

To have any answer to this question requires a long, practiced intentionality. One must not only see their life as a work of art, but also practice it that way. It doesn't matter what manner of life one has. A high school janitor serves as well as a Hollywood star. Everything is canvas. Every moment is open, available to the painter’s brush. The key is to choose how you will live each moment, to act and move through the world with the intent to create something beautiful in the moving, something that rises to the level of artistry.

I am not talking about spectacle, or the thin veneer of pretense. When art is real, it is inescapably true. It confronts us with truth. There is no fakery or façade about it. Living your life as art is not about crafting the best mask. It's about taking them all off, and revealing to the world the deepest truth of who you really are underneath. This includes your brokenness, of course, but it isn't only that. It is also about your glory, the unique spark of the Divine that lives in you. Too many try to make a great show of their brokenness, to display their nakedness for titillation and arousal. This is gaudy work, unbecoming of a masterpiece.

But the life of a true artist is wholistic, encompassing both the darkness and the light that lives within them, and colors in the subtle gradients between these two extremes with all the hues of the spectrum. Brokenness is something that happens to things. It isn't what the things are.

The true artist among us takes everything that happens to them, everything they become, or failed to become because of what happened to them, and uses it all as raw material—as paint, as clay—to craft a masterpiece of truth with their life. True artists understand that it's not what happens to you, but what you do with it, that defines the art you may become.