When You're Looking For Spring, Look Only to Yourself

The human being should be an artist. There is an art to living and an art to loving. The greatest of arts. Then, there are lesser arts but arts, nonetheless, in need of no less than artists to guide as hands do. Less can assume more. Even the warrior is an artist. Even the smallest of seeds creates beauty likened to art. Even the comedian, with his crude speech and brash ways, tailors the art of our humanity into humor. His art creates joy.

There is an art to this thing. That's why when we lose focus and concentration, we fail to create works of art, as the artist fails to create without a steady hand and discipline, surely leaving his muse lonely and his love without expression. The human and the artist fail to be artists without commitment and discipline to their art. The artist is not worthy of such art if he only chooses to abandon his art, as he abandons himself.

Fromm wrote that we need to study life and love in theory AND in practice. We only become artists through that kind of discipline. If I am to know you, what better way than to pay the homage of witness through my steady devotion and discipline? How else am I to know what's behind those eyes and beneath each intent, impulse, or action? My love becomes art, even in the everyday ordinariness of you.

Like any artist, the warrior must know his craft: his opponent. The comedian must know people, especially her audience. She must pay special attention to human imperfection and each fall from grace, the obvious and subtle. The lover must not be afraid to love or to know the beloved. The lover also must not be afraid to know herself. To know the nature of each and the environment.

The true artist is neither afraid to know herself nor can she avoid doing so. She finds herself in her creations and at the end of her own sentences. Rilke wrote, "Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it only comes to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast."

The lover waits patiently for the beloved to reveal her secret. She waits patiently for her beloved to open like a cryptic poem written in a foreign language that had only become accessible through a timely dream in which the Rosetta stone had been given and she had accepted. And now sits patiently before the beloved's eternity and "unconcernedly silent and vast" ocean of unknowing she can't escape and may choose to meet.

You see, this patience is not without faith, an essential confidence and trust. All true artists create in this sphere. They are gathering dust.

However, eternity is not only the soul that can't be seen, it is the soul that can be seen. Simple truths and lesser arts. And you shall know them by their fruits. Give her time to ripen or that love to bloom or an end to finally wish you fare thee well. Look only to yourself.