I Am an Artist
I have always had a love of reading and writing. Words were my earliest companion. I remember writing and drawing picture books as a grade schooler. The one I remember the most and the only one saved was “Aurther the Ant.” Weird spelling I know. I recall being very adamant that I wanted that specific spelling.
As a young kid I was very aware of the judgment and bullying that happened to myself and others about our bodies, our personalities, life circumstances or the things that made us who we are. I didn’t have the adult insight or the therapy degree yet to see the bigger picture about why that happens and how “hurt people hurt people”, but I did have a feeling that if we could take the time to see how someone’s perceived shortcomings were actually an asset, perhaps we would all at the very least be kinder to each other.
Although I never mentioned bullying in the book, I do remember that was the feeling behind writing it. Now rereading it many decades later I see how I wrote it as a pep talk to my younger self. In the book, Aurther is sad because he is small. In the end (spoiler alert) he is able to save a life because he is the only one small enough to rescue a baby ant in a small space.
I see the hidden yet not so hidden meaning when I wrote this book. My yearning as a grade schooler to be surrounded by kindness, to be aware of my own positive qualities, to believe my mom when she would contradict the messages bullies were giving me. That my bullies might see how the things they mocked were my greatest strengths. That I might someday have the grown up confidence to see that in myself as well. I feel for this young author.
I am reminded by reading “Aurther the Ant” how writing can be a healing process at any age.
Throughout my life I continued to write. I filled dozens of daily journals, favorite moments journals, wrote essays, poetry, and short stories. In my work I’ve wrote news stories, marketing materials, press releases, and emotional and impactful fundraising stories. I received my undergraduate degree in Professional Writing and remember those classes and the times when we would critique each other’s work to be some of the most fulfilling and creative moments in my life.
I have felt the healing of standing up at open mic nights, reading poetry I’d written about my life and having people come up to me afterwards to share their similar stories. I’ve felt the pride in having my niece Maddie join me for one of those open mics when she was 17 while she was visiting Seattle from Michigan, where she watched her “Aunty Bethy” be nervous to share these personal and revealing poems in front of the crowd and do it anyway.
Later during graduate school I met two people, Jennifer and Ben, who I would eventually form a writing group with. We would meet in coffee shops and other creative spaces to write and then share. It was at Ben’s house that I wrote the poem below, “I Am an Artist”. These were incredibly creative times and I'm reminded that even though I love spending time alone and can happily do so for days and even weeks, at a time, that there is something so powerful when you join with others in the creative process. There is a collective hum of energy. The building upon each others sparks.
I am also reminded by the poem below that creativity comes while “doing the thing”. It often doesn’t come from just thinking about being creative but by being engaged in the writing, the painting , the doing. When I wrote “I Am an Artist” it came on a day where I wasn’t feeling inspired at first and wrote a couple of poems that were just, OK.
Then as I was sitting there I saw a beam of light coming in Ben’s front window, casting a glow of sun on the wooden beam of the living room of the sturdy beautiful old house where decades of families had lived. A trail of dust in the air, glistening in the light. I felt an openness and this poem flowed from me. I wrote so fast. Pencil on paper, the satisfying scratching sound. I felt this poem. I experienced it in my very being as I wrote it down.
It is still one of my favorites.
I hope this post inspires you to do “the thing” you love most or are curious about. Allow yourself to get out of your head, stop “thinking” about how you might do the thing and just - DO the thing. YOU are an artist.
Let your creativity flow from your very being.
xo Beth
I would love to hear how you’ve been creative lately. How you are getting out of your head and just doing the thing you love most? What is inspiring you right now? Where do you feel stuck?
Comment below.
I AM AN ARTIST
I am an artist
It is in my bones and in my soul.
Growing up you may have thought I wasn’t seeing the world
Properly
That maybe I was
Unfocused
But the truth was that I saw more than you noticed.
My world existed within the autumn leaf, floating in the puddle on the dented sidewalk outside my house, a world within a world, my mind absorbing every detail of the patterns and colors.
My face inches from the puddle. Becoming one with the water and the reflection of the sky on its surface.
The blending of the cold damp earth against my soft body, the calm of my breath moving in rhythm to the leaf as it floated and turned.
My mind excited by possibility and calmed by the cadence of nature’s breath and my own.
My world existed in the smell of the earth and rain and the trance of a single drop at a time tapping on my skin.
You thought I wasn’t paying attention but I was attuned to everything, everything at once.
I am an artist
It is in my bones and in my soul.
As I sit here, to write I am watching single flecks of dust fly in a beam of light and I think about how that speck has always been. Maybe once a human, a blade of grass or the exhale of a king thousands of years ago.
Lately I am compelled by the idea, the energy ,of lineage.
That who I am is actually a sum of others before me and how one day I will be a speck, a breath, a thought, a faded picture for sale in an antique store.
I have this moment in time as the clock tick-tocks to my end and I choose to spend it putting myself on paper for no one to see and I laugh at the smallness of this gesture and how I am but a speck of thought and vision and light.
How insignificant and greatly significant I am all at once.
I am an artist
It is in my bones and in my soul.
I love the angles of this room, the dense, white painted, wood boards that surround the doorways and windows. Their solidness and strength that will remain long after I am gone.
I think about this wood and the life force that propelled its growth and my mind moves to the tiny maple seedling I have growing in a small green pot on my deck. Only a few months old, mailed to me as a seed from my home in Michigan. A new life begun.
These floors, boards and strong beams were once filled with water and earth and sun. They reached to the sky and inhaled its warmth.
Here it listens, and feels over one hundred years of the weight of a foot step, a family, a life.
It waits for the day that it will sit in the sun and feel its rain again, dissolve back into the earth to prepare a home for a root, reaching for its turn.
I am an artist
It is in my bones and in my soul.
elizabeth anderson
2010 original - adapted 2024