The world waits for your "and yet"
Creating art can seem futile in a world that prefers power and might to truth and beauty. But we've been here before.
We are living in an age when words have become cheap and beauty eludes us. We’ve been in this place myriad times before in human history. But it just seems different now.
While I long for people whose words are vessels of truth and grace, I hear only the silence. And while I search for reliable witnesses to reveal the beauty which fills this world, I too often meet people whose despair has caused them to store their brushes or shutter their lens. And yet, we need these voices with the right words, these artists with their visions of beauty, more than we’ve ever needed them before.
I have noticed artists of all types—writers and poets and teachers and painters and photographers—speak about giving up their work. “It’s just too much,” they say, “offering up words and beauty and no one seems to notice or care.” Even in the best times, but certainly now, artists know the temptation to believe that all the real decisions and great deeds are being done by people in places of power and not by ordinary artists in the midst of ordinary life.
