Osprey Flight Original Watercolor Sketch

Everything that is worthwhile has a price, and for an artist part of the price is dealing with indifference and rejection. Often the indifference comes from oneself. I’ve given up on my art more than once in my life. But ultimately, I made the commitment. I put hours a day into it for years. Well maybe not for years. I don’t actually remember how long it was before I painted anything worthwhile. I do know it was over a thousand watercolors. I still throw out most of the paintings I finish. First, though, I set them aside so that my initial disappointment at not being able to execute what I have in mind has had a chance to dissipate, and be replaced by perspective, by an ability to judge a work based on its merit.

Trees For Life, a nonprofit founded by Balbir Mathur and his wife Treva, has planted millions of fruit trees in rural villages around the world. Here’s an excerpt from an article written by Treva for the Trees For Life newsletter.

Three years ago Balbir (Mathur) and I were in a small village in Orissa, India. The villagers welcomed us with songs and flower garlands.
After introductions, the village leaders sat down with us.
“Our land is very degraded and we are very poor, they said. If our children were educated they could get jobs, but there is not enough money for their school. It's like a trap, and we can't break free. What can we do?”
Balbir closed his eyes, listening intently with great reverence. Then he spoke.
“If you will donate some very poor land to your school, we can help you regenerate that land, and it can provide income for the school,” he said.
Several villagers started grumbling. “Our lands have been divided and passed down for generations, they argued. How could our people give up their inheritance?”
Balbir spread his hands. “Nothing comes without sacrifice. The more important the task, the greater the sacrifice.”

After reading that article, I called Balbir, Treva’s husband, and asked him about sacrifice. This is what he said.

“From time immemorial, spiritual leaders of all faiths have told us that anything worthwhile requires a sacrifice. Nothing happens without a sacrifice. Sacrifice is such an essential part of the equation of life. In order for a mother to give birth to a child, she has to sacrifice. A sperm germinates an egg, it has to lose its identity. A seed, to grow, has to lose itself. A candle can only give light if it burns itself out.
“Sacrifice is the cornerstone of life. When we say that life is sacred, that implies that it demands sacrifice. What we sacrifice is what becomes sacred to us. Without sacrifice, nothing becomes sacred.”

Meaning is the upside, mediocrity the downside. A life of meaning requires courage.

A life centered around beauty requires integrity. Life is about having the courage to act on the things that matter to you.

You are defined by the things, the beliefs, the principles that matter enough to you that you are willing to pay a price for them. You are entitled to the dreams for which you are willing to sacrifice.

A creative work has a sacred element.

There’s something mysterious going on out there. Some creative force that leads to the ongoing evolution of the universe. It’s not static; the universe, since the Big Bang, has never been static. Furthermore, it yields to the laws and parameters of

mathematics. I’ve quoted, from his books and Heron Dance interview, Roman Catholic monk Thomas Berry, who explores a theory of the creative disequilibrium of the universe that is neither traditional Christianity nor traditional science. His thought-provoking argument is that it is likely neither. See the Thomas Berry page on the Heron Dance website here, and his books The Great Work and Dream of the Earth.

Thomas Berry is not alone. Martin Rees, astrophysicist, and professor at Cambridge University, states if six numbers were slightly different – for instance the mathematics underlying gravity – not only could life not exist but the universe could not exist. It would collapse or fling apart or have been unable to form. See his book Just Six Numbers. From this work, and other similar explorations of the nature of the evolving universe come the following observations:

• There’s an order to the universe that is not random.

• We who are made up of components of that universe have the ability to reflect on it, to discover the underlying laws of mathematics that govern it. We are the universe pondering itself. In the words of Thomas Berry, “the human activates the most profound dimension of the universe itself, its capacity to reflect on and celebrate itself in conscious self-awareness.”

• The universe could not exist without countervailing forces that are never one hundred percent in balance. That creative disequilibrium is what makes the universe possible.

• Creative disequilibrium is also what makes art possible. To quote Berry again, "Art emerges out of a disequilibrium in search of a new equilibrium. The creative act itself is the emergence of something new. That is why it is so important to create. That is why the artist is always at the margin. Nothing creative ever happens at the center. The artist revels in the ultimate disequilibrium of things.”

All of this supports the contention that creative work has a sacred element in the sense that it is a manifestation, a continuation, of the creative force of the universe. The implication of creative work as sacred work, and of humans as entities designed by, created out of a dynamic universe in order that it can reflect back upon itself, is that our internal world, our imagination, our levels of consciousness, also possess an
element of sacredness. There are other elements of course.

Discipline, persistence, the willingness to practice, to try to manifest an idea, to fail, and try again. The ability to withstand rejection in pursuit of art that is as unique as our internal world, created out of our internal world.

With a great will to say a thing comes clairvoyance. . . A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.
- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Sacred work requires sacrifice, as I’ll explore in the next Art Journal entry.