Note to self

(Just trying to keep myself grounded...)

Art.

It is a quiet kind of artificial reality we create for ourselves. We paint it, we write it, we capture it, and some days we live it. If even for a second we jump into our home-made realities, we feel all the more safer and maybe a little less lonely. But there’s nothing locked secretly beneath the words, or the ink, or the colours that could keep you breathing or your heart beating. It is the loneliness and the heartbreak that keeps our lungs in tact. Though we are living in a rather spiteful world, this is what we have. This is our reality and it is in no way artificial. It is a beautifully bitter world out there and if we work it, we can love it. If we love it, we can live it. You cannot live with your head in the sand all your life, because someday you’ll suffocate and there will be nothing but your dried out brushes or pens to pull you free.

It’s not so much carrying a mask in front of your face. It’s leaving your body to fend for itself in a world where chance will just as soon send you love as drop a piano on your head. Pain is the best we have. From pain we learn joy and learn to be amazed. If you hide from that pain, you lose touch with the joy everything else in the world - including your made-up reality - can bring you.

It hurts; but it’s true and it is wonderful.

The freedom we seek is not locked behind the walls we slowly build. When we hide from the world, we simply imprison our minds which yearn to fly and grow. When we race beneath the trees at sunset or swim in cold water below the moon, we find the quiet freedom we’ve been fighting for through art.

Art is beautiful - but it cannot define, control, or be you.