The Art of Saying NO

“Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.”

— Kevin Ashton in Thoughts on Creativity

The Art of Play

Jennifer Trafton is an author of children’s fiction. Her book, The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, was read aloud by yours truly across many evenings with the Abell six. We laughed and enjoyed this unpredictable book, squealing with its silliness. She recently wrote an essay for The Rabbit Room, titled “The Art of Play,” which is worth a read...

That is what I mean by a holy silliness. Yes, there is a profound need for art that plumbs the depths of human depravity and suffering and shows that redemption is possible within that darkness. But there is also a profound need for art that creates spaces of innocence—innocent play, innocent joy, innocent beauty—in a world where innocence is violently stripped away from even the youngest children, and where adults have spent so long choking in the smog of corruption that they have forgotten what it is like to breathe pure fresh air. 

I will defend and defend the belief that the deepest reality of human life that we must impress upon children is not that life is hard and death is inevitable and they need to get used to sadness and darkness and make the best of it. The deepest reality is joy. The prize hidden under the scratch-and-win card of life is a beauty so big that no happy ending in a story can even come close to approximating it. War is a horrific stain on the floor of an extravagant ballroom. Tears are temporary; laughter is eternal.

Read the whole thing.

The Least Likely Things...

Alan Jacobs at More Than 95 Theses...

The least likely things in the world are Bach’s B Minor Mass and the Iliad. There are no plausible ways to account for that heart-piercing moment when Hector tries to console his beloved Andromache without denying that he will soon be killed and leave her widowed, after which he bends to pick up his infant son, only for the boy to be terrified by the great plume of his father’s war-helmet. (But whoever Homer was, he wasn’t an aristocrat.)

Read the whole thing.

The Gorgeous Insanity of it All

I snoop around the Rabbit Room because I like its proprietor.

There are two beautiful paragraphs in an excellent article written by Lanier Ivester that I am going to repost here. If you have any desire to create art in you—of whatever kind—read the whole thing.

I don’t want to fail. I want to sing the songs of Eden to a tired and homesick world. I want to write of beauty and truth and goodness, unashamed; I want to spin words and weave stories that will make other people know they are not alone. But even this ambition, sweet as it is, comes short of the mark. For if I truly believe that in attempting to write a book I am being obedient to something that God has placed within me, then His pleasure is the final word. It will not matter in the least whether I succeed in the temporal sense or fail utterly. In the words of the immortal Rumpole, it will be “a matter of indifference bordering on the supernatural”. Supernatural, indeed. For only faith’s vision can incite a recklessness of that ilk, that caliber of abandon that has made the disciples of Christ stand out from their kin like stark raving lunatics from the first Year of our Lord until now. God help me to be among them.

The Apostle Paul called us ‘fools for Christ’, and I’ve always imagined he said it with a lopsided grin, a little dazed by the gorgeous insanity of it all. We are ordinary men and women aflame with immortality and moonstruck mad by a grace we can scarcely fathom. We believe crazy things and we do crazy things as a result. We are loved outrageously, beyond all wisdom and reason, and we can’t keep the joy of the joke to ourselves. The love of God has wrung all manner of impossible things from of the hearts of His people since the world began. And how much lovelier is the world because of it.

I hope I can write like that when I grow up.