Live Your Walk

It is Easter weekend. It also happens to be the time of Passover. The two holidays don't always coincide, but this year they happened to. I was wished a "Happy Easter" by a friend yesterday and it occurred to me that I married an ex-Catholic and was raised by ex-Jews, and I am a happy, multi-cultural Pagan. I happily celebrate anything, so since I love fish and my DH enjoys some of the outward tableau of his former religion, we eat fish on Fridays during Lent. It's wonderful - I get fish on Fridays which I love, he gets to feel more rightious (or however it makes him feel). At Passover time, I think about the Exodus from Egypt - the cup left for Elijah, the matzoh, the salt water and bitter roots, the wonderful food and the gathering of family. We didn't celebrate Passover every year, but we celebrated it often enough that I have fond memories of nights spent with family, friends, and even people who I had never met before that night, celebrating the events that had happened 1000's of years earlier. We don't often have memories that span that timespan. But both Easter and Passover do.

I am sure that other religions also have celebrations whose origins go back centuries. In many ways these are the only things that push our racial memories past a few hundred years because our active memories are short - very short. It is one of the reasons that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again - we are slow learners and we don't seem able to learn from our past. Additionally, evil is very present in the world. It will keep going through every open crack, infecting all that it touches. So how can we keep memory alive and evil at bay?

What can we, as artists, do to celebrate millenia and fight evil? After all, we're "just" jewelers, painters, authors, potters, beaders.... We can create with a song in our heart. We can make items that will bring smiles to people. We can make things that will make people think, but with this type of art we must be careful to not fall into the trap of making "statement art" - art that will only make sense while its' statement is understood and culturally relevant. The best art is that which spans the ages and still pleases the mind and the imagination. So what are you creating today? If you make it with joy and in the realization that, given every option to spend your time however you wish there is nothing more that you want to do but create this piece, right here, right now; then that joy will spread past the piece, go to those who will look at your piece, and will finally reside with the ultimate owner. And isn't that joy the best reason to create? Happy Weekend to all of you.