Still broken...but authentically me

"Let go of who you think you're supposed to be and embrace who you are."

Brené Brown

In Remembrance of Things Past

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/in-remembrance-of-things-past-lianne-schneider.html

Perhaps I'll never really exhaust the subject of brokenness because it's part of understanding who I really am and what the process was of becoming me. I promise, however, not to dwell too long on the broken parts...but rather more often on the good that comes of them. I know that there are people who would prefer not to explore the idea of being broken...let alone admit it out loud. The question for me today is what do we gain by being vulnerable, by acknowledging the broken bits and pieces, by accepting our imperfections? 

And for me the answer is authenticity. If I can muster the courage to admit how cracked and broken and mended I am, if I can expose what most would perceive as weakness and allow myself to be vulnerable, then what I gain is the freedom to be truly and authentically myself. I don't have to pretend to be someone else. I don't have to keep trying to be who others expect me to be. For years and years, I was the "rock," the "strong one," the "crisis handler," the "responsible get it all done well" one. I didn't let a soul see how shattered I was at times, how much struggle there was to pretend to a strength I didn't feel. 

My own perception of vulnerability was character weakness. My version of relationship was to be the one in control, the giver, the do-er, the rational and seldom emotional spouse or partner or friend. "Big Girls Don't Cry" should have been my theme song...or alternatively, "Lean on Me." I didn't often let anyone offer me a shoulder to cry on. I never admitted that sometimes the burden was just too heavy and I needed someone to share it with me. If I had a problem - or you did - I could analyze it to death coming up with just the right advice or course of action. But I didn't very often acknowledge how I actually FELT about any of it. What I THOUGHT, yes, but what I FELT, no. The brain could be trusted - the heart with its messy feelings could not.

I could, I thought, prove that. When I fell in love late in my life after the death of my husband, I couldn't seem to help myself from opening the door to all those "feelings." Irrationality was the special of the day and for once, my heart ruled my head. And then...I had my heart totally shattered. One would think, wouldn't you, that I'd fall back on old habits - go back to pretense, to rationality, to cover up? But that's not what happened...once the door to a feeling heart was open, I couldn't close it again. And I realized that broken or not, I didn't want to go back to that inauthentic person I'd been. So it is that I learned this most valuable lesson: (I post this for a dear new friend - you'll know who you are!!)

HEARTS WERE MEANT TO BREAK

Hearts were meant to break

Love…requited…bursts them wide open

expanding them ever outward with the

awesome power of the big bang,

photon upon photon of love light -

an endless grace, that energy moving toward

the sacred consummation of intimate union.

And when stars cavort and gaily pour

the glittering dust of diamonds

into the space that love has opened

to receive it, a heart so fills with light

that it must split asunder to make room

for the more of love, the overflowing

river of it, the numinous, luminous constellations

of love light dancing through the cosmos.

Love…unrequited…breaks it open wider still…

transforming brokenness into beatitudes,

slivers of past sorrows that now sparkle

like shards of glass catching moonlight.

But the shattered heart remembers,

with deepening gratitude, its shattering,

having tried with such determination

to share its rounded fullness with another

and found it breaking on the hard, square edges

of someone’s heart not open yet.

There is no way to put it back together.

Now broken, it moves ever outward

like the universe,  which is itself

Love’s energy radiant with grace.

© 2013 Lianne Schneider 

So, I can say truthfully, that though I'm a mended (or mending) version of who I was, I think I was blessed to be mended with gold as I said the other day. Admitting that I'm always vulnerable now, that I can be hurt, that I feel things not only lets me be authentically who I am without pretense...but strangely enough my vulnerability gives the people I love the courage to be vulnerable too and it's there, in that shared vulnerability, that true and honest and loving and joyful relationships are born. 

 

Are you mended with gold???

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful - Billie Mobayed

 We Are Glass

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/we-are-glass-lianne-schneider.html

I've read in countless spiritual guides, self-help books, motivational guides that we are all "broken" in some way. Throughout the course of life, events conspire to break us - we suffer losses, disappointments, heartbreak, failure and sometimes what feels like endless struggle. Someone I love dearly is having a "breakdown" - that's what they call the loss of touch with reality that comes from a steady diet of psychological pain. Even if the situation is not so dire for us, we've all experienced moments, perhaps days or weeks when we felt just shattered by circumstances. But the question for me has always been whether being broken means broken down or broken open. There's a huge difference and I've written numerous poems about that thought over the past few years. It seems to me that if we are all broken in some way, what counts is how we put ourselves back together! 

What if we could see ourselves and others as perfectly imperfect...patched with the gold of the lessons we've learned and the vulnerability we've accepted without the shame that usually haunts us because we're "not good enough" or we're "weak" or "afraid?" What if we could see ourselves as more beautiful because we're damaged and imperfect and because we've been broken open by our suffering, exposing the deeper heart and soul of who we are and finding that lovelier than we ever knew was possible? What if we could accept our wounds as important and even possibly necessary aspects of our own "soul" development? (You don't have to believe in the religious definition of soul to understand what I mean but if you prefer, use spirit or heart or just plain human). What if we could accept that as Leonard Cohen wrote in the lyrics to Anthem, "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in"?

"Pain is the great teacher," said writer May Sarton, so what if we could study the lessons and find the gold or the light that makes us more beautiful than ever. This is how I expressed it in the poem I wrote at the same time as I created this image:

IN THE SHATTERING

Shattered -
the fragile glass of me is shattered,
crushed and broken into tiny shards
now reflecting, diamond-like,
a thousand points of light -
magnifying what had once been
but a solitary beam, diffuse, opaque -
as if in the final breaking,
the small, soft, subtle glow,
so long and well contained within
the shape that was the whole of me
is now free to sparkle all the more -
brilliantly, blindingly more -
each crystal sliver multiplying
radiance only dimly shown before.

How could I have known
when I was whole and empty
that it would be in breaking
that I would shine so brightly,
be more luminously transparent,
with a glory all out of proportion
to the pain of the shattering itself?
How could I know that I held
a million different joys inside
just waiting for release?
How could I know that I
was never meant to confine
the light of the Divine inside
but was always and eternally
envisioned in the mind of God,
as each of us is truly meant,
to be at last its sacred shine?

                     Copyright Lianne Schneider 2014

All art and poetry unless otherwise noted is the intellectual and artistic property of Lianne Schneider and may not be copied, reprinted, reblogged in its entirey without the express permission of the author.  

Could you give it up???

“I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.” 

~Robert Henri

Postcard - Impressions of Niagara

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/postcardimpressions-of-niagara-lianne-schneider.html

Over the past few blogs, I've written a lot about motivation, marketing and how to avoid burnout, particularly if our artwork isn't selling. As a result, I got quite a few personal messages from fellow artists who wrote about discouragement, about all the ways they were turning themselves inside out to be successful (financially) as artists, about the frustration they experienced when they saw work by artists they didn't feel was as good as their own selling well while they sold nothing. Most of these heart-wrenching letters were completely sincere and not a few people suggested that perhaps it was time to throw in the towel and either take some period of time off or get out of the art world except to putter at home for their own enjoyment. These friends had honestly tried everything they knew to market themselves. That's not to say there might not be other sites or methods out there that would work but at this point, they'd tried everything and had come to the conclusion that no one really wanted their artwork hanging on their walls. 

The truth is that no matter how hard we've tried, most of us are NOT professional artists. I know a few of you who truly are but most of us are not. We're rank amateurs regardless of whether we have fancy cameras with $5000 lenses, a complete studio with stacks of canvases and $200 brushes, pens and notebooks full of ideas for our next story or poem, or the best kiln and clay on the market. What we're trying to do - most of us anyway - is market our hobby. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. But we should not expect the kinds of results that a professional artist expects and strives for. And we should not be so frustrated and disappointed when we don't achieve that level of success. 

I say hobby because being a professional artist/writer takes enormous discipline. It has nothing to do with how many courses we take or how many positive comments we get on the work we present to the world. It has to do with whether we cannot let a day go by without working at our art - not just for an hour or until some distraction comes along - but literally setting aside a good portion of our day to create. It has to do with writing or painting or sculpting even if we feel no inspiration today at all (and believe me I've gone through months where I complained that my muse was on vacation!). The wonderful writer, May Sarton, and the much loved Annie Dillard both wrote about writing for hours every morning after a walk - even if at the end of those hours everything they wrote went in the trash. It has to do with working through lunch if we're on a roll. It has to do with believing in ourselves enough to be persistent in marketing ourselves through every possible means. It has to do with not comparing ourselves to anyone else - or their success - because we believe in our gift and our talent. It has to do with knowing that no matter what happens - we could not give up what we love to do.

There is a lovely succinct little blog post that struck home to me when I read it and I think you might enjoy it too. Doug Hoppes wrote recently, "However, in my mind, if you really are meant to be an artist, you won't give up.  It's part of who you are.  Rather than having the fancy paper or pens, you'll get a ream of copy paper and a ballpoint pen and draw.  Rather than having a fancy studio, you'll work at your desk... or dinner table... or wherever you can sit.  Making art is not about having the fancy materials.  It's about expressing yourself in only the way that you can imagine the world around you." Read the rest here: Ever felt like giving up? | Doug Hoppes Fine Art

If writer/artist is who you ARE, there's no way you could give it up and go back to being something or someone else. Be courageous (which means to have a strong heart) and be persistent and believe.

 

Are you "first rate?"

“You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.”

Anna Quindlen 

Mockingbird Have You Heard

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/mockingbird-have-you-heard-lianne-schneider.html

In case you haven't noticed, I've spent a good deal of time in this blog advising - myself more than anyone else - how to live our artistic lives with integrity and purpose. And not just our lives as artists either...but more importantly life in general. I've given a great deal of thought in the past few years to meaning and purpose...to what the point of it all is. At the beginning of the year, I began my commitment to this blog with intention and along the way, I've explored with you the heroic virtues required for our sacred quest for a good life, a worthwhile life. I've spoken about success and motivation and goals. I've even spoken about happiness as if I had some answers different from those the rest of you have arrived at on your own! In the last post, we had some great exchanges about burnout - whether it's possible to successfully market ourselves without losing our creative edge and purpose. Whatever your answer to the question was, one thing is certain - we cannot be "first rate" artists/writers if that is all we are. Even the most successful of us cannot eat, sleep, breathe and market our art all the time or I would venture to say, it soon stops being "art" and becomes "work." 

Which brings me back to Ms. Quindlen...or rather to Maria Popova's blog about Ms. Quindlen's beautiful little book about life - "A Short Guide to a Happy Life." Quindlen, says Popova, "considers the question of the self and what makes us who we are, what makes us worthy of being...Even those trying to find their purpose, even those engaged in fulfilling work, and even those of us lucky enough to have no separation between “life” and “work,” can get consumed by our modern cult of productivity. Quindlen’s words come as a vital reminder of what matters, what counts, what the true aliveness of life is." 

You can read the rest of Popova's blog post here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/03/11/a-short-guide-to-a-happy-life-anna-quindlen/

And then you might want to go out an buy Quindlen's book so you can reread her beautifully intuitive advice again and again. "Get a life," she says, "Get a life in which you are not alone...get a life in which you are generous... All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough." We won't find our happiness in being or having nothing in our lives that is more important than our art or our writing. We cannot be happy if art is all we are and all we do. I think all of us know that already...but in the push to be commercially successful artists, we may find ourselves on that slippery slope at the bottom of which our art has become work and our lives are consumed with productivity and marketing, rather than an expression of our very human spirits and our desire to generously share the goodness we see all around. To be happy is to share our dreams and our passions and to inspire others to share theirs and most of all, to be truly, gratefully present to every moment we are blessed enough to have. 

Motivation and marketing

People don't like to admit it, but it does motivate you to make work if you're selling it.

There is a drive in that. (Zoe Benbow)

Chanson d'Amour

http://www.lianneschneiderart.com/DigitalPainting/Florals-and-Macros/i-LHQ6vXX/2/L/chansondamourdesatcl-L.jpg

Continuing the discussion from the other day about different kinds of art sites and the potential for burn out from having to keep up our presence and participation in various online art venues, I thought I’d tackle the other half of the equation – the reason we do all this! As I mentioned, our first priority may not be sales, but I think it’s a bit ludicrous to say, “I’m only in it for the art” when we’re working our rear-ends off trying to market ourselves every which way to Sunday. There probably isn’t one of us who wouldn’t celebrate a sale even if just as an affirmation that what we create appeals to someone besides ourselves.

And we’ve probably all bitten off more than we can chew when it comes to self-promotion. We read blog after blog about how to market ourselves online, how to be more visible to potential buyers. Maybe we even buy packages that promise to show us how to get 10,000 Facebook fans in just weeks. Then…the next blog you read says, “Don’t count on Facebook to sell your art.” More successful friends recommend Google+ or Pinterest and so you do that too.

As artist Dan Turner says, “Too often, artists start down the online art marketing path and quickly find themselves bogged down in “how-to” details. They reach burn-out before they ever get a fundamental marketing plan in place. Trying to connect the dots in a half-baked, half-finished marketing plan is disheartening and counter-productive.” Dan’s written a simple, easy to follow art-marketing primer called, “7 Keys to Selling Art Online.” Best of all – it’s a free e-book download. Remember though, just because Dan makes it look simple with his clear, step-by-step advice, doesn’t mean it isn’t going to take work…lots of work…but at least the end result might be those sales we keep pretending aren’t important. That doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind about why I create in the first place or how I measure my success as an artist…it just means that it would be less than honest of me to suggest I wouldn’t like to sell a few pieces now and then too!

You can get Dan’s free art marketing guide here: http://danturnerfineart.com/dan-turners-7-keys-selling-art-online-free-ebook-artists/  But don’t stop there…he’s got lots of worthwhile advice in his blog too!

Perhaps it's true that as Abigail Brown says, "We cannot judge our art because it does or does not sell." In the ideal world, that's the way it should be. But the real world is more likely to be like this: