Becoming

It's Friday night and Bon Iver calls.  This music has been playing from my computer in the kitchen for the past hour as I've been washing up the remains of Tess's birthday celebration.  It's funny, what music does to a person.  This album reminds me of last summer when I purchased it.  I listened to it non stop, in my car, in the shower, in my bed, or at my desk while writing and critiquing poems for class.  It's strange how different life felt back then.  It seemed we had all the time in the world.

I recently read that Bon Iver was nominated for something like four Grammies this year.  I was annoyed when I read the news because I assumed this would eventually bring the band instant fame, thereby ushering them away from Indie rock and into main-stream-manufactured-trash.  I feel possessive of bands I love, especially during that phase when they are still unknown by the masses.

I felt this way about Coldplay in the early days, with their first big album, Parachutes.  It was the summer of 2001, and that album was my summer soundtrack during train rides through Italy. It played as I sat in our Florence apartment, sipping cheap wine and painting still lifes of fruit for a watercolor class.  That album is steeped in memories from my sophomore and junior years of college.  But look at Coldplay now. They became a big deal, and now they are doing duets with Rihanna.

In Bon Iver's favor, I will say that they refused to do a sell-out musical performance at the Grammies.  They said they thought the awards show was ridiculous, and that everyone should just go home.  They've got guts. They know who they are. It made me love them even more.

This is the sign of a true artist...someone who is all about their work, about being who they are and expressing that to the world. They are willing to uphold their integrity at all costs, even if it means losing popularity. They are not about the accolades or the praise of it. They do it because they have to--it is knit into every fiber of their being, and they do it whether they are publicly acknowledged for it or not.  It's just about being who they are.

I read a quote the other day that struck me.  It relates to all of this.

"Now, with God's help, I shall become myself."  --Soren Kierkegaard

It's funny how one little sentence--eight simple words--can sum up the arduous journey of a person's soul.  I've been journeying through the terrain of my own heart and mind over the past several months, searching for that answer.  Who am I?  Who is "myself?"  Parts of her have gotten lost in some places along the way.  I've started traveling back to find those fragments that I disposed of, some of them as a child, some during my teenage years, some during adulthood and motherhood.  I've held some of them up to the light and invited them back into the whole.  The strange thing about this journey, though, is that the basis of it has been surrender, a letting go of my life into God's hands.  I have had to ask Him to show me who I am, who He made me to be, and to give me the courage to be it. As my friend Heather eloquently wrote yesterday, "I love the thought of surrendering ourselves to find ourselves."

A couple of weeks ago at church they showed a video of a woman making a beautiful clay bowl on a potter's wheel.  The clip was creatively done, and its purpose was to illustrate the process of transformation--mainly, the process of God transforming and molding us into something beautiful.  As our pastor later stated, God is an artist.

God is an artist.

That sentence resonated with me.  It still resonates with me.  I've heard it before, but sitting in church that morning, it really hit me.  For a long time, I've recognized myself as an artist.  I've been painting, drawing, or sketching for as long as I can remember.  Now it manifests itself in writing.  What I'm coming to acknowledge, though, is that it's deeply ingrained in me.  I was born this way. It is not just what I do.  It's how I see the world, how I experience life, how I experience God, what I'm passionate about, and how I engage with people. Perhaps it's also the way God intended me to reflect Him.  In the past, I've thought that the "artsy" part of me was something to put in the background--it was always so impractical, so I couldn't justify spending a lot of time developing it.  Now I am understanding how backwards this approach is. After all, how practical is God?  In my mind, if He was practical, He wouldn't be so concerned with relationships, and He certainly wouldn't have bothered creating us.  Love is perhaps the most impractical thing of all.

Over time, and with God's help, I am starting to name and accept who I am.  It might take the rest of my life, but every day, I peel back more layers of myself and settle into that deeper, rawer skin. I feel okay saying that I am an artist, a writer, a poet, regardless of whether I gain acknowledgement for these things or not.  I have received one rejection letter so far, and I expect to receive many more.

I wonder why it feels so foolish to name who we really are.  I wonder why it feels so scary to let other people see it.  (Even this post feels really scary to write.)

What would happen if we stopped covering up the unique person God created us to be?