The Gift

Showing up is essential, but not ultimately about your work ethic (imagine a “highlight reel” of all your moments of sacrifice pursuing your dream, in slowmo).  Showing up is actually not about you at all.  Showing up is about the people you will bless.  Showing up is about knowing the power of your gift.

Knowing why your gift matters.  Why do good songs matter?  Why do good books matter?  Why do good paintings matter?  Why?  Not for world peace [nice try ;-), but for you personally.  What did these things do for you?  You absolutely must know the answer to this question.

You did not “fall” into your creative pursuit, you were lured there carefully through your own experiences.

Your own story of transformation runs through your art and creates a remembrance, a demonstration of how it matters.  Your life was changed.  Think of it.  You were heading one way and then something about this thing awakened something in you.  Something that would change you.

What happned to you?  What drew you in?  What drew you from another course?

Now you have the opportunity to create those experiences for someone else.  To pay it forward if you will.  To freely give what was freely given to you.  That is powerful.  That release of the gift will do something in your spirit.  It will bring you to a new place of appreciation and respect for your gift.

The gift will speak for itself.  In the end, that is what comes through.  Or doesn’t frankly.  There are those that want a gift they were never given.  That is not how this works.  We do not create our gifts, we only discover them.  Whatever is there we cultivate, not create.

That means showing up. A little bit every week.  Pounding it out with whatever energy we can muster.  It won’t always be genius.  It won’t always be “inspired” - in that sense, but it will always lead to inspiration.  A good tree bears good fruit.  Eventually fruit will come.        

And that is the end goal.  That our budding plant will bear fruit.  Fruit that is good to the taste AND pleasant to the eye.  Beauty in petals gives way to fruit - fruit that carries within it the very seeds that will be planted in others.  Full reproduction.

More beautiful plants will grow.  More fruits will bud.  More seeds will be planted.    

In the end, our fruit is part of a much bigger tree.  We are attached there, out of some mercy.  Without the sustaining life of that parent tree our branch would simply wither and die.  Our life comes from that tree.  Beyond us.  And its life will continue long after we are here.

We, it turns out, are not our own.  We are held together, even sustained, by Something Else.  Something beyond this world.  Beyond what we see.  Beyond what we touch.  The means, indeed, behind our work.  For now hidden, but soon revealed in the very thing we create. The seeds of life endure on.