Many of us can feel, inevitably, that the creative act takes us away from our children, our wives, husbands, the domestic demands that befall all of us. The time that you step away from your loved ones to write, to compose, to play music, and to paint is time lost, in a manner of speaking, by the judgement of the world.
There is that familiar twinge of guilt when you step away, when you close the door, and you step out to the studio, that there is something that could be done, or should be done, somewhere else, that you should be with someone you should be attending to.
We are so resolutely oriented towards love, and towards service, as husbands, fathers, mothers, and wives, that we can feel terribly conflicted being away from all that we know and all that we love. Will our children resent us, do we wonder? Our spouses, perhaps. Where are we failing and falling down due to the obsession, the fixation on the work at hand, when we’re chasing sounds and tones, or colours and textures, when we’re madly deliberating between the univibe and the harmonic tremolo, or the powder or the pearl?
What do our loved ones think of us when we’re programming our MIDI controller, when we’re tinkering hunched over a synth for the third time that week? Our children and our loved ones, dear reader, have fallen in love with us. All of us, just as we are called to love them and love them, they too have a calling to love all of you, for better or for worse. This must include, of course, the fixation and the vocation, the creative acts, the love, the affair of the artist.
What you must ensure, however, is that there is, at the end of it, a body of work by which they can know and love you all the more. A body of work by which they can hear your voice, understand your presence, your language, the tenor of your spirit, the delicate work of your hands. There must be, dear reader, a trace, a cache, a collection, a body of work by which they can know and love you all the more, perhaps all the more differently.
The Lord teaches that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains but a single grain. Dear reader, should you fall in submission, in humility to the creative act, to the daring premise that you, indeed you and only you, can create something that you and only you can create, in a world awash with the dead and lost works of other souls - souls that never took the time to truly bring these works to life.
You must believe that delicate, wonderful, wonderful truth: That you are God’s creation; you alone are God’s son or daughter, given a voice and a means that nobody else has.
When you honour that gift, when you honour that talent rather than burying it in a field… when that grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, and it takes life and breath and colour and song into its being, then you will know, dear reader, that it was all worth it, and your loved ones will know it too.