Art has a very important place in my life. It feels incredibly hard to pick just one poem, just one painting, to represent so much at once. I went through a whole repertoire to figure out which one could capture the most well-rounded picture of what I believe in. In the end, I returned to something very simple, and it is actually a piece of art that truly has served as my guiding metaphor over the years. It is a little poem that I know by heart from The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, who is one of my favourite authors of all time. It is not really a children’s book, but not really for adults either. It is one of those books that can be enjoyed by anybody at any age, if you have the right mind for it. (Neil Gaiman himself actually has a very interesting take on the attribution of ages in literature). In it, a young boy is raised by ghosts in a graveyard after his parents are murdered, and when the time comes for the mortal kid to move on and into the world, his ghost mom reminds him of a lullaby she used to sing to him:
(Sleep my little babby oh, sleep until you waken,
When you wake you’ll see the world, if I’m not mistaken.)
Kiss a lover, dance a measure,
Find your name and buried treasure,
Face your life, its pain, its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.
It is so simple, and it certainly does not encompass my whole world view, but the message is powerful and has always stuck with me. I think I have throughout the start of my adult life often struggled with taking life a little too seriously, and this has always reminded me of the lightness, but also the balance, that we should all have in life. There are few things that really, truly matter.
Kiss a lover: To me, it is my deep love for the people around me and humanity in general. It is a reminder that our relationships in life are more important than anything else, at least on a personal level. And that we need to love fully and fearlessly.
Dance a measure: This is where the lightness comes in for me. I have held back for many years. This is a reminder to express myself, to not be scared, and to allow for exuberant joy.
Find your name…: My reminder that identity comes in all sorts of different shapes, and it shifts and changes over time, and that is a good thing. It is always worth it to keep searching.
…and buried treasure: Often the things we find along the way are most valuable, and they deserve our attention. This to me extends to everything I am passionate about that I maybe never thought I would be, whether this is a personal or a societal theme or issue.
Face your life, its pain, its pleasure: Balance! But also, there is no need to be afraid. Life always has a little bit of both, and that is good.
Leave no path untaken: This one seems obvious.
As for my favourite work of visual art, the answer has to lie within my own home. My partner is a wonderful painter, who only fairly recently has picked up oil instead of acrylics, and it has been my favourite thing to see him completely blossom in this medium. Our house is always filled with his works in progress, and every morning I get up to see him standing by his easel, headphones on, in deep concentration. So to me, this painting does not necessarily just represent something in itself, but it also represents my current life, the love I have for it, and the love I have for my partner’s brain and creative expression in general.
“A pine tree is time” is a quote from a novel by Ruth Ozeki, a Japanese Canadian author who writes beautiful prose. I find it hard to put it into words, but the painting encompasses my ideas about the circle of life, what a human life is to the life of a tree, how connected we are to nature, how connected we are to home, and how connected we are to each other. It hangs on our wall, and I am looking at it as I am writing these words.