becauseidreammoi

Keep the hope alive

April 5, 2013 § Leave a Comment

Believe in your fucking self.

Stay up all fucking night.

Work outside of your fucking habits.

Know when to fucking speak up.

Good things come to those who work their ass off and never give up.

Go and fucking find your inner demons.

Never give up or let someone else make decisions which are supposed to be yours.

If they don’t like you as the skinny girl you are, try to be a fucking plus-size.

If life gives you a lemon make sure there is tequila around.

If being number 14th in the world sucks work harder and become number one.

If you want to hide go and hide in a fucking smart way.

If you are going crazy.

Don’t worry.

Your mind is way too complex to keep it healthy.

If you don’t want to show your face show your feet.

Don’t fit in. Fit better.

They don’t believe in your idea?

Ignore it and take the challenge.

Take pictures of yourself no fucking matter how you look,

you are just doing it to prove you are alive anyway.

You are the result of 4 billion years of evolutionary success.

Fucking act like it.

It’s you. The next big thing.

I LOVE YOU. So go and fucking love yourself.

The Ego issue , October 2012

Your worth as an artist

April 2, 2013 § Leave a Comment

A repost from the blog, www.tasteofgingerblog.com, dated May 5, 2012 by Ginger Pennington. Here is the link to the original text.

*Thank you Ginger for writing this poignant article on the daily emotional and financial struggles of most artists.*

“When bankers get together, they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.”

- Oscar Wilde

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Here I am sitting in a sunny, barely-affordable apartment in one of America’s most expensive cities, surrounded by paintings and collages and musical instruments, books and salvaged furniture. I’m writing a blog for which I don’t get paid, and I’m eating Ramen noodles. There are times when I might second-guess the choices I’ve made to get me to this point; times when I wonder if things would be “easier” if I could afford a cupboard full of the fresh delicacies from the museum-like aisles of Whole Foods, if I could shop for this season’s Anthropologie dresses, if I could say “yes” more often to invites because I had the disposable income.

Photo by David Heald – Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

In this society, the easiest way to get the key to all those little extras is to give up, for the most part, on being an artist, a creator, a performer. Because, let’s face it: if I lived in a cheaper city and got myself a 60-hour-a-week job doing something “normal,” I could stop shopping at the 99 Cent Store and drive a new hybrid car and join an expensive gym.

But then when I read an article like Scott Timberg’s “No Sympathy for the Creative Class,” it gets a little easier, knowing that there are others out there like me, though I can’t see them because “the full picture of culture in this country doesn’t get told.” According toTimberg, “to most Americans, this middle class of the creative class might as well be invisible.”

We here in America are all about “hard work,” but we have a very limited idea of what that work can be. To be respected in this society, one’s work has to be something that one brings home the bacon, so to speak, steadily and reliably. Value, to most Americans, is a concept defined by nothing more than the price of something. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been encouraged by practical, well-meaning people to focus on something more lucrative, to save my work for “playtime” after I’m done sitting at a desk all day in a windowless room. We artists and creative types are looked at as dreamers who do nothing for society. Our work is looked at as play. But I dare the people who demean our life’s purpose to try living their menial lives without all the contributions we provide them.

What would the red-blooded workaholic weekend warriors do without movies and television, books, magazines, and internet sites to beguile them in the off hours? What would they do if their cities were not beautified by architecture, if they had no fancy clothes or cars to show off at their office jobs? We, the writers, the photographers, the actors, the singers, the designers, the architects, the artists, are the ones that provide them those joys. Timberg cites a quote from Dana Gioia, a poet who oversaw an artists/finances study while she was chairman of National Endowment for the Arts: “What does it mean in America to be a successful artist? Essentially, these are working-class people – a lot of them have second jobs. They’re highly trained – dancers, singers, actors – and they don’t make a lot of money. They make tremendous sacrifices for their work. They’re people who should have our respect, the same as a farmer. We don’t want a society without them.”

I’ve learned to survive in this recession of money and values by listening to my own voice above all others. When I am encouraged to marginalize my creative endeavors, to get a “real” job (how insulting–I would never insult someone’s chosen path like that), there are two truths that keep me from taking that step: 1) directing 60 hours of my weekly energy into something I don’t care about leaves my life grey and bland, depleting me of the energy I would otherwise use to do my creating, and 2) money still, after all these years, does not buy my or anyone else’s happiness. So when the store windows begin to tempt me, I imagine how it would feel to trade in my passions in favor of a “safe” life, saddled with a mortgage and a cubicle and a predictable week’s activities. That’s when I remember that art is my path. I am intended to be a creator, the way Arjuna was intended to be a warrior.

I love the story of the Bhagavad Gita (2.48), where God tells Arjuna, “Perform your duty equipoised, O Arjuna, abandoning all attachment to success or failure. Such evenness of mind is called yoga.” We are all given specific gifts. We are all on our own special path. Whatever our path, we should pursue it to the fullest, for the love of it, staying in the journey of it, without looking for the result. Sometimes staying in the yoga is difficult; I convince myself I should be so much further along this imaginary path than I am, when really I am right where I should be. My value is not measured in money; I am worth more than anyone could count.

Posted 5th May 2012 by Ginger Pennington