“Every child is an artist until he’s told he’s not an artist.” — John Lennon
What the world needs now is arts and crafts. As kids, we are encouraged to create — we paint, draw, sculpt, stitch, build, write, sing, dance, play, and perform. Remember when cutting and pasting was safety scissors and a big jar of paste (don’t eat it!) to make colorful collages and not some mindless combination of hot keys in Excel on a laptop? We need to bring back what we loved as kids to our lives as adults.
I believe each of us has a first love in the arts and crafts. Ask yourself, “what was I passionate about as a child that I have a longing for now?” For me it is poetry and writing. For my uncle it is making music and songwriting. For my mom, wife, mother-in-law, and daughter it is sketching and painting. It is not just about the fine arts and performing arts. For my dad it is carpentry and woodworking. One of my Marines, after he got out of the military, taught himself how to become a blacksmith and now he makes some of the most beautiful hand forged custom knives. Even bushcraft is a craft — learning the art of minimalist survival is making a comeback.
I have loved poetic writing for as long as I can remember. From Rumi to Dylan Thomas to Tupac Shakur to Andrea Gibson, I love the work of great poets — regardless of the era or the topics they write about. Dylan Thomas traced his love for writing poetry back to the Mother Goose nursery rhymes his parents read to him as a child:
I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance … I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.
Back in high school, I used to write poetry. I desperately want to get back to doing it and I will. I even entered our school’s annual art and literature contest in 1993 and won the award for best literature. My main piece was called Running for Freedom. It is an ode to Jesse Owens, the American Olympic Gold Medalist who won the most gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin in front of Hitler. ESPN’s Larry Schwartz reflected on the monumental importance of the event, “When Owens finished competing, the African-American son of a sharecropper and the grandson of slaves had single-handedly crushed Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy.” I wrote this nearly 30 years ago when I was sixteen. I have not shared it since then. I hope you like it.
Running for Freedom
I am a black man,
but I believed.
Long and rough was the track,
but I believed.
Cast under a shadow of white supremacy,
but I believed.
More than a medal at stake,
but I could succeed.
More than a record to break,
but I took the lead.
And it was surely my hardest race,
but I achieved.
And I ran with an ill-wind in my face,
but I achieved.
My opponent was not a man, but mankind,
but I still believed.
I saw the finish line hurdles away,
but I’d soon achieve.
And their hatred turned the skies to gray,
but God and I, we believed.
I found my strength inside,
not in numbers.
I did not run because of fear,
a fear of difference.
And the millions, as they surrounded,
were astounded.
I ran for freedom.
And here, something they could not conceive,
that I, the black man, could achieve,
but I, I believed.
While many of us have read about Owen’s achievement, what you may not know, is that Hitler once wanted to be an artist. Imagine how different the world would be, if he had pursued his dream. Author Stephen Pressfield writes about this in The War of Art:
You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study… Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.
After sharing this anecdote with my best friend, he remarked, “If I could go back in time and change one thing, I would make sure Hitler stayed in art school.” So, what is it about our society, our system, our way of life that wrings out every last drop of our natural passions to create? We warn our kids, “Don’t end up a starving artist,” but instead of that they often end up miserable souls in the pursuit of money. This deeply held belief that some professions are worth pursuing and some are not has been around for well over a century. Art critic Carleton Noyes wrote in the book, The Gate of Appreciation, in 1907:
The child is the first artist. Out of the material around him he creates a world of his own. The prototypes of the forms which he devises exist in life, but it is the thing which he himself makes that interests him, not its original in nature. His play is his expression. Imagination surrenders to the intellect; emotion gives place to knowledge.
Gradually the material world shuts in about us until it becomes for us a hard, inert thing, and no longer a living, changing presence, instinct with infinite possibilities of experience and feeling.
I think it is time for us get back to our world being “a living, changing presence, instinct with infinite possibilities of experience and feeling.” I think it is time for us to rekindle our childhood passions for arts and crafts. What are we waiting for? Retirement? Our death beds? Writer Chris Brauer recently had a Facebook post go viral about giving ourselves permission to do what we need to do for our own sanity — especially during this time of heightened fear, anxiety, and depression. Chris writes:
Please stay at home. Not so you can tidy the house. Not so you can do recycling. Stay at home to write, paint, bead, sew, or sit at a pottery wheel…We are not a species that thrives when we stuff our dreams and desires and moments of vulnerability in suitcases. I know. I tried. For a long time.
I hope you will each be brave enough to comment on my post with your favorite childhood art or craft and what you will do now, as an adult, to pursue it. Maybe even post a picture of something you have created. I can’t wait to see it!
