“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”
~Vincent Van Gogh
This past weekend I listened to an interview with Krista Tippett and author Kate DeCamillo. It was a charming and inspiring conversation between two people that seem to truly admire and appreciate one another. During the interview in response to a question, Kate DiCamillo said:“Life is chaos. Art is pattern.” These words pierced both my heart and my imagination. And they hit home to the world as I know it these days. Her statement also sent me to the dictionary to refresh my memory about the actual definition of chaos. “Complete disorder and confusion. Behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions.” And of course, there was also the definition that exists in the beginning of the sacred texts many of us hold dear…“the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.”
It seems that over the last two and half years chaos has been the food of the every day. Some days I find myself overwhelmed by it all. Am I alone in this? Yet in those feelings I have found myself drawn more and more to art. And not just art we might find in museums or on stages and between the pages of books though that has been particularly helpful in counteracting the experience of disorder and confusion. The every day arts of cooking a meal or arranging flowers in a vase have lifted me out of what seems the randomness of it all. Taking time to pay attention to how I wipe the kitchen counters or arrange books on a shelf also has done the trick. And in just a few weeks (please, God!) spring will be here and the art that is the garden will begin to take shape.
“Art is pattern.” I had really never thought about it in that way before. But the patterns of the buildings we know to be great gifts of architecture can bring a grounding to our world. Noticing how a chair we have housed for years is put together with form and purpose speaks to the patterns of bringing wood and design together. The coat we have worn all winter and are desperately tired of was fashioned from patterns of what fits on our needy, welcoming body. That favorite recipe takes random ingredients and through the process of weaving them together feeds us, even delights us.
No matter your faith tradition the stories shared round fires and passed down from generation to generation all begin with some kind of disorder that moves through the acts of creativity to birth patterns that bring order, calm, purpose and even beauty. “The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface”…and then light was called forth and the patterns of Creation began to build.
So why did those six words spoken by the great teller of stories for children capture me so? Perhaps it was a challenge. A challenge to take what often feels like the chaos of thought and experience and find a pattern that will make something more of it, perhaps even art. If we take seriously these traditional stories that ground us in who we are as humans, it seems a central message is to create. So on these days that seem to want to hang on for dear life to the grayness of winter and in the face of those voices who want to stir up evermore chaos, there might be the challenge to begin to see, to create the patterns that can make artists of us all.
It’s worth a try.