Tag: women writers

A letter to all my creative friends

What is your art worth, my dear friend? I write this as someone who has been writing for 25 years, whose writing is infused with the type of experience I would not wish on anyone. I write this as someone who wakes at 4am to write with a broken French Press and discount Lebanese coffee, as someone who spends her evenings creating digital art with pharmacy glasses as I cannot afford prescription lenses.

So, you tell me that your jewellery is not worth the price tag, though I know you have spent years training and hours making the piece which you undersell. I have seen the callouses on your fingers and the chisel slices taken from your hands.

You tell me your art is not worth the price, and I tell you the problem is not your jewellery, nor the price-tag.

The problem is that you do not yet know your worth.

Because there must be something beyond the daily labour that reduces us to automatons. A rationale for placing one foot beyond the other. There are those who say they are not creative, but even they enjoy a unique bangle bought, a song on the car radio played in peak hour traffic, a series on Netflix, a spring garden that they tend.

Art makes life bearable, my dear friend. It gives us a reason to keep going, and you might say well that this the role of children, or a partner, or a pet. But love itself is an artform, a creative practice infused with intuition and hard work.

Art gives us a reason to breathe, dear friend.

Please know your worth.

Things I learned from you

That nature is comprised of fractals, a golden ratio seen in a sunflower’s face and a fern unfurling, that a wave’s crest can be reduced to the rise and fall of sine and cosine, of trigonometry in motion,

That nature smiles when you plant kamote leaves, that she blesses you with rain and sweet potato tubers, that there are spirits in the trees and that the ground upon which we tread is alive

That some earth needs to be softened in order for plants to grow and indeed you sprouted forests from clay and hoof torn dirt and I learned that some people are better teachers than parents,

And I learned that the same person who can birth foliage from barren earth, command an oasis with toil and care, delighting in palms that reach to the sky

May not delight in their own offspring’s unfolding, that they will plant them in darkness, abandon them in barren land and blame them

For their leafless stems and flowerless bloom

I learned that you should have been a botanist and not a mother.