Your Art is a Goddam Miracle
a poem, (lots of) artistic exercise + a Dallas update
ESSAY | Your Art is a Goddam Miracle
Yes, I’m channeling my inner Amie McNee today. Your art is a goddam miracle. I’m riled up. This thought struck me a couple nights ago, right before I fell asleep. It came in so hot I had to swing my body out of bed and passionately type the gist into my notes app, tapping feverishly into the glowing screen with one eye open.
Life has been coming at me pretty fast these days. There are things happening from the moment I open my eyes in the morning until the moment I close them at night. I’m certain I’m not the only one. We all have things — from partners, kids and pets to monthly bills, spaces to care for and health goals.
Maybe you or a loved one is going through something big — a move, relationship stuff, aging family members, health challenges and goodness so much more.
Don’t even get me started on the world. Sometimes when I watch the news it feels hard to breathe. In my current orbit there are endless group texts, birthday parties, a lot of laundry, mouths to continuously feed somewhat healthyish food, screen time to monitor, so many sports practices/games, creativity to foster and a calendar that looks like my markers attacked it in the middle of the night.
And yet.
And yet.
Every single day I pull my pen out of my bag to face a blank sketchbook page. Every single day I find a cozy corner to kick my shoes off and sketch for a sliver of my day. I’ll do anything for my 5-10 minutes to read a book that inspires my art practice. Every single day I find just one thing that’s beautiful enough for me to photograph.
With all that is life, this act of creating something each and every day, no matter what, is a miracle. It is not lost on me.
(Just before I put the finishing touches on this post, I was reading up on couple newsletters I had recently received. As I got toward the end of
’s River Day I had to smile, I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling this way. To tackle the “impossible task” of a daily art practice she will be embarking on a 100 day project to write a poem a day starting today.This was a spark from her friend ’s post, 100 day project — in which she also mentions laundry. Ah! The synchronicity of it all was too much to ignore so I decided that I too would start a 100 day drawing project starting today. Each day, I tell you, will be a goddam miracle.)
ART | Photography, Poetry, Collage, Music, Documentaries & more
Do you ever walk up to your bookshelf, pull a poetry book down, flip to a random page and read? Sometimes I do this — like pulling a tarot card from the deck. What can this poem show me? What do I need to hear today?
Well. This week I landed on these beautiful words from author Lang Leav and they made my shoulders relax. I needed to read this and maybe just maybe you need to read it too.
All Your Tomorrows
This is the recalibration of your soul, the moment of its resurrection. This is the clear, indisputable break between past and present. Your heart, mind, and breath fall into perfect alignment. Your feet stand at the threshold, ready to step into your purpose. Your hands are primed for the gathering of all your tomorrows. Every atom of your body is straining forward, working in perfect harmony with the clarity of your intent. Here is the moment of your arrival. Let yourself in.
- Lang Leav, Self-Love for Small-Town Girls
LIFESTYLE | Kitchen, Home, DIY & more
Since we’re not doing much around our house these days, if you don’t mind, I’m going to use this space to keep an update on our move to Dallas.
On Monday we packed backpacks and flew south to scope out rentals. It was exciting. We checked out a few different schools, narrowed it down, applied for a rental and it’s looking like we’re going to get it. We should have keys middle of July and will begin the process of packing once again.
The sadness finally hit me at the end of this week. I’ve been running on adrenaline and not allowing myself feel it all — once I opened the floodgates I’ve been crying on and off ever since. An emotional rollercoaster to say the least. I know we’ll make it through though, we always do.
Next week I’m hoping to share good news about selling our dreamy home here in northern, MN. Currently, that’s been the weightiest stressor. Stay tuned!
MANA STUDIO | Updates From My Studio
This week I decided that in order to move forward, I had to go back… to the basics. Create a stronger foundation. Lucky for me, the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain landed in my orbit and wow.
I put aside the type of sketching I love (loose sketching) and all week long practiced drawing exercises. I’m talking pages and pages of drawing upside down, pure contour drawing, circles, lines, shapes etc. A few times I broke out of my box and sketched a thing or two from my camera roll but I’ve been mostly making my way through, page by page, exercise by exercise and all I can think about is how I wished I would have found this book sooner. Building, learning, growing. We’ve got this!
See you next week! Keep creating! Elyse’
Adding collage elements to some sketchbook pages, quick trip to Dallas this week to look for a place to rent, pure contour sketching / back to the basics, collage + sketch, attended the No Kings Protest in my local community with my parents, sketch with markers from my camera roll, stoked with my Dallas thrift store finds, always sketching, found my people at a local bookstore in Grapevine!
Thank you for reading Norden Morning. This publication is created without artificial anything - it’s me, an artist/mother in my late 30s living life and sharing about it from my favorite little corner of the couch.
Did you enjoy today’s post? I invite you to share a blurb about it on your social media, forward it to a friend or link it in your newsletter. Lastly, I get so much value from your thoughts around all of these ideas, feel free to leave a comment, like or hit reply. I’d love to hear from you!
Let the goddam miracles begin!
I will share that when I first arrived in Dallas in Aug 1975 to attend graduate school, after living in NY State up until then, my reaction to the heat was to sit on the curb outside our Apt and cry.... I learned alot about adaptation, attitude and embracing the present....