When is Life, Art?

Ghandi once said his life was his message.  I would also like to add that our life is our art.  True artists don't paint to sell, they paint to express what they feel.  True writers don't write for any reason except the words are asking to be expressed.  Or, at least that is what my heart would say to my spirit.

The battle I have noticed within myself these last years as I try and find my way to express my art as my life is that "outcomes" seem to get in the way.  What will people think?  How am I changing things to get sales?  When am I doing less than my vision to make others comfortable?  When do I compromise my vision for another persons concerns?

Art, like life, goes through stages.  In our innocence we do what we feel.  But life often shows us that the external world doesn't always reward or accept that version.  So we compromise.  When art must lead to money, we are faced with an even bigger dilemma - which is more important, our art or our income?

It is easy for those who don't have to consider children, mortgages, and all the responsibilities of most of our lives to just create art for the sake of creating.  But when we can't do that, what is life then really?  Isn't the whole point of life to live as creatively as an artist does in their own medium?

I have envied the crazy artists who have a cadre of caretakers attending to food, cleaning, the basics of the business of life.  They have been men mostly.  As women, it's hard to choose creation over the roles we have assumed to be responsible for - and it is not wrong to do so, someone has to:)

Art is really only the creative expression of our inner vision.  It is our imagination which is really what creates the world and the Universe around us.  So I do believe our life is our art.  The problem isn't naming it, it's living it. 

Simplifying my life was meant to allow more time for living my life as I wanted to and in many ways it has - I have no idea how I ever held a full time job, took care of a house and all the extra stuff that went with it - and even less idea how those who raise families do it all.  But they don't really, do they.

But most of us don't.  Even with so very much less to do, there's still too much to do that I don't really want to and there are still expenses to meet that are asking me to compromise in ways I don't know if I can any more.  I still yearn for more freedom, even though I have more than I ever have had before.

The truest expression of my life as art also requires the truest expression of freedom.  I can FEEL this, but I'm still trying to BE this.  In a world that asks us all to DO more, all I can feel is I want to do less so that I can BE more - that is the artistic expression of the freedom I desire.  I'm still working towards it, but today I'm naming it - again....