A MILLION LITTLE WAYS: UNCOVER THE ART YOU WERE MADE TO LIVE

Two and a half years ago, I discovered Chatting at the Sky after my dear friend Jamie Martin shared it was the first blog she’d ever followed. I stopped by and immediately found myself at home. There author Emily P. Freeman was working through some ideas on what it meant to create art. I printed out her post, Fourteen Ways to Make Mediocre Art, and pasted it to the mini file on my desk, where I see it every day.

Emily has continued to explore this idea of being an artist on her blog. She’s written A MILLION LITTLE WAYS in an attempt to dig into this concept more deeply. What she’s created is inviting, encouraging, and profound. And it starts with this:

All of us have permission to make art.

I can’t help thinking how incredible this message might have been to my twenty-four-year-old self, the one who’d dreamed of writing for years.

“Art is what happens when you dare to be who you really are.”

I’d sent my students home for the last time. The summer stretched free before me. It was my moment to find the courage to try.

“The essence of being human is that we were made by design with the hands of the Divine Artist.”

I knew no one who wrote. I spent that summer and the years following trying to make my way. Two things kept me moving: I trusted that if I kept trying, my work would improve. I believed I had something unique to say.

“We get good at the things we practice.”

Thank you, Emily, for showing me art is much more than a thing we produce. It is who we are. It is what we’re made to do. It’s what most connects us to living. To ourselves. To God. This book is a gift to the new writer I was fifteen years ago, a treasure to the person I am now.

“Uncover the art you were born to make. Release the art you were made to live.”

Want to learn more? Read Emily’s October blog series called Made for This: 31 Days of Living Art, or consider joining the (in)courage Bloom book club, which is featuring her book this month.