Just Beyond the Light: Making Peace with the Wars Inside Our Head

by D. Randall Blythe

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Maybe… but who gives a fuck?

Even (gasp!) social media itself? It doesn’t matter. It’s all just noise, and paying attention to that crap, much less actually worrying about it, is a complete waste of time.

there is a better life waiting for you, but there is no express train to salvation. You’re gonna have to walk through some crap to get here, but it’s going to make you stronger by the time you arrive.

I am convinced that creative energy lingers in the places where great artists struggled to bring their genius to life.

That is what the artist sees in the totality of life: the possibility for expression.

And for God’s sake, assembling a carefully curated social media page full of nothing but beautiful pictures and videos of yourself “living your best life” sure as fuck doesn’t make you an artist; it makes you a narcissist and (at best) a visually creative liar.

Art is the outwardly manifested expression of the artist’s search for meaning.

art is an expression of imagination perceptible via our senses that conveys a truth of some sort about the human experience as interpreted through the eyes of the creator. As well, art is capable of being witnessed by others; it can be viewed, read, heard, touched, even smelled or tasted, or some combination of all of the above, by someone other than the creator. Furthermore, someone other than the creator can have their own experience with the art, run it through the filter of their own perceptions and experience, internalizing and interpreting it through that filter, and then assign their own meaning to it, even if that meaning is not the same as the creator’s original intent. This, of course, is one of the hallmarks of good art—it kickstarts the imagination of the viewer/listener/et cetera, perhaps even inspires their own artistic ideas.