Me & Helen pretending we are on stage as ABBA’s backup dancers.  Photo taken by Melissa last weekend.

Today I have been working on an art piece for a forthcoming book by the lovely Kelly Rae Roberts, who gave me the honor of asking me to be a part of her book…..back in March.  While I would love to take credit for all the time I’ve been thinking about it and use that as the official start date for this piece, the truth is that no actual creative activities had taken place for this project until yesterday.  This was when I proceeded to create a piece that I liked but did not love because I misunderstood exactly what she was looking for and was trying to fit my style of work within a specific – and incorrect, it turns out – framework.  Fortunately we were able to talk last night about it so today I started an entirely new piece and it is coming along beautifully.  I still asked her if I could turn in my homework late.  No gold stars for me.

I was given a choice of themes for this piece, and I chose Creating Community.  There were other topics that felt easier for various reasons, but because I have a pattern of struggling with what community, friendship and family means to me I believed that tension would help me create more interesting, meaningful work.  I don’t want to spill the beans too much on this piece since it will be featured and discussed in Kelly’s book, but it has been an insightful exercise for me to sit down and focus on community for two straight days.  I’ve had to ask myself a myriad of thought-provoking questions such as -  what does community mean to me?  What do I need, want and expect from a community?  Is community the same thing as friendship?  What are the different communities I am a part of and where do I fit in?  What are my most important values and who do I rely on to help me live by those?

What was interesting – maybe even surprising – is that I had to start with my own values before I could start thinking about what community meant to me.  Because this piece is not about friendship per se, I found I needed some kind of central starting point, something that placed me in the center of a circle of people who I could count on from near or far to support me in living by my most deeply held priorities.  I used an exercise from Sunny Schlenger’s book Organizing for the Spirit, an exercise I did a few weeks ago that has stayed with me, guiding me in large ways and small.  In the exercise, a list of 35 or so values is given, and the reader is instructed to choose his or her top ten values from that list.  After this, one’s list is narrowed down to five and then to one.  At the time I did the exercise, my number one value was health, and that still holds true today since I am still not entirely out of the woods with a few different issues.  I put my top five on the piece I am working on today, and I look forward to seeing how the items on that list shift and shuffle in significance as the months go by.

Once those values were stamped on paper and glued to the piece, everything else evolved from there, and with those values as the starting point, it was very easy to think about what kind of community I needed to live by those values.  In creating this piece, it was so easy to see how connected I was to a larger and very inspiring entity, and made me realize how many different people (or books and places) I can turn to when I need support.  It showed me where I fit into the great big puzzle that is the world and reminded me that I am absolutely nuts to think I am alone in this life.

I have friends.  I have a community.  I have people I talk to almost everyday and others I will most likely never meet, but I am connected to them all and working on this art piece made me feel closer to all of them.  Oprah Winfrey might not know me personally, but I know she truly wants me to live my best life – this is what she wants for the world and I am a part of this world.  We are not as far apart and unknown to one another as we might sometimes believe, and I personally find great comfort in the notion that through our passions and our dreams, we all are all weaving a beautiful tapestry together.

"One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them."  -Virginia Woolf