For those in the back, not paying attention, the last few weeks have been full of a one syllable word that leaves the rooms in which it is spoken with a little less air…DARR.

Now that the DARR Mine Mosaic Memorial has been doing its thing on the 300 foot long wall for a full week, I am breathing a bit easier. After several necessary hibernation days of basement recovery, I have emerged, to hear the first of the travelers make their initial, shocked remarks about its impact. Hundreds of real life people are saying the name Darr and being primed to learn more because of mosaic. I have counted no less than four retired coal miners looking me in the eye and saying, thank you. One old gentleman cried as he rode his bike by, asking “are they really meant to be coal tags?”

Take a listen to last week’s The Art of the Lost Story as a read-aloud by me.

Listen now · 8:34

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You Are a Rain Barrel

This is for the artists who worry about not making art. I am you.

Art, maybe more than any other thing that humans do, besides love, is difficult to enforce. The creative act must be approached with a willingness, an eagerness, an open heart. Some are under the misapprehension that art just happens. They believe some people are just born with the gifts. But those of us who do it on the regular understand that there are a million ways to usher the creative act into the world. We court it. We woo it. We seduce and cajole it. Sometimes we ruin ourselves for it.

But the longer I live with the empty times, the more I have come to see them as necessary. Because the empty times are not really empty.

Think of yourself as a rain barrel.

The rain barrel is the perfect image for how making art gets done. And done in a way that keeps the maker healthy. Because we can’t be always full. An always full rain barrel is not being used correctly. In order to do what it is built for, its faucet needs to be turned to OPEN at the right times. And CLOSED at the right times.

You are always in some stage of being empty or full. The rains of possibility will fill you with ideas. You store them, keep them safe and organized until you are ready to turn the faucet. You make the good stuff. Then you are emptied out. Let the water soak into your substrate. Until the next rain starts your cycle again.

That feeling of emptiness, when there is no urge to mark the blank canvas, can be the moments just before taking a deep, deep gulp of pure rainwater. Your empty time can work for you if you have a plan.

It is your job to capture the rains. Some of us, if we don’t yet understand how it works, may run around with a butterfly net, trying to catch the rain drops. Or a shot glass. We use tools not meant for the job at hand and expect the creative process to work for us. Then we get frustrated and quit. We beat ourselves up for not having our faucet turned to OPEN, forever.

The rain barrel is a system that works. Its simplicity makes it effective. It involves rooflines and gutters, gravity and pressure. And the fickleness of rain.

Rain in, rain out. Rain in, rain out.

If you live in a desert climate, your rain barrel analogy can still work. In fact, it may even be more crucial. Capturing the less frequent rains becomes your solution to survival.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking of the emptiness as an indication that something is wrong. An empty rain barrel can also signify that something has been watered. Some creative thing has been fed and ushered into the world.

When your rain barrel is being filled with ideas, that is the time you become the collector. You write the brilliant ideas down in quirky lists that only you understand. Because if you don’t capture them, they will slip through your fingers and into the notebooks of others.

Your collecting times should be filled with lists and documenting and messy sketches. If you write about making art, this is the time to do that. Keeping a notebook by the bed so you don’t let the murmured messages from your dreams slip away. Sometimes just one word, or three words, written in very large letters and hung in your workspace, can change the trajectory of your month. Your year. See the three words below. I have written them down in my studio this summer to keep some rain barrel energy from escaping.

Once an idea leaves you, it may very well never come back.

And the exhilarating, intoxicating times when the rains come usually means there is not enough time in the day to make them all come to fruition. Mosaic is the slowest art, after all. The making of it can take weeks and months. You must capture the spirit of the rain in scribbles or words or by recording your voice. Something to document the details of what the Irish like to call a lashing from the heavens. So when the making time comes, you can be reminded of those feelings and translate them to the substrate.

You are a rain barrel. Capture the rain.

In the spirit of all this water, I am sharing links to a publication I am obsessed with lately… Cosmographia

I’ve Known Rivers and this one, Under the Sea. Each page is riddled with ancient maps, lost manuscripts, forgotten myths. Its like turning the corner and happening upon a hidden away rare bookstore with a surprisingly helpful front desk clerk. Check them out.

Thank you for being here with me as I keep digging for optimism.

Some days with a shovel. Some days with a hammer. And some days with a pen.