Be an artist. Paint. Write. Play the banjo. Sing in the shower. Whittle figures out of soap.  Write lyrics in bathroom stalls. Do anything and everything that connects you with your creative potential.

Any day is a day for a play

Imagine. Explore. Dream.

Don’t be angry if your parents or teachers try to discourage you. They are worried, worried for you.  Money rules the world in so many way and bleeds into our fears for the one that they love. Adults try to pretend this fear doesn’t exist. But it does.

But they don’t understand. They don’t know what it is like for words to course through your veins and swell your body until a pen realizes it. They haven’t found salvation in a dingy light club with a sweaty rock and roll man screaming as the crowd swells against you.  Or spent all day staring at clouds. Or spent six hours trying to find the right shade of red. They simply are just not wired like you,do not thirst art like water, do not breathe it in like air.

Realize that this beauty is more powerful than any dollar amount, and may never bring you any money. Realize that the late nights and long hours are worth what you are doing for nothing more than the finishing line of a poem. That fame and success do not add to your work. You do not have to be Picasso.   My art, your art, our art will have a rippling effect that no one will fully comprehend. One speck of paint can bring the heavens to weep.

Creation. Taking nothing, taking parts and making a whole is contained within itself, a wonder that mimics the heavens.

Be an artist because the world tells you to become an investment banker but just as the word needs financiers, scientists and doctors, the world needs a soul.

Be an artist because the world sucks. In the darkness, we need your light of hope. We need a voice that screams, “I feel how you feel. You are not alone.” And in the light we need the darkness, an everlasting reminder of the yin and yang of life.

And never apologize for it. Be who you are. And love what you do. Those who understand will never chastise you. And those who don’t, will never understand.