A week ago, I was running late, frustrated and feeling more than a bit burnt out. I was late to a sober teens group that I have volunteered with for over 15 years. As I packed up my materials for them to make a simple jewelry stamped piece, I couldn’t help but think “what a hack! These materials and the project are so elementary!” You see, these teens are some of my favorite people on the planet. They are intense, creative, and savvy far beyond their years. They have lived through a pandemic, shootings in schools so commonplace they do the drills like fire drills. Many of them have lost their own close friends to fentanyl, other drug overdoses and suicides.
We began in a circle and the facilitator asked me to introduce myself. As I looked around the room I could see and sense the boredom and distain, the “I have to sit through some lady here to show and tell me something that I could care less about”. Arms crossed, several looking at their cell phones, I thought, screw it, scrap the plan about running a business in the arts, meet them where they are at.
I channeled them back to the story of my junior year in high school me. How I moved from Washington D.C. in the middle of my junior year, happiest year to that date, to the middle of Kansas, leaving behind my first boyfriend, a school that inspired me and many clubs and friends. How back then there were no therapists to talk to and no one I knew. I told them how sad, isolated and lonely I was. How I would play Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere over and over again on my record player that I won on the boardwalk in New Jersey for a quarter. How I found the baddest boy I could, hanging out in places and situations that I now know I was lucky to walk away from.
And then. I told them of the day I walked into a pottery lab on the military base. I walked in quietly when trumpets should have blared, as Margaret Atwood wrote in a novel I once read. I recounted how a lieutenant not much older than me showed me the ropes…picking out a mold, pouring the slip, and the jars of glaze stretching out like a rainbow bridge to my old life and happiness. I was transformed. The hours went like minutes.
Fast forward to sitting in that circle, I told them about my motto, ART SAVES. I looked around the room from student to student and thought, “oh geez, Nanc, get on with the demo, you’re really boring them now…
I pulled out the project materials and they began stamping, hammering and filing. But before that, I asked them to think of the darkest hardest moments of their lives so far. I implored them to suspend their need to understand where they’re at and surrender to the beautiful, powerful deep siren language that calls them, whether it’s pottery, photography, a service industry and on. And then I asked them to find the word or words that came from that experience that they are proud of about themselves, that would become their own wearable shrine of intention. Some of them worked with intent, some didn’t. Or so I thought.
We ended the group as we began. Back into our circle and the facilitator asking them each for a takeaway- what they liked the most about our time together. Every single person there talked about how inspired they felt, many of them talking about how they were going to go toward starting their own business, meanwhile others saying they were going to enroll in a jewelry making class at school or music or some other art form.
After they left, and as I was packing up my measly jewelry making materials, I couldn’t help but feel elated and inspired myself by them. That my tools were not merely “just tools”, but a tool kit for getting back up. That as I spoke, I was transported to the hardest time in my life, now a fragment of a dream. That I was able to see how as hard as it was, that I couldn’t have the drive, empathy and creativity without having lived through such a dark experience.
Most of all, they reminded me what we are all here for. There is no president that will save us, no person, nor more stuff, no pill, but the individual and collective WE that will save us. That we all need each other in community and creativity. That living life as a work of art will save us, even if it’s just a smile toward someone. That each of us in our own unique way can be relied upon as a faithful way-shower for the heart.
I told them to hang on when they feel anxious, frustrated and lost and lonely. To be patient. That is does get better. That the meandering, unstudied lost and lonely me was actually in deep concentration and had no idea how beautiful and okay it would all turn out. That inner growth will bloom like the springtime. That you are fighting to emerge out of the earth like a sprout to the ecstatic dance toward the sunlight in this crazy upside-down world.
ART SAVES,
Nancy + Team Sweet Bird