Tonight, I attended the inaugural event for a new Chicago artist group called Whitespace centered around how artists use their sketchbooks. It was both entertaining and inspiring, and a great way to meet new folks.
As I was leaving the event and on my walk to the train, I began to realize.
As a creative person, I know there is a place within your soul where you collect beautiful things, like a treasure box of ephemera gathered from your life. Like a particularly ostentatious pink and orange sunrise over the ocean that you stayed up all night to witness, or the way the summer sunlight shifts and sparkles through the window when filtered through the shivering leaves of a tree. Or a suddenly powerful and insightful phrase or sentence from a poem, or a book, or the mouth of random passerby. Maybe it’s the face of a girl in the crowd whose smile illuminates the room, or the way a man gestures when he’s on the phone, or the way a boy on the train puts his hand on his lover’s neck when it’s late and they’re both tired. These are the things, the events, the moments that take your breath away, that suddenly show you the beauty of the universe unfiltered for a change. You stare, trying to drink all of it in, to burn the image into your retinas and write it out on the wall of your mind so that it will stick with you, in that special place inside you filled with the reasons why you keep moving and striving and fighting on the days when nothing and nobody seems beautiful anymore. You are filling your soul with beautiful light so that one day you can shine for someone else, so that those moments will never fade from this world; they will only be recycled, reused, polished up and passed on.
And I realized that I need a good portable sketchbook, so I can start capturing these moments in more than just myself. Because often, I forget them.
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