Compassion and the Arts
If you’re working in some area of the arts yourself–writing, music, film, painting, photography, dance, theater–or you’re close to someone who is, you know that this profession can often feel awfully detached from the real world of real suffering.
Living in Nashville, I’m particularly aware of the music industry, and what a superb job many individual bands and musicians
have done in publicly supporting a particular cause, whether clean water or feeding the hungry or construction in developing nations.
And from personal friendships with people in the arts, I’m aware that many of you give to compassion organizations–often quietly, often with breathtaking generosity.
Still, lots of us struggle with what can feel like an inhumane disconnect between barricading ourselves in a studio or library or practice room to work–while the images of recent earthquakes or tsunamis, or of orphanages without nearly enough food for their children play on in our heads.
What I’d like to do here is to offer a place for a conversation among people in the arts. We don’t have to agree on one organization or one region of the world to support. We don’t have to agree on political parties, or live in the same country.
But perhaps it would be helpful to talk. Perhaps to give one another ideas. Or support. Perhaps to form a loose coalition of writers and musicians and actors and painters and
directors and sculptors who want to live with passion and compassion in the stories we tell or the images we paint or sounds we produce, and who want to stay connected–to each other and to the wider world of desperate need.
If you’re interested or know someone who might be, see the blog attached to this website under the category “Compassion and the Arts,” and join the conversation there. Please feel free to forward this to your own colleagues and friends. Your input and theirs will be valued. And let’s see what comes of the conversation….
Thank you for your time, your ideas and your heart,
Joy Jordan-Lake
joyjordanlake@aol.com
Connect with Joy
Some Favorite Quotes on the Writing Life:
"People without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal."
--Flannery O’Connor"You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
--Jack London"Writing has saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence." --Alice Walker
"You must be prepared to work always without applause."
--Ernest Hemingway"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
--Samuel Beckett"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson"You keep putting one blessed word after another, just as you hear them, as they come to you."
--Anne Lamott"Sing to God a new song."
--Psalm 33:3
