Tend the Light
A reflection on holding space for darkness and lightness and the "necessary unecessaryness of art."
Creative Fuel is a newsletter about the intersection of creativity and everyday life. There are essays, prompts, Q&As, and more. Paid subscribers get a (mostly) weekly creative prompt, have full access to the prompt archive, and help to make this work sustainable.
I walked home from the studio a little after 8 p.m. the other day, reveling in the fact that it wasn’t entirely pitch black yet. Dusk was dwindling, about to transition into the darker hours, but that in-between space sitting in the middle of day and night felt like it held on a little longer than usual. It seemed like just a few weeks ago that night rolled in during the late afternoon.
I went home and lit a candle, a habit that’s leftover from winter hibernation. I watched it flicker, throwing light and shadows up against the wall.
This time of year can feel so tender, so full of potential, so much space to grow into. But that tenderness means that it also holds the opposite, as if this vast space of growth and potential opens us up, making us more vulnerable to the darkness.
We’re so much more aware, so much more sensitive. It’s the seasonal emergence, as if we are little plant seedlings, our faces urgently directed towards the sun, but our roots not quite deep enough to hold us. Spring cracks us open, and as we unfurl, lays bare our vulnerabilities. We see the light, but we also feel the grip of dark.
This past week, in my local community, the Tacoma and greater Pacific Northwest art world unexpectedly lost a light. Chandler O’Leary wasn’t a close connection of mine, but I have visited her house a few times on open studio tour, and I have loved her books. The loss is unfathomable for those in her immediate circles, as it is for those on the periphery.
That’s what happens when someone puts their heart and soul into sharing their creativity, sharing their art, sharing themselves: it touches people, creates a connection, a network, a constellation.
I am also coming up on an anniversary of an unexpected loss in my personal sphere, and I have talked to others recently who are in that same space right now. This topic of darkness and lightness therefore feels particularly poignant in this moment, and reflecting on it has me thinking about the creative paths we choose. How we implement our art and creativity on a daily basis, and why.
It is far too easy to say that art doesn’t matter, that it’s superfluous. It might be just as easy to say that it’s essential, that we must have it. The truth lies somewhere in between.
When we need to eat, we don’t opt for a painting. When injustices occur, we need systemic change to address them. But when we grieve, we might cling to the words of a poem as if they were a life raft. When we see an injustice, a suffering, an inaction, sometimes our only way to take a stand is through a song, an expression, a drawing, a choreography.
Art can’t nourish us physically, can’t change the history of what has already happened. But art can help us build the emotional scaffolding that supports our processing, it can lay the cultural groundwork for change, it can cultivate the connections that we need for deeper empathy, and it can help to create a new story, a new future. Art can be a place that we find solace, and find community.
“Art is an entry point for the difficult. The beautiful is a gateway to the urgent.”
-Kyo Maclear
Last week I read Kyo Maclear’s book Birds, Art, Life: A Year of Observation, gifted to me by fellow artist Brooke Sauer. In one chapter, Maclear grapples with this topic, aptly giving the chapter the subheading, “on the necessary unecessaryness of art and nature appreciation, especially in times of crisis.”
When two good friends are imprisoned in Egypt, Maclear’s creative practice, and her love of watching birds, starts to feel unessential—or at the very least, as if they are diverting her attention from other, more important, things.
In recounting an exchange with her bird-watching, musician friend, she notes, “we both agreed that in functional (stanching the wound, stopping sea-level rise) terms, art was fairly superfluous and fairly pointless. Some days this pointlessness was fine and even the point, but other times it felt dubious.”
I think that any artist has grappled with this at some point. I know for me, it’s sometimes on a daily, even hourly level. But as Maclear later writes, “birds do not stop flying and art does not stop getting made.” They are intertwined in the larger circular nature of things. We can’t really separate ourselves from nature and from art, because they are a part of our existence.
Whether we pay attention to birds and nature, or whether we engage in art in the face of those larger, global, unjust, and traumatic forces, these acts could be (and have been) seen as self-indulgent. Yet they can also be seen as modes of survival. “Art is an entry point for the difficult,” writes Maclear. “The beautiful is a gateway to the urgent.”
When a light goes out, the difficulty lies in that there is nothing to take its place. We’re challenged to find a new source. What we come to learn is that the light is, most often, within ourselves. We are responsible for tending to it, for sharing it.
To make art is to tend the light. To serve as a kind of lighthouse keeper, for ourselves certainly, but also others who may be lost in the darkness.
In my head, I hear the Swedish verb, tända. It sounds almost the same as “tend.” It means “to light” or “to ignite.” The action of creating a spark or a flicker. Sometimes that is all we can muster. A tiny moment of light. But that small action is a reminder that more is possible, that a brighter light is somewhere out there.
In Swedish, ljus means light, but also “candle.” I immediately think of the soft and calming, unobtrusive light that a candle throws onto the wall. The light that it provides, but also the feeling, the emotion.
Tänd ljuset. Light the candle. Ignite the light.
Tend the light. Take care of the light. Pay attention to it, give it what it needs, cultivate it, share it, extend it.
When I think of Chandler’s work, it makes me think of taking a big highlighter and underlining a particular lesson: that a live dedicated to sharing art and beauty is a life well-lived. It’s a life that’s dedicated to connection, it’s a life that honors joy. She certainly tended the light.
I think it’s fitting that her most recent book is about islands, places that often have lighthouses perched at their edges. The light tended for wary travelers across history, making their way through the waves, in and out of storms, in and out of the ebb and flow of the tides.
When we’re in deep grief, it can feel difficult to surface. The waves come incessantly. Everything else falls to the side. That grief can be personal, something we hold close and can feel incredibly alone in experiencing. It can also be collective, something we all may have felt during the time of Covid.
That collective version of darkness is something that sets in deeper and deeper with every new report on climate change, a changing environment escalating our despair and anxiety.
We do not always feel that in an acute way like we might with an immediate personal loss, but it is there. That kind of darkness can lurk just below the surface, like a dull pain that never goes away. It waits for a fire, or a deluge, or a cataclysmic storm, to escalate, that acute pain rising straight to the surface.
What do we do with that?
Rebecca Solnit wrote a recent piece in The Washington Post that helps to get at that question. “To respond to the climate crisis — a disaster on a more immense scale than anything our species has faced — we can and must summon what people facing disasters have: a sense of meaning, of deep connection and generosity, of being truly alive in the face of uncertainty. Of joy. This is the kind of abundance we need to meet the climate crisis, to make many, or even most, lives better. It is the opposite of moral injury; it is moral beauty. A thing we needn’t acquire, because we already have it in us.”
In other words: we need to tend to the light.
To be creative, we exist in the lightness and the darkness. This is our human condition. Art and creativity can be a salve, but we can’t always come to them. Sometimes we are so in the darkness all we can do is muster the energy it requires to survive the day.
But eventually, when we are ready to process, when we feel the inkling of light, the art is there. A life line. What a beautiful thing to create for ourselves and for each other.
Tänd ljuset. Ignite the light. If and when you can, knowing that we all share the responsibility.
Tend the light. Take care of the light. This is also our responsibility, as artists and as humans. This is our pact: I take care of it today, and you take care of it tomorrow. We’ll do it together.
Tend the light my friends. Tend the light.
-Anna
If you have ever been touched by Chandler O’Leary’s work, you may want to consider donating to help support her family through this tragic time.
A LITTLE CREATIVE INSPIRATION + OTHER TIDBITS
READING
The Nature Harmony spring reflection from Seven Senses (which I just discovered thanks to Chasing Nature).
“An open heart doesn’t need closing; it needs tending.” - Lisa Olivera
Chris La Tray's book, One-Sentence Journal
“I am more interested in what one can do with great constraints than what one can make with carte blanche.” Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame) in her article “Against House Porn.”
“Oral traditions, rather than being subordinate, are capable of transmitting just as much useful information as the technologies of reading and writing.” Patrick Nunn, “Memories within Myth”
LISTENING
I learned about the very fun world of amapiano music at an art residency this past month and have had it on a lot since then. Hailing from South Africa, it’s described as “a hybrid of deep house, jazz and lounge music characterized by synths and wide percussive basslines.” Just type in “amapiano” into your preferred streaming service and you’ll find something. Here’s a song I’ve been playing a lot.
Swedish artist Snufmumriko and the "Sekunder, eoner" album, which is on my radar thanks to Flow State
Max Richter’s “Sleep” album, which I’ve had on while writing and not sleeping.
VISUAL
Antti Laitinen’s incredible work (more from the Broken Landscape series here)
Skye Young’s new series of botanical illustrations she has been working on
Orra White Hitchcock’s science illustrations
Other ways to support: buy something my shop, buy one of my books, come to a Creative Fuel workshop or free Wednesday session, or send this newsletter to someone who you think might enjoy it.
Beautiful. It reminded me of the Virginia Woolf quote: "The great revelation never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark..."
Ooo thanks for the shout out Anna! Hope you enjoy Seven Senses! Im glad to discover Creative Fuel ☺️