"One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice..."
Once, a young girl awoke and found in her a song. Or a poem or story or invention or introduction to a manifesto or inspiration for a movement or value prop for a startup—it matters little.
This thing she found was implanted within her from the start. Every morsel or moment or memory from her life was patina on the imago that was her "transforming self" for the world.
As she came alive to this identity, her perspective began to alter.
At first, incrementally—witnessing the profundity of a simple act of kindness, the smell of stone before it rains, a single creature's ecological impact.
Then all at once, existentially—noticing the hyperreality of societal mores, her epistemological shift to consistently divergent views, a growing ferocity with which the song yearned to be sung.
It drove her out of bed one morning to her journal. Here she found relief. Here she found solace in a generative process of listening and vocalizing, internalizing and externalizing, seeing and sharing.
Her gift found a home.
At first in the private circle of the thought-world of her paper scraps and pencil sketches around her home. Then in the public sphere of thinkers, artists, and actors, good and bad, who make tastes and move worlds.
Being converted to art by the art itself and not some master or outside influence made the journey to bring her work to the world tragic.
A knee-high signal-to-noise ratio grated upon her resolve.
It became harder to hear her song each day...
But she didn't stop.
"...Little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognised as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save."
~ Mary Oliver, The Journey