Life, whole cloth.

You’re having an almost-magical afternoon, brilliant sun with just the right amount of chill in the air to hint that change is afoot, seasonal currents that maybe you’ve grown up with, savor, and now have even have come to need for the steady ground these shifts provide, a dependable anchor that feels both familiar and welcomed. You stop at the store to pick up potatoes, lemons, and parsley for dinner and as you pull into the parking lot, careful to avoid the spot next to the cart caddy, your phone rings.

It’s news of a sobering diagnosis. Or maybe dreaded confirmation that a long-suffering elderly parent can no longer manage at home alone. Your insurance policy won’t cover the claim from last week’s storm damage. Your offer on the new house fell through. Your package was irreparably damaged in transit. The engine needs replacement.

All against the still-darker backdrop of raging wars, a home country in turmoil, Mother Nature, heartbroken.

In other words, life, just as it is, whole cloth.

And so what a strange impulse, then, to find oneself moved, in response to these concerns and even horrors, to pick up a paintbrush or soldering iron, to feel a poem forming, to hear the musical notes arriving and capturing them from the air to the page. What explains this curious impulse in a dark time? And how to justify the imperatives of these urges, a mandate to bring to fruition that creative something where once there was nothing, when life by her very nature can be so deeply and demandingly grim? Shouldn’t we be spending our time in more useful ways, attending to the pressing issues that threaten and quake rather than occupying ourselves with metaphor, harmony, silent company with the Muse?

Creative urges in response to life’s inherent peril are not new. Evidence suggests that our earliest cave dwelling ancestors, whose daily existence was moment-to-moment palpably uncertain, nevertheless devoted time, attention, and care in placing a warm hand on a cold cave wall and, with a mouthful of ochre, blowing indelible proof of their presence for all who would follow. Too, visitors to these caves today find themselves thwarted by stringent measures to restrict the all-too-deeply-human impulse to place their own hands atop these ancient prints, as if to connect with the ancestral spirit that says, “You, too, are here, and triumphant.”

For many artists, these urges are spawned by the inherent hazards and turmoil of life, fueled by the very forces that make daily existence feel perilous or, at the very least, viscerally uncertain. These impulses, and the works that emerge from them, form a kind of container that helps the artist to bear those precarious parts of life that test and threaten us all. In Kay Jamison’s words, artists surf in waters that others drown in.

In this way, artistic practice is seen as less discretionary luxury and more vital necessity, not only for the artists themselves but also for those who appreciate these creative works, though even when the canvas, manuscript, or musical score is enjoyed by no one other than the artist her- or himself, it’s often every bit the buoy. My 90-year-old father picked up a drawing pencil for the first time in his 60’s, moving to watercolors in his 70’s. Harboring no gallery aspirations whatsoever, he describes his art practice in that warm-paneled basement studio as “a world all its own.”

“I leave it all behind and step into another place altogether. It helps me feel happier and more hopeful.”

In Art as Therapy, Alain de Botton writes:

We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope. Today’s problems are rarely created by people taking too sunny a view of things; it is because the troubles of the world are so continually brought to our attention that we need tools that can preserve our hopeful dispositions…If the world was a kinder place, perhaps we would be less impressed by, and in need of, pretty works of art. One of the strangest features of experiencing art is its power, occasionally, to move us to tears; not when presented with a harrowing or terrifying image, but with a work of particular grace and loveliness that can be, for a moment, heartbreaking.

For makers and appreciators, works of art—small and great—affirm an allegiance with immortality against all that reminds us we’re not in charge and we’re not here forever. Art-making offers a sturdy alcove that can hold the very best and worst of what life delivers on a daily basis. Far from being a dispensable extravagance, creative practices offer artists a storm cellar and safety shelter for a life that can turn in an instant, then settle once again.

And again…and again.

You Are Standing at the Edge of the Woods
by Mary Oliver

You are standing at the edge of the woods
at twilight
when something begins
to sing, like a waterfall

pouring down
through the leaves. It is
the thrush.
And you are just

sinking down into your thoughts,
taking in
the sweetness of it—those chords,
those pursed twirls—when you hear

out of the same twilight
the wildest red outcry. It pitches itself
forward, it flails and scabs
all the surrounding space with such authority

you can’t tell
whether it is crying out on the
scarp of victory, with its hooked foot
dabbed into some creature that now

with snapped spine
lies on the earth—or whether
It is such a struck body itself, saying
goodbye.

The thrush
is silent then, or perhaps
has flown away.
The dark grows darker.

The moon,
in its shining white blouse,
rises.
And whatever that wild cry was

it will always remain a mystery
you have to go home now and live with,
sometimes with the ease of music, and sometimes in silence,
for the rest of your life.