Art

"When Henry was born, we brought music into the delivery room that we thought would be the right sounds for him and for me, to serve as the soundtrack for his birth...

"Just after Henry was born...and his thin little gasping first cries...at that moment, the only other thing we could hear, in the middle of the night in a silent hospital, was a song called "Needle and Thread" by Sleeping At Last...

"We heard the song again a few days later in our car when we brought Henry home from the hospital...I cried all the way home, thinking about how God and his angels knitted this boy together...And I thanked God for that song, and for creating a person who could write that song, our song...

"A few months later, Aaron and I went to a Sleeping At Last show, and when they played that song...I wanted to tell the songwriter about it, about how thankful we were for his song, about how deeply his song traveled through the tenderest parts of our life, about how those words and sounds had become part of the story of one of the most sacred events of our lives...As I walked out to my car after the show, I almost went back to wait in line and tell him, but I knew that I would cry, not sweet little tears, but the kind that make your nose and eyeliner run...

"And so I didn't tell him, but if I had, this is what I would have said: Thank you. Thank you, and keep going. Please keep writing songs. Please keep believing in music, because we do, we need it, and specifically, we need yours...We're desperate for great storytellers, great painters, great dancers, great cooks, because art does something nothing else does...

"It matters, art does, so deeply. It's one of the noblest things, because it can make us better, and one of the scariest things, because it comes from such a deep place inside of us. There's nothing scarier than that moment when you sing the song for the very first time, for your roommate or your wife, or when you let someone see the painting, and there are a few very long silent moments when they haven't yet said what they think of it, and in those few moments, time stops and you quit painting, you quit singing forever, in your head, because it's so fearful and vulnerable, and then someone says, essentially, thank you and keep going, and your breath releases, and you take back everything you said in your head about never painting again, about never singing again, and at least for that moment, you feel like you did what you came to do, in a cosmic, very big sense.

"I know that life is busy and hard, and that there's crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don't. Please don't. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader, because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making art for people like me, people who need the magic and the imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable..."

~Shauna Niequist, "Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life"