The Risk | by Rosemary Leach

Don’t do something until you are good at it,”; the unspoken mantra.

Another voice whispers: “Skip through the forest. There is no result.”

Or, there is.

Risking dipping a brush in paint, not for the product, but for the sheer love of it.

Gardeners are better at Results Based Management…or managing results? They shrug off the weather, expecting it to be mixed. They are happy to be under the sky with dirt caked under their fingernails.

Some tender hearted makers of things resist sharing what they have done. They keep their makings private, and therefore safe.

After my mother died I found under her bed a charcoal sketch of my 7 year old feet wearing keds, those white canvas shoes that came back in style a few years ago, that you pull out of a bin in pairs with laces tied together.

Making things, relishing our focus for the sake of some ineffable homecoming it provokes inside of us. It is something we are hard-wired to do, but perhaps is becoming more difficult to do.

Art acts like antibodies that fortify us. We write a sentence, we mix yellow with purple varying shades of grey, thereby tuning more clearly into our inner radio, a signal we so need to hear.

The greater risk is to not do it.