Exhort

"I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create." Author unknown.

Dealing with Disappointment - What shall we do?

Have courage, patience, persistence and to look at the world and your work with an open mind. Each time you paint, draw and create, observe, be gentle with yourself and you must be willing to fail. Samuel Beckett wrote, "No matter. Try it again. Fail again. Fail better."

“Forget your personal tragedy,” Ernest Hemingway exhorted his dear friend F. Scott Fitzgerald in a tough-love letter of advice. “Good writers always come back. Always.” It is an insight as true of writers as it is of all artists and of human beings in general, as true of personal tragedy as it is of collective tragedy — something Toni Morrison articulated in her mobilizing manifesto for the writer’s task in troubled times: “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”