Thoughts to share, ideas to ponder

Is it because I know the meaning of the word "vocation" (a calling) that I love it, or is it because it connotes something else? To my ears, the word sounds to me both solid and soft, serious and gentle.

Vocation is "solid" because it is immovable, unyielding, continuously beckoning, always quietly waiting to be acknowledged, regardless of pay, accolades, limitations or circumstances.

It is "soft" because a vocation will require emotional vulnerability and authenticity to be fully realized.

The "serious" part means that hard work-very hard work, continuously, over a long period of time-a lifetime?--will be required.

Embracing a path where the future is very uncertain and answers are not always evident means "gentle" trust of conviction is in order.

For a working artist, what does "vocation" look like, functionally, on a daily basis?

1. It means that regardless of how I might feel in any given moment, I have an unquenchable gnawing that requires me to create art and then market it and also teach someone else how to do it. It is the "solid', immovable presence--essentially, my "boss". How my time allocated to each of these functions is my "job" as the "employee".

2. It means that I spend oceans of time alone creating, revising, scrapping, and creating again, never, ever taking shortcuts to quality by working from life and life drawing the model (the "serious" part) and if I'm wise, I put my most vulnerable sensibilities to bear on what I create (the "soft" part).

3. And because I work alone without feedback and without a linear, logical path, I have to trust (the "gentle" part), that I'm on the right track.

From this list, one might conclude that vocation is not much fun, and that is, in fact, true. In an interview with the wonderful artist Don Demers he recounts that when passersby see him painting the landscape, they will comment to him that it sure looks like fun. He laughed with the interviewee, explaining that it is not fun at all but a lot of hard work!

The joy of vocation depends not on the rush of "fun", and can't really be rooted in short term anticipation because that would imply that one can perceive the reward at the other end.

When an activity is a vocation-it calls a person in a way that ego-driven attachment to a goal is silenced ("I'm going to create a beautiful painting"), and with the more demanding, louder goal: "I don't know where this is all going but I am compelled to answer to the solid and immovable beckoning to create from a place of emotion and vulnerability and gently trust that the act of doing so will give honor to the beauty before me." The result is a paradox: not having "fun" as a result of that unyielding "boss", many failures, very hard work and the uncertainty that comes from listening to "the call" yields an experience that is deeply satisfying and continually humbling.