Barbara Wentzell Jaquith, Lovering Studio

As someone who does not fall asleep with the deep exhaustion of middle age anymore, I’m grateful to be living in the age of podcasts. I’m grateful for their late-night companionship coming to me through headphones in bed before drifting off. These podcasters raise questions and offer perspectives I’ve never even considered. Some offer interresting food for thought and seeds for personal growth and they take me to places I cannot travel. Most shift me from my active engagement in daytime studio life to a slower place of percolating ideas where the next piece of artwork will surely be born.

Under the warm down comforter, I settle in to welcome these strangers and their perspectives speaking to me in the dark. There is something intimate about being the only person listening to a speaker through headphones. It is a very personal experience (if you can put aside the fact that thousands of others have also listened to the same message). But right now, in this muted room it is just us. I am a rapt audience of one, alone in the dark with strangers.

I try to use discretion regarding which strangers I let into my head. I am curious about lots of things, but unless it has some thread of simple kindness or uplifting beauty, even in suffering, I opt out. After all, time is limited and there is still so much to learn!

Last night I had some alone time with Author James Patterson. He was the stranger in my head as I listened to him being interviewed on a podcast. He was asked what motivates him. He said that early on in his career, he heard a quote that reminded him that his time was limited, and because of that, he should ask himself, “So what can I do most beautifully?” For Patterson, that clarified what became his life’s calling: telling stories.

The question Patterson asks himself highlights the importance of bringing beauty into our lives whenever and wherever we are able. Intentionally seeking beauty is soul work that can lead to our creative transformation over time. If we are inspired and energized by the beauty around us, we are then best able to create more and share it.

This is what any storytelling does. By telling stories through music, culinary arts, painting, dance and such, artists find the right questions. The artist poses the question, but the observer must be able to look for it. I would suggest that the true beauty may not be immediately apparent to our senses in a finished piece, but rather, it lies in the question that is being posed by the artist.

That’s why I delight in the company of others who have a love affair with words, a need for whimsy, the arts, storytelling, music, compassion, activism, and of course, for small kindnesses. When one human being asks another: “Do you find this beautiful?”  an invitation to engage in sacred questioning and critical thinking is issued.

Art invites a closer look into the strangers we are taking into our lives and the questions they ask. If our entire day consists of a twenty-four-hour news cycle that blares stories of humankind’s inhumanity to others through war, conflict, racism, and cruelty run the risk of becoming numb to the suffering of others.

But beauty can be a vaccine against violence. To ask beautiful questions, we need to inoculate ourselves with a dose of curiosity and wonder. We need to invite in the strangers and the questions they raise that make us more alive and hopeful. We need to counteract the strangers who make us apathetic and divided, choosing instead to attend to what makes us more whole.

The Vermillion Cliffs, 2023

Watercolor on Archival Paper, 10 x 7

Available at https://BarbaraWentzellJaquith.com