looking at feelings

I read somewhere that most artists and writers are looking at their feelings. That most story-telling involves showing others our human-ness through sharing our feelings about things.
Thinking is all well and good, but the realm of the thinkers does not belong to the poets and artists of the world.
I leave the thinking to the doctors and accountants.
I guess that shows in my work in my journal.
I am examining my own feelings and trying to understand them. Lots of people pay a therapist for this, but I find the process of making art and writing on the collages does it for me much better (and so much cheaper!)
"The unexamined life is not worth living" was a quote that got my attention as a kid, and I guess I have lived with that always in the background of my psyche.
The conflict for me, is that sometimes it feels self-involved, egocentric, or selfish to focus so much on my own feelings.
and that just might be the dilemma of artists and creators through time.
I think people who knew Vincent Van Gogh probably did think he was way too absorbed in his own problems.
But by working out his own issues, look at the paintings the world received.
What a gift.
So I try to remember that having and sharing this struggle is worthwhile.
That our own inner struggles are meaningful and worth spending time on, and that sharing this path will help someone somehow along their own way.
Life is short.
It comes and goes like a breath of mist on the grass.
and I want my one short time here to be lived with intention and meaning (until the next go 'round and I get to come back as something else!)




"I am a greedy, selfish bastard. I want the fact that I existed to mean something." --Harry Chapin