Living Within Your Purpose

Today’s drawing of Mary Magdalene (Watercolor on drawing paper)

With a little color

Living the perfect day means to me… spending the entire day playing with colors on paper, working on a personal project, connected through a sense of simple joy, thinking good thoughts, feeling like anything is possible.

I have been practicing as much as possible how to make the right decisions so that my day does not disappear, diluted by commitments, chores and lack of concentration.

Two days ago, I reviewed my longish list of habits I would like to cement, and just looking at it helped me get back on track. After being sick for a while, I really lost my rhythm. So a day of art has been a day of medicine.

It is sometimes difficult to believe that art is worth dedicating your life to. We become so practical, we want every single little action to have great impact and to really matter. But art requires experimentation and the acceptance that it sometimes is done just for oneself.

There is also another way to think about it: remembering that art is a spiritual practice dedicated to the liberated flow and expression of God through creativity. I don’t know if nuns and monks ever question whether their prayers and rituals are worth dedicating their lives to, since their lives a dedicated to God through these practices. This is their purpose. Us artists sometimes fall into our egos and forget the bigger purpose of art, and end up feeling that it might be wasted time. We probably feel guilty about feeling so good!

But something that creates such joy and harmony in human beings must be something worth doing… I heard today that if you have something in your heart that you want to do, then it must be possible to be successful at it just because it exists in your heart.

My definition of success is simple and easily achievable. Right now a successful life for me is being able to have more days, lots more days, like today. To feel rested at the end of the day, or gloriously tired.

Creating the perfect day, one in which we model for ourselves how we want to live, and become a vessel for the expression of the Divine, is a way to be in communion, to feel truly human for a long moment.

One thing I did before starting we read my own book. Since I originally put it in book form for that purpose, I thought it was time to go back to the ideas that push me forward every day. Writing here about Mary Magdalene, the practices inspired by her, the drawings, is one of the ways I apply the ideas of the book. What does it mean to write and draw (almost) every day? It is a way of sustaining discipline and commitment to a work of the soul that I hope will continue as long as I am alive.

I still have a few more hours to complete one more joyful task. Tomorrow I will go back to work renewed. That work is also important and mostly enjoyable. And while the number of glorious days grows, the work days have become more precious. That is the magic of living within one’s purpose.