The Healing Power of Art

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

When I lived in Dadaab Refugee Camp, I remember how I once let Angelo, a young Ethiopian refugee, borrow the book ‘What is the What’ by Dave Eggers. It is a beautiful, harrowing, powerful, and ultimately uplifting story of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.

He started reading it immediately. Before I knew it several young men were standing around him, reading over his shoulder.

“Michael, come”, he said. “I’ll show you where I was born.”

Angelo traced with his finger on the map his journey of over a thousand miles fleeing genocide from Ethiopia to Dadaab on foot.

“So, this book is your story?”, I asked.

“It is all of our stories.”, he said.

I have never forgotten that moment. I have never forgotten how one story could be so specific, and yet so universal.

A recent TED talk given by Ethan Hawke shares the same sentiment on the power of art: “It's vital. It's the way we heal each other. In singing our song, in telling our story, I’m inviting you to say, "Hey, listen to me, and I'll listen to you," we're starting a dialogue. And when you do that, this healing happens, and we come out of our corners, and we start to witness each other's common humanity.”

A few hours after I gave Angelo the book, I saw him walk off into the desert night listening to Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” on his cell phone as he thought of his wife and daughter whom he left behind.

He understood these healing lyrics.

“And I need you.
And I miss you.
And now I wonder,
If I could fall into the sky
Do you think time would pass me by? Because you know I’d walk a thousand miles If I could just see you tonight.”

What is a piece of art that healed you? What did you learn from it?

A CREATIVE TOOL

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A PIECE OF ART

“A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Grateful,

Michael