Mindful Making

Tao Of Yummi, Sutra 25, Microsutra 5/6

What is the difference between making art and building everyday things? Everyday things can be art…it’s a matter of inspiration, aesthetics and effect on the audience. What you make, whatever you make, can be art — intentional authentic value you’ve imagined and created, imbued with your aesthetic sense, and impacting your audience.
 
Write a grant proposal to help the fire department purchase lifesaving equipment. You are inspired by the need, imagine the program, and use your authentic perspective and sense of aesthetics to craft the story of how it works and the impact it creates. Your funded grant proposal is art that produces ripples of impact across many lives.
 
Although your First Grade son may not be able to spell ‘aesthetic’, he uses his sense of aesthetics to design and make a “robot arm” from cardboard tubes, tape and colored paper with which he and his friends can play. Other children either make or ask that he make “robot arms” for them. Your son’s “robot arm” is art that inspires games and grand adventures of the imagination, leads to joy and laughter, and serves as a foundation for what’s possible as other art is made in ripples of creativity and inspiration.

Do you see the inspiration, aesthetics and impact without which these everyday things might not exist? When facing the opportunity to live into purpose by fulfilling the need for an “everyday thing,” realize the authentic value that is yours’ to give. Mindful in the moment, you open to the delightful and unexpected: the art of Serendipity that is also yours’ to give. If you make it, make it mindfully and make it art.