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Need a Change? Grab Your Resilience Bucket & Light Up Your Life
🗂 This Week in Work in Progress
Status Update: Change of any sort requires resilience. Here, we discuss the Resilience Bucket, one way to fill it (art-awe), and the artist who restores places, himself, and me!
Inspiration: Frank Lloyd Wright helps us find God.
Lighter Note: Learn more about the artist who brings us the light, Xavier Nuez.
🔔 Status Update
Change of any sort requires resilience. Interestingly, it can also create resilience. As we take action, we grow our capacities. The trick is to know when to do, when to rest, and when to realign.
What I call the Resilience Bucket allows us to visualize our capacity to cope with stress or change in any given moment. In this week’s essay, I describe the bucket and some recommended means to top it off. I also introduce an artist, Xavier Nuez, who has a lot to teach us on this topic. Today, I’ll give you a taste of both the bucket and the artist who filled mine.
What is the Resilience Bucket?
Imagine that you start your day with a bucket, chockfull of resilience. You feel fully charged. As the day wears on, your resilience gets scooped up: a missed train, an angry client, a pissed-off spouse, eating a salad when you really want a burger, bypassing the bar when you really want a cocktail.
A few days ago, I took a long ride with a slow-driving, chip-munching, hands-off-the-wheel-steering, broken-seatbelt-toting Uber driver. During the ride, I also learned that a client is hospitalized with Monkeypox. I could feel my resilience dripping out my toes!
Little and big challenges chip away.
A depleted bucket is a danger to your plans and intentions. Self-control is intact when you have resilience to spare. When it’s depleted, your ability to handle challenges decreases. There’s no resilience left, so there’s also no self-control.
The Bucket is your route to success in regaining resilience.
Learning how to refill your bucket is critical to your well-being and your ability to achieve your goals, despite whatever mess life throws in your path.
I often top off my Resilience Bucket with art and awe. First, I pause and notice the need. Then, I breathe. Sometimes, what I inhale is oxygen – slow and steady to regulate my nervous system. At other times, it’s art – much the way some folks inhale a pint of Ben & Jerry’s (but with far fewer calories). I seek out something juicy like nature photography, revisit my own nomadic-travel Instagram photos, or wander around a sculpture park. When I’m very, very lucky, I “discover” a new artist and take a deep dive into the gifts they embody and offer to the world.
Last week, after I wrote about my obsession with graffiti, a reader pointed me to a local artist, Xavier Nuez, whose photographs of graffiti are quite literally unparalleled. Nuez lives in Chicago but is nationally known and lauded. He’s received scores of rave reviews from around the country and The New York Times called his Alleys & Ruins series a masterpiece. I wholeheartedly agree.
Decades ago, Nuez developed a unique style of art photography – one that transforms abandoned places into beauty and, literally, light. We are not talking European, bucolic castle ruins. Oh, no. These are hidden urban pockets haunted by trauma and universally considered ugly, decrepit, worthless, and dangerous. Places occupied by unfortunates who have nowhere else to go.
Nuez goes there, though.
When he says, “I go to neglected spots. They interest me more,” it touches me. In my line of work, I feel the same way about neglected people. There’s so much depth. So much beauty once you shine a light.
Witness the transformation of one space in his Alleys & Ruins collection…
The "After" Photo:
Image by Xavier Nuez (with permission): Alleys & Ruins no. 149, Dumpster Dive (2016, Chicago, IL, 10:30pm)
And The "Before" Photo: 😳
Image by Xavier Nuez (with permission): Before shot:, Dumpster Dive
Decades ago, Nuez developed his approach – shooting in dark, abandoned spaces, at night, shining lights on the scene, in a form he calls light painting. This resulted in a new art form and a successful career. But it also served another function.
Shooting at night served as an ideal antidote for social phobia. It allowed Nuez to spend time on his art in isolation, keeping his anxiety at bay, providing him an unobstructed view into his own creative process. This is what happens when you’re pulled in a certain direction – a little niggle or whisper in the gut, “try this” – and you’re willing to listen. His approach to his art allowed him to fill up his Resilience Bucket.
Nuez had a problem – social phobia – and he found a way to solve it. In the process, he created a new art form that brings light and color into many people's lives.
This, too, is resilience. This is the inner healer at work, identifying a problem, and brilliantly executing a solution.
More recently, Nuez decided it was time to bring his artistry to ordinary, appreciated, and frequented places. Safe spaces to counterbalance the years of putting himself in danger in dark alleys. He continues to deliver the same quality of gasp-worthy, light-painted place-portraits but now he’s enhancing places already viewed as pleasant and desirable. While we didn’t discuss this, it sure sounds like a step in a healthy direction. I love when people vote for their own well-being. It’s nearly as beautiful as his art.
Here’s a gasp-worthy piece from his newer collection:
Image by Xavier Nuez (with permission): Ocean Embrace
This week, I filled my own bucket with art-awe and connection with a creative soul. And I learned that a place can be refueled with light and careful attention, just like my bucket can be filled with resilience.
(Learn more about resilience, The Bucket, and Nuez by reading the full essay.)
Does your bucket need refilling? What type of fuel will top it off? I’d love to know!
“I believe in god, only I spell it ‘nature'.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
💡 Inspiration
I’ve spent the pandemic revamping my perspectives on spirituality and god. Millions of deaths, weekly climate crises, and a host of other tragic world events can rattle one’s perspective if faith is lacking. Never having been a religious person, faith has never been my strong suit. So during these many months, I’ve traveled from agnostic to atheist and right back to where I started: We are but a web of energy, all connected, and all of creation is god.
We can get into a deep philosophical discussion (or debate) any time you like. Please get in touch! But meanwhile, I’m agreeing with Frank Lloyd Wright that Nature is where god – however you define him/her/them/it – excels. It’s certainly the creator’s best handiwork.
But also, I see god in Nuez’s masterpieces. And I see god in the masterpieces who walk into my office every day. I hold the flashlight. They absorb the light. And what emanates is their true self, their unique energy vibration (this ain’t no wu-wu nonsense, it’s science, folks), and their unmistakable glow.
That’s what this quote triggers in me. What does it say to you?
🤡 On a Lighter Note
It’s all about Xavier Nuez today…
See the making of Alleys & Ruins no. 149, Dumpster Dive (2016, Chicago, IL, 10:30pm) here.
The development of an art form: PBS Eye on the Arts.
🎀 It’s a Wrap
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Until next week, take care of yourself and someone else if you’re able.
Lyssa