Monday, December 14, 2015

The Art of Verbing Nouns

Peter Leavell is an award winning
historical fiction author.
My family verbs nouns. When we sit around and chat, we family. When we eat, we dinner. 

And when craft time rolls around, we art. Normally, art is something to hang on the wall. Art is a degree that’s quite liberal. Art is one of my good friends. 

Art, for my wife and two kids, is a verb. We art. 

My son is 15 and he takes numbers and coaxes them to tell stories. Numbers give weights and distances. They plot courses and erect buildings. They guess chemical reactions. Math makes sense of God’s world. Math is my son’s art.

I know a musician. She arts beautifully.

My daughter is 12 and she dances. Straight arms and bent fingers, swirling, flowing, bending, swaying—she tells a story of beauty and tragedy with her body. Dancing is her art.

My wife draws with colored pencils and watercolors, which feels like conventional arting.

I’m arting right now, since writing is art. 

Art is why humans live.

God's creation is His Art. With a word, He created trees. Mountains. Sand. Tadpoles. Rice paddies. Baby’s smile. Stars. Lava underwater. People. The universe has great content. Really, really great content.

Rembrandt and da Vinci and van Gogh were artists. Read their biographies. They arted because they couldn’t do anything else. It wasn’t about the time arting. Van Gogh needed money, but painted as he saw the world. If it was for money, he would have painted for the market. His art was about the content.
Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers
Public Domain


God didn’t look at His watch and think, 'I didn’t art today. I need 1,500,000 more stars.' Instead, His art was about the content.

The Bible is art.

Humans are made to art. We’re unhappy if we don’t.

You and I write. With words, we coax out what it is to be human. We show (not tell!) the beauty in this world. The horror. Triumph. Tragedies. Hope. Looking at our watches and putting in the time just isn’t who we are. We’re artists. We art. We’re content constructors. If we were to look at our watch and time our writing, we’d art far less, because we’re punching in a clock as a job. No, writing is simply who we are. We stumble home from the cubicle and we need to make sense of what we saw. So we art.

We don't need a blog to motivate us to write. We write. We live, breath, and dinner art.

We break rules because we know the rules. We verb nouns

What if God punched a time clock? Creation is quite the project. And overtime is expensive. It's not going to be finished in time for the Second Coming. No, this world is simply Who God is.

We chose writing. Or were chosen for writing. Art is simply who we are. We better get arting. 

Van Gogh shot himself. But no gun was found. And he said he blamed no one for his death. He died poor