Effort

It wouldn’t surprise me if the muse of one Fine Art had dipped her fingers into the thick oil paint of another form of Art before she inspired the colors of a new canvas. 

Our speech breathes in analogies, our movements are echoed in sound. Music unfolds a story, dance sketches an illustration, poetry feels a downbeat. 

“Play this piece like you’re a duck,” I’m told as I sit at the harp. “Calm on the surface, but paddling like crazy underneath. Your job is to make everything look effortless, like you haven’t worked for it at all.” 

Like ballet, I think. You pretend to float in flawless motion when your feet are in excruciating pain, but no one knows, because it’s

effortless. 

Like the strokes of a thin paintbrush in the hand of a skilled calligrapher. 

Like the gliding movement of a violist’s horsehair bow across the strings.

Effortless,

in the way that some people tell stories or read them, in ebbs and flows of honeyed vowels and gutsy consonants. 

Life would be dyed gray without the simultaneous emotional challenge and outlet for emotions that is Art, and Art intertwined in itself. 

The masking and revealing of feeling, of sound, of color. The restraint and liberation of movement and words. Even silence is something played, stretched taut in calm. 

But underneath the surface of 

effortless

pause, 

there is a breath that feeds energy to the next pirouette, the next audible pulse, the next daub of paint on canvas.