What is Artful Living?

“You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.”

- Annie Dillard in “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”

As I launch G Marie Art — a space for sharing both paintings and journal entries — I want to start by examining what I call Artful Living.

We often think of creativity as something we do. We paint, write, or design. But there's a deeper creativity in how we live our lives. Counterintuitively (for me, anyway), it’s less doing and more being. Less chasing and more allowing. This is the heart of Artful Living: a way of moving through the world that values presence over productivity, meaning over metrics.

I’m new to it and find it as challenging as it is fulfilling.

From certainty to seeking

Like many, I grew up with traditional frameworks for understanding my place in the world. The structure of organized religion (first Evangelical, then Baptist) offered me valuable tools for practicing presence, ritual, and meaning-making. Daily prayer forced reflection, ceremonies marked transitions throughout the year, and events small and large were deciphered as part of my life’s larger narrative called “God’s plan.”

Perhaps what kept me tethered to organized religion for so long — what keeps many of us there — was the comfort of certainty. When you believe in God's plan, everything has meaning; every experience points toward a divine purpose. The question isn't whether there's a way to live but simply how to discern and follow the path already laid out by someone who knows best.

In 1993, as a sophomore in college, I read Annie Dillard's book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” It showed me a different way to live by cultivating presence and meaning in my life with equal intentionality, less dogmatism. It made asking questions exciting, not scary. Thirty-two years and hundreds of books later, I still enjoy asking, "How should I live?"

It's a very, very old question. Let’s review:

• Heraclitus pondered it by the rivers of ancient Greece.

• Rumi explored it through poetry in the 13th century.

• Montaigne invented the essay to examine it in the 1500s.

• Henry David Thoreau took to the woods of Massachusetts in 1845 to “live deliberately” and find his own answer.

• Annie Dillard would continue the trend along Virginia's Tinker Creek in the 1970s, inspired by Thoreau's example more than a century later.

For me, the answer that has emerged is a way of experiencing the sacred in the everyday through presence, meaning-making, and, ultimately, reimagining what success looks like.

Big-picture, artful living invites us to trust that we might find fulfillment in releasing our grip on certainty: the contentment and freedom that come with being fully present to life as it unfolds. It asks us to choose simplicity and emptiness over the security of predetermined meaning. In this way of being, there are no external measures of success — only the quiet knowing that comes from being fully awake to our lives.

My copy of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”

It’s not the original, which is too bad. But it, too, has been read several times.

Learning to be receptive

Over the last decade, I’ve been increasingly drawn to a life of creativity — though that word feels both too modern and too narrow for what I mean. It’s closer to what Dillard describes as a state of receptiveness to the present: not chasing after meaning but waiting, alert and empty-handed, ready to be filled. And then creating.

In "The Creative Act: A Way of Being," Rick Rubin also argues that creativity requires us to be empty and patient. As an "antenna for creative thought," we pick up the signal by not looking for it.

“Instead, we create an open space that allows it. A space so free of the normal overpacked condition of our minds that it functions as a vacuum. Drawing down the ideas that the universe is making available.”

This emptying and receptiveness aren’t just about creativity; they're about life itself. To live artfully means releasing our grip on certainty, letting go of old narratives and patterns that keep us from being receptively present.

Perhaps this is why I’m drawn to the phrase Artful Living instead of “the creative life” or some such. It suggests so much more. It’s something that existed before we had a word for the curious, imaginative impulse that makes us human. That makes us question and seek answers.

Redefining presence, ritual, and meaning

Through Artful Living, I've rediscovered the three elements of religion that I miss most.

As Dillard wrote, “Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.” In Walden, Thoreau understood the rarity of true presence, which he equated with being awake:

“To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.”

Complete awakeness is a worthy aspiration, but it’s in our trying that we find moments of genuine presence. In the meditative deliberation of creating, time dissolves. When writing my way through an idea or painting subtle shifts in color, the hours mean nothing. I’m shocked to learn it’s something-o’clock. In these empty, receptive moments, presence isn’t about discerning divine signals but about being engaged in a moment I choose to expand.

Ritual emerges in the sacred ordinary: mixing paints on a palette, preparing a workspace, cleaning brushes until the water runs clear. Even the familiar creak of my studio chair as I wheel it toward the easel and choosing a pen to use in my journal each morning are rites of a larger ceremony. These rituals don't commemorate Biblical events but rather mark the rhythm of a deliberate life.

Finally, meaning is not prescribed by a divinity who knows best. When we release our need for certainty and predetermined outcomes, meaning reveals itself in unexpected ways. It lives in the connections I make through art, both on the page/canvas and with others who resonate with what results. Through G Marie Art, I hope to nurture this way of being.

The paradox of emptiness

The path to Artful Living often requires subtraction rather than addition. To create even our lives, we must first empty ourselves of what blocks our ability to be present. That may be overthinking, endless planning, or the distractions we use to avoid sitting with ourselves and others.

The writers I mention above point us toward this same path. Rumi taught that we must empty ourselves to become vessels for creativity and love; in his poem “The Song of the Reed,” he described the soul as a flute that must be hollow to make music. Montaigne found fulfillment only after leaving public life for his library tower, where wisdom emerged through self-examination rather than external validation.

After this emptying, what remains paradoxically fuller, simpler, clearer, and infinitely more alive. The practice isn't easy, but in releasing our grip on certainty, we create space for meaning to emerge. And that, perhaps, is where Artful Living begins.