Hello 2025: I've got some questions for me

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.*
Hello, 2025.
We knew you were coming, and now you’re here, and I feel kinda late.
I have high hopes and high fives ready for 2025 (A new grand daughter! My book will be published!)—some worries too (pick a headline)—and so for the past few weeks, instead of my typical Can-do/Get-it-Done Default Rush to cross the new year’s threshold, I’ve been allowing myself to hover a bit in between.
Soften.
Take a breath.
For, after all, if that quote has any truth to it, the big art I’m crafting is a life.
So are you.
Take a Pause
I’ve written before about the experience I had being punched in the gut to write a book. I needed a wake-up call. I was so head-down, all-in on my career at the time that there was no mental room to consider anything else but the track I’d carved out for many years.
My body got my attention and I ultimately crossed a threshold, ending one trajectory to start a new one.
In the craft of writing, a similar hard-hit moment is called an inciting incident. A spark that ignites the narrative, pushing the subject out of her ordinary life.
So in my novel, based on a true story, after I researched her life, I chose the inciting incident to be when Jo van Gogh finds out her husband, Theo, is dead. (Theo is Vincent van Gogh’s brother, so Jo is Vincent’s sister-in-law) In the opening scene Jo is expecting Theo to come home from a three-month stay at an asylum. Jittery, nervous, as she waits she doesn't know she’s standing on an invisible threshold. On one side is security and familiarity as beloved wife and mother to their one-year-old son.
On the other side will be a new choice.
For as soon as she receives news of Theo’s death, the door of her old life will close and she’ll enter a threshold and face new choices: Return to the security of her father’s home or take an unknown path of striking out on her own, despite being a grieving widow and new single parent for a baby. (Not to mention now being overwhelmed with the 300+ paintings and drawings by Vincent in their apartmentalone and considered nearly worthless by the art elite establishment.)
She chooses to go solo.
It will be a decision that changes the course of her life forever.
And ours.
For as a result, instead of being lost to the ages, Vincent is one of most celebrated artists of our time.
So, feels like a good idea to pay attention to thresholds.
Asking New Questions
A threshold is a liminal space. Liminal refers to an ambiguous state of being, a transitional period or space where old structures and identities are being deconstructed, and new ones are not yet fully formed.
Making annual New Year Resolutions is a tradition catching that spirit of an end to the old year/beginning of the new. I’ve done my share of NY resolutions in the past, but this year it feels like the stakes are higher.
I don’t want the regret of wasting this year by not being intentional.
Here are the three private questions I’ve been asking and how Jo’s been an example to me:
Am I thinking I’m small? Jo moved to a remote Dutch town to run a guest house as income. The chores of daily living—being a single parent/ sole breadwinner—didn’t stop her from soliciting dealers to show Vincent’s paintings or defending Vincent from art critics or publishing Vincent’s letters in the press. Author Marianne Williamson encourages us, “Your playing small does not serve the world.”
Am I silencing my voice? There’s a cool moment in Jo’s life when she starts to write op-ed’s defending women’s suffrage. She takes a leap of faith to put her name on the by-line of controversial topics. Decades later poet Maya Angelou would write, “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”
Am I thinking I’m not ready? Uncommon experiences can mean uncommon readiness. Jo’s tender relationship with Theo in supporting his work as an art dealer turned out to be an apprenticeship in art dealing. She witnessed and loved Theo’s devotion to his brother’s art. Unknown to her, she was being prepared to take stewardship. Of course, there would still be a lot for her to learn. So, you know what? Even if you feel you’re not ready, Jo’s example is an argument to take those first steps anyway. Consider Nelson Mandela’s counsel: “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
I started this blog out with a quote stating that practicing your art is apprenticeship. That learning methods and measures can be more than honing your chosen art form. Seven years ago I started out thinking that I simply wanted to publish a book. Instead, working on this novel and learning from Jo’s story has become much more.
It’s been a means for growth.
I suppose that’s my resolution for the new year. To continue the learning, the questions, the excavation.
To be big, to be loud, to try anyway.
Whatever your work is in 2025. Whatever your play or your art or your duties. They are an apprenticeship, for—yes, I’m gonna say it—your life is a masterpiece.
Happy New Year!
Warmly,

This quote is by Mary Caroline (M.C.) Richards (1916-1999), American poet. I like it so much I’ve posted it on the top of my website.
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