If art’s an island, then you can get to her by two approaches.

The first is the most common direction, the direction that seems most obvious, the broad way. Everyone who survived this direction once erected a lighthouse to persuade people from all over to enter by that side of the island. That house, if you look close enough, emits an alabaster green light, eldritch and perfidious. Like the isle in The Most Dangerous Game, the light stands priapic atop a brobdingnagian crag over a bay known for disaggregating schooners and brigs alike. Those who sail that way, sail by pertinacious resolve and exhausting effort. They forfend criticisms, attacks, spires, hoping to slalom through boulders to the wall. Cynicism eventuates as they watch peer after peer bemire into the depths alongside them. The field narrows until they, as true artists, navigate to the end of the line, only to find their precious momentum meet stonewall in marvelous allision, smashing their ships asunder. Few survive the night, what with the storm, the dead around the wreck, the despair within, excoriation without. Those who perdure, climb the wall. Those who keep from falling off the mossy rocks assemble on the cliff with all who lived through that weary life of disenchantment. They haul heavy burdens of stone and pile higher their ghastly tower. Most travel that cynical way. Few endure. Those who do stiffen their necks, harden their hearts, clot off the spirit in their veins and freeze the fire in their bones until they’ve forgotten how to face the island and see what’s inside. Their life is that broken bay, nothing more.

Few find the second way. It’s hard to see with all the pricey sails marching into the bay. In fact, there’s no means to sail the second way. To get there, you must row and row slow between a tall rock and a whirlpool. Sailboats’d get stuck, but a rowboat can fit. You’ll come around the long way until you’re rowing up from the south. You’ll see another light, a truer light kindled on a mound of stones. It’s a beacon, and old fire—the same that lit the camps where your father’s fathers circled to tell the first stories. That fire calls you home. White shores will throw back a truer white. Your eyes, if you ask them to see, will see the greenest of greens in palm and fern. Water feels bluer, though it’s made of the same stuff as in that sardonic bay. The difference is in the rowing—the slow way gives pause to pilgrims, and those who set their hearts on pilgrimage and not pride find themselves blessed with a world of color, local sound, caresses and fierce smells. When your ship lands, you’ll find yourself tired but not from pain. Rather, the work brought pleasure out of pain, wonder out of labor—aches feel like afterglow. You can moor your boat on a bed of sand and walk barefoot around the island wherever you please. You can even check on those poor souls manning the lighthouse, but they’ll write you off or tune you out. Fruit, waterfalls, beds of clover are yours for the savoring—all there is grace, naught is due you. You’ve landed at what looks something like wonder, feels something like joy, but the only way to bring it back to the world is to tell them the story of what happened to you.

Two ways—the forthright, disillusioned direction of the bay or the wonderful, round about way of the southern shore—lead to art. One always looks without.

The other ever looks within.