Every Tuesday around 6:05pm, there’s a reverberation throughout Main Street in Canandaigua, NY. It’s not something that can be heard, but it can be felt.
It’s around this time that the group of students in my painting class at Pat Rini Rohrer Gallery get settled into their seats, then take turns saying, out loud,
“I am an artist.”
Some are students who’ve never picked up a paintbrush before. Some have taken multiple classes with other artists and have come to my class to learn a different style.
All of them find it difficult to say these words, out loud, with conviction.
Yet it’s how we start each class: “I am an artist.”
Because each and every time they work up the courage to declare it? A small stone drops into the water, casting an outward ripple of confidence; of hope; of creativity.
Soft as that ripple may appear, the wave it creates carries a weight that none of us can measure the impact of.
That wave is the positive, powerful energy that’s needed to make change in this world, one person at at time.
Each Tuesday evening in my tiny corner of the world, it begins as I drop my own stone, creating a ripple of energy among my students that they funnel into their learning and art that night.
As they make their own declaration, claiming their power and owning that energy, they cast new ripples that they funnel outward.
Onto who knows who; who knows what.
The possibilities are endless.
We all have this power within us — to make change, one ripple at at time.
Like the impressionist style of painting my students come to me to learn — one that relies heavily on the play between light and shadows — the world carries its fair share of dark and light.
When we’re faced with some of the harsher realities of life, it’s easy to be paralyzed by anxiety, overridden by overwhelm, and stuck questioning what it is we, as one person, can actually do.
The answer is quite simple.
To spread the light, we need to cast our own gentle ripples — finding the good, and casting it outward.
Not with force, but with love.
And then watch, with amazement, at how a “gentle” ripple can create such a powerful wave.