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Learning from Artists: George Sand, giving us permission to create boldly and uniquely.
Dear George,
I struggled to get your story into my mind, but I found that you entered my soul. I struggle to understand how a mother could leave her children for years at a time to take off and enjoy a lover and pursue her own interests. I struggle to read the truth about your multiple lovers and the feelings you had that caused you to dismiss them so quickly because it shines a light on my past and that is hard to bear. I can’t grasp the ideals that propelled your political activities and the world that gave you the opportunity to hob nob with the likes of Chopin. Yet I fell in love with you as an artist and secretly wondered if I could explore life in my writing as you did in yours.
As I write about you and think of you I feel a crevice open. A blockade is caving in. The womb that had been knitted together has bust open. I am free to create out of the misery of life. I am not required to follow a rule, but to act upon an impulse. I have entered Paris. A place where ideas flow and passions rule. Where love is celebrated in many forms. Is it no wonder that Van Gogh longed to be there. That he worked so hard to arrive-there. Because of you I long for my own Paris.
