"The power is within us. Now all we have to do is teach ourselves how to believe it.& …

I agree that we are more powerful than we often realize, and that art has the power to help bring out the power in others.

One of the most inspiring articulations I’ve heard of this idea – and the reasons behind it – was by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, on her audiobook “Your Heart’s Prayer”. I transcribed some of the wisdom she shared and applied it to the practice of blogging in a post on Oriah and Buber, I and Thou: Bringing All of Who I am to Blogging, but I believe it applies to any art form … or indeed, as you suggest, to any job. I hope you won’t mind if I include an longish excerpt below (substituting cartooning for blogging, which is more relevant here):

When you engage in a creative act, you bring yourself into relationship with that form, and if you give yourself completely to that process – you bring all of who you are to it – what happens is that you are changed, and a work is created – it could be an object, it could be a piece of music [or cartoon] – but something is created, which to the receptive beholder, will give them the opportunity to have a direct experience of the form.

So when you write a piece of music [draw a cartoon] – let’s say if you’re a composer [a cartoonist] – and you bring yourself entirely to something that is larger than you, and you hold none of yourself back, you create a piece of music [cartoon], which someone who listens to it [reads it], if they too bring all of themselves to it, they are able to directly experience that which is larger than themselves in their own way – it will be different than perhaps the composer [cartoonist] did – but there will be a similarity in terms of what they engage with.

So my job – your job – as human beings, is to bring all of who we are to every moment.

I know this because the easiest place for me to do this, in some ways – and it’s not always easy, but the place where I feel compelled to do this, I should say – is when I write. There’s something about writing, for me, which compels me to try to include all of it … to hold nothing back … and I’m changed in the process of writing.

The other thing that happens is I produce a book [cartoon] that other people come to and get something out of that I never could possibly anticipate. …

All I can do is bring all of who I am to that writing, and then that allows the opportunity for something else to come in, when someone else, who is a receptive beholder, uses that work … and that’s not me, it’s something that’s larger than me that comes through this.