I recently attended a workshop held by a writer I admire. My goal was to receive some inspiration on the art of writing, and some guidance on living the life of a writer.

It was a creativity retreat and the other offerings were yoga and photography. Yoga has been a part of my life for 2 decades now and was not as intriguing as the photography which has sat in the corner of my interests for a very long time.

I left those 4 days with a new label for myself: artist. It was an emotionally fraught realization about one of the most important parts of myself.

I never considered myself creative – I was an engineer for goodness sake! I couldn’t draw, paint or produce anything beautiful with my hands. What I saw on the inside of my head could not be translated into what was produced in the material world. My skills at singing or dancing didn’t count.

By putting the camera up to my eye and seeing the world through a much smaller area, I understood that the universe had already created infinite amounts of beauty and all I needed to do was capture it. For the first time in my life I began to take pictures, sometimes to document and memorialize my adventures, and sometimes for no reason at all other than being moved by the drop of water teetering on the edge of a leaf outside my office window.

The final product became much less important than the process of discovery. I was training myself to move with the creative impulse that was already inside me. This tiny little action, picking up a camera as an adjunct to my normal observations, created a sea change in how I saw myself.

At the same time, I was also working on a philosophical deconstruction of suffering. I realized that I was moved by the transformation of suffering into either cruelty (and more suffering) or creativity. I saw, very clearly, that one of the primary differences between artists and regular people was the ability to magically transform suffering into beauty. Into art.

This was the current, and truest path of my life. Through my words, I was going to turn my own darkness into light and healing for others.

The painful experiences that gave depth to my voice and meaning to my writing would be honored as the seeds that bore the sweetest fruits.

Through a several-day conversation with a good friend and amazing artist, this revelation unfolded: a lifetime’s worth of heartache, grief, loss, betrayal, and trauma planted in the dark soil of fear would bear only toxic fruit that would not only poison me but also anyone in its vicinity.

But those same seeds brought out into the light and planted in fecund ground could create something completely different. Compassion, kindness, beauty. What’s in that soil, I don’t completely understand, but I do know that love must be there.

I couldn’t possibly speak for all artists, but from my limited study I can find no great art, be it painting, sculpture, or performance not born from the inherent struggle so fundamental to the human experience. We all suffer. Does that fire and grit burn and chafe us? Or does it purify and polish us?

At the many forks in the road where we have the option to choose fear or love, will we understand the vast difference in outcome and the implications to the universe?

I truly believe that there is no such thing as evil, only impenetrable pain. (I heard this line, or something like it, once, but for the life of me cannot find the source. My apologies for not being able to give credit.) Suffering that is so solid and hard that the light cannot find its way in. But all it takes is a crack, just one small uncertainty in the structure, like the weeds pushing through city sidewalks. This impulse towards the light lies in all of us in a kaleidoscope of colors and forms. We dance, we write, we create in an effort to turn the lead of our pasts into the precious golden future.

This isn’t a treatise on solving the issue of suffering. That is for another time. This takes a more practical approach of transmutation. By using this common ground of our humanity, something that I believe no human can escape, and planting whatever seeds we have, can we choose creation over destruction?

Is art the antidote to hate?

Can the process of creation, in whatever medium, move us away from our own destruction?