The 2018 Artists’ Gratitude Project: A Weekly Practice

The potential for positivity, hope, change, and appreciation.

Do you feel the dichotomy? Many artists come from an upbringing of extensive support and opportunity – with training, classes, private lessons, workshops, mentors, supplies, and equipment. Many go onto colleges, conservatories, and masters programs. Yet, as artists in the U.S. today, many of us live with modest incomes to support our families and to keep making our work. Many times – we can end up feeling bitter, resentful, and negative.

Would a weekly gratitude practice inspire and promote personal change, hope, and contentment?

Whether you consider each weekly idea while on the subway commuting to work – or you decide to write in a personal journal – please join us on this journey in 2018. The 52 ideas were brainstormed and then placed in a random order. Thank you to colleagues Valerie Gutwirth, Juliana Monin, and Brian Smith for help launching this project.

Each week, one idea/intention/consideration will be shared.

 

Week 7: Students

Today and this week, I offer gratitude for: 

My students. The gift, privilege, and opportunity to be in the room together. To co-create, to learn together. To see the evolution and the future of the form. To have hope.

I am grateful for the give and the take of teaching.

To quote Abby Fiat, now retired from an extensive career at the University of Utah:

Lifelong learning is for all of us. Let me talk about it from the students’ vantage point first. The students are the ones that keep it current for me. We are so lucky to be in the profession we are in. It is the profession….it puts us all together – our mind, our body, our creative spirit. Wondering, celebrating, exploring, discovering, struggling….. This is hopefully the environment we create for our students. There is not even a choice of keeping it current….that’s what has to happen. The struggles and epiphanies that the students are having are some of the same struggles and epiphanies that we are having – whether it’s our research, their research, their choreography, our choreography, our teaching, their learning. They are learning and so are we, and they’re teaching us what to do.  

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