Wind Shadows, egg tempera

Artificial intelligence inserted itself unbidden into my thought process as I began this post. It offered to generate my reflections on this egg tempera painting—stringing together words scraped from the internet rather than words forged by the life I’ve lived.

How nice.

Where was this machine during those tormented first ten years when I taught myself how to draw and paint without formal training? The hours I spent in marshes and meadows, and in back rooms with veterinarians, and volunteering at wildlife rehabilitation centers, learning animal anatomy?

Those were driven years—in rain and wind, sunburned, bug-bitten, beating myself up because I could not capture on canvas what I saw before my eyes, imagined in my mind, and felt in my heart.

What goes into my art is me, and what goes into what you create is you, my friend. It is a lifetime of lived experience that we share. Every fiber of our being that makes us human strives to find its way into our art. It takes time to filter life through our senses and express what it means to be human—to birth something beautiful into being. No machine will instantly do that for you. Discernment takes time.

And, as for me, it is true that I am slow in knowing.

When I uploaded this egg tempera painting, Wind Shadows, I intended to share with you the journey of its becoming—my creative process. Instead, when I opened the editor,  I was immediately distracted by this prompt:

How generous… AI will just generate a life for me.

How lazy.

Sloth is an enticing sin. Why think deeply for yourself?  Why struggle for hours to create when AI can do it in seconds?

Why be concerned about the ultimate cost of our natural and  material resources being consumed to sustain AI? Don’t look behind the curtain

We are told it’s progress. Progress towards what?

C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:

“Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better.”

That’s what I’m after, changing for the better.

Not the insidious change brought by algorithms trained to find and feed our addictions, but the kind of change that brings hope to the weary and beauty for our souls.

Do we want a life generated for us, or a life of meaning—one that can only be lived in all our messy humanness?

As for me, I am taking my old Bible and going to the coastlands, where late-summer sunlight sweeps across slender grasses and the salt air carves wind shadows in the sand for birds to rest.

I choose to practice the way of life generated by my Creator.

Stand by the earliest roads, ask the pathways of old, “Which is the way to good?’— Jer. 6:16