July 23rd, 2019
When asked how he created his sculptural masterpiece David, Michelangelo said — and I’m paraphrasing, because I wasn’t there — that essentially David was always inside that block of marble, and he just had to chip away the parts that weren’t him.
What he actually said was this:
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
And:
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
You can do a lot of things in your life that are not you. In fact, you can spend your entire life acting against who you really are on the inside. We wear masks and we tell lies and we cover up truths and we call it being human.
Being a better person just means being a more defined version of what we can already see. By diligently — painstakingly, sometimes — chipping away the little pieces of what we are not, we become closer to being the better shape that has always been living deep inside our marble.
And the thing about sculpting yourself is that it gives you more educated eyes to see the art in the world around you. You start seeing the more defined sculptures and you gravitate towards them; you also can see a block of untouched clay from a mile away.
So what does this mean for you? It means you will be forever unfinished. And until you can’t lift your fingers anymore, keep chipping. We see you. We can trace every line. And we appreciate you.
The Den 