by Rachel Hicks
Enjoy a collection of artwork, poetry, and more from our archived December 2021 issue of Among Worlds magazine!
We decided to end 2021 with a bang—an explosion of color and beauty and depth and light!
These are heavy times we’re living in, and many of us feel that heaviness as a deep weariness. We’re tired of the COVID pandemic, some of us are grieving loved ones lost, many of us have experienced extra levels of loneliness or isolation, and conflict in many parts of the world has made us tense and perhaps pessimistic about it all.
For those reasons and more, we wanted to offer this artistic feast to you, our fellow TCKs, as an end-of-year gift.
But how can art help? Or poetry? The arts can’t solve the world’s geo-political problems, stop a virus, or bring back a loved one. But perhaps as we slow down and take the time to look, to reflect, and to savor all the creative works included in this issue, they might remind us who we are, give us words for complicated emotions, teach us new ways to see, celebrate the good, or make us wonder, explore, and question.
But how can art help? Or poetry?
In this issue, TCK artists, photographers, poets, and writers give us more than windows into their own thoughts and lives—they help us to see what they see. They reflect our world and our complicated identities back to us from new perspectives. They show us how to be okay with the tensions in our paradoxical lives. They remind us to look for beauty, sometimes in unexpected places.
Poet William Carlos Williams once wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there” (from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”). If we expand his idea of “poems” to include the arts in general, I believe the sentiment still rings true. The creative arts help us—whether we are artists or consumers of art—to access life from the right side of our brains, from our creative center. In encountering visual art, poetry, music, or artistic photography, we access ways of knowing and understanding that bypass our reason and logic, but that still reveal truth about our humanity and our world.
Each submission in this issue was created by a unique individual and has particular meaning for that artist or writer. And yet good works invite the viewer or reader in as a participant in their meaning—we encounter the universal in the particular. Different images, sounds, and words will resonate with each of us, and we hope that each of you will find something in these pages to take with you, to remember, to contemplate.
As you celebrate this holiday season and the end of 2021, please enjoy the special gifts we’ve curated in this issue on TCKs and the Arts!
Featured image by Christine Rasmussen: Beyond, oil on canvas, 2017, 24 x 30 inches. Used with permission.
