Pin It Down
Pin It Down
Leonardo da Vinci said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
As I near the completion of The Wiley Canning Company Cookbook, his words feel true. I could work on this book for the rest of my life. Choosing to set it free evokes a complex set of emotions. As I edit, I look at the pages before me and say, “I want to keep you to myself forever, but it’s time to share you.”
I believe in what this book has become. I respect what this book has become. Most importantly, I honor what this book has become.
The Wiley Canning Company Cookbook is a snapshot of my knowledge and heart, right now. Is it possible that our work is never finished because we are ever-evolving? Our minds grow, and our hearts grow. Our capacity to love expands, and our capacity to grieve expands. Our experiences of the world around us change, and our desire and ability to articulate them change. Our work is of us, and therefore, it may never feel finished because we are never finished.
About his work, poet Ocean Vuong said, “It’s never done. If I had a chance now with every book I wrote, every page would be a little different. Commas would be moved, words. And I think that’s beautiful, actually. That’s a good thing. It reminds us that the artist and the mind and the poem still grow. The poem is like a tree, and the book is a photograph of the tree. You take a photograph of the tree, but the next day, the tree has new cells. The next year, it has new branches. We have to make peace with the fact that a book is actually just a photo album, and that the organic, psychic life of the poem is already growing somewhere else, somewhere inside you. And we pin it down.”
As artists, writers, and creators, we pin down a moment in time. We hold on tightly. We bravely share it. We continue to grow and expand and change, and we honor, we must honor, what our work was and has become.
Pin It Down was written on August 12, 2022. It is the third of five essays from 2022 being shared December 22, 2022 and New Year’s Day. You can read the first, The Pursuit of Complexity, and the second, A Cumulative Mindset, on our New Feed here.
Each essay was first available to Wiley Subscribers. You can subscribe to The Wiley Subscription for first access to all essays here.