This Visible Created World

It was the single most gorgeous photo I ever took. A quick, unplanned roadside stop just entering Grand Teton National Park in Northwestern Wyoming with my family. I pulled over, jumped out, ran to the other side of the car, lined up my old iPhone 6s, and shot a pic. Something in that moment was illuminated, or flashed, in my mind. As I checked the photo on the little screen, I saw it. Unmistakably, this was “the photo” for the trip. Ten crazy days in five states and multiple parks with our family of four - this was the photo. None of us in it.

Just this visible created world.

As a creative person, a musician, a speaker and an educational entrepreneur with the Visible Music College systems and partners and daily work of my life, I would be tempted to write about the “Visible-created world” and the miracle of music education in fundamentally changing artists into professionals or tentative songwriters into powerful voices in culture. But there is something far deeper than a college or song or record label. More than human made items and textbooks and merchandise.

This visible and created world.

I see a greater Artist who has imagined and designed and guided the creation of all things globally. I see the incredible series of captured moments in each life. Each one, created and meaningful. I see a global connectedness of these stories and persons that unfold into larger narratives of community and support through an often troubled and tenuous personal existence. And we are all creators. Yes, it is most obvious in the musician or the potter, but we also create food and finance and family. And gardens, and businesses, and healthful people. We, as little creators, visible to each other, outside our sacred spaces, reverberate in our daily connection to one another just as Bonhoeffer intoned the meaning of “the visible community” some 80 years ago in The Cost of Discipleship.

Visible Music College is a part of that visible community. We are in and of the visible, created world. We work globally to train artistic people to grow personally and professionally in a dozen places with hundreds of faces and all styles of music and art.

Look long into the visible created world - and embrace it for yourself.

#kensteorts