A couple of years ago I wrote a piece, and I was pretty happy with it. After a lot of research and a lot of writing and a lot of editing and painting I had something I felt pretty good about. I didn’t love the layout but I was pleased with the content and the art and so I felt like it was ‘good enough’ to be called done. So I printed it and we used it for the purpose for which it had been written and it was pretty good. But there were typos and when put to practice it was clear that some things needed to be tweaked, the usual refinements of a prototype. Then I got busy with other things so it just sat.

At the beginning of this year I got less busy so I picked up the manuscript and went to work. I wanted to publish this more broadly so the layout was going to need to change, and if the layout changed some content was going to get refined – scope creep – you think you are doing one thing but nothing is truly independent. We are all connected, we are all dependent, we all have threads that reach to places we did not expect. So I worked on this and that, and then I felt really good. It was better than it had been and I was pleased. Sure there was more I could do, there always is, but you have to know when to say enough and let it go its way.

It was at this point that I discovered a fatal error and one I could have avoided but for making an assumption (which you know the saying and it is said for a reason). Turns out the Amazon won’t just publish in whatever size format you want, they have their opinions and requirements despite being the printer of the people. So the whole thing had to be redone again. Which it was.

Turns out on this third round I was even happier than the first and second so was starting to feel like this was a good nudge from the universe to keep evolving the piece rather than the doors slams it felt like at times. Here is where I will digress for a moment and say I have a flaw (many) as an artist, and that is that I want my art to be the way I want it to be and (as my grandfather would say) ‘to hell with the people who don’t like it.’ My first book was accepted by a publisher on the condition that I change the structure of the first section to which I said, ‘to hell with you,’ (but in a nicer way) and the result was, well, not an overflowing bank balance shall we say. Back to the current piece: so I was feeling like I was really learning something about flexibility in art and the willingness to adapt and really liked where I was at in this thirdish round.

Apparently Amazon also does not like layers of text and images. Now I think this looks really cool and had spent a lot of time getting the opacity of images and color of fills just right so that letters flowed into image and vice versa. Apparently this does not print well. ‘But the experience of the words!’ cried the artist in me, ‘they aren’t meant to just be read, they need to felt.’ My husband, ever the pragmatic supporter said, ‘do what you want. You can print it the way it can be read and have people actually be able to read it, or you can print it the way you want and have it be an interesting dust collector.’ On to round four we went.

I need not bore you with why’s of round five, and the eventual last edits that technically make a round six after the proof was received but suffice it to say this was a learning process on many levels. What’s my point? My point is that we are never done. It’s not that you have to keep striving, or that whatever it is that you are doing will never be enough or never be good enough. It’s probably just fine. But we are layered versions of ourselves and if we want to be fully experienced by the people we encounter we have to be willing to peel away layers, make ourselves vulnerable, refashion structures to better fit us as we grow; we have to recognize that who we were is never the end of who we are going to be and that takes an acceptance of versioning.

I’m not saying change yourself, I am saying let yourself be changed. There is a difference. Sometimes it is the little nudges from the universe, sometimes it is the door slamming in your face. We have a choice in how we respond. The core of what I wrote, the core of who I am, is there. I am learning how to let it be seen in ways that might just work better in certain situations. That’s really what this piece I wrote is about too. It is a Passover Haggadah* that I hope will be used for Seders and for Maundy Thursday services and Holy Week dinners. It asks us to be willing to see differently, and to be seen differently, and it accepts that we are versions of ourselves; a lot of good stuff happens when we let the artist go to work on us.

*available next week on Amazon.