This is a short meditation I wrote for The Breath and The Clay on Instagram. This is the unabridged version.

It’s a good thing we realized that God is just a grumpy old codger who doesn’t understand the really important things in life, like work productivity and school sports and shopping at the mall. Now we’re free to do those things seven days a week, not just six. Things to do, things to do!
For artists, the hustle is the normal state of being. In fact, for a lot of us, it’s the raison d’être. We build for ourselves castles and temples and monuments to our work—making, creating, manifesting—so that we will not be forgotten, either by the art director or the producer making hires, or by the audience, or by posterity. This all takes place in space—the physical world of art objects and stages and audience and paychecks.
But that is the realm of Man.
The artist intuitively knows that space is not the only realm—in fact, it is the world of limitation and frustration. And yet, it is where we live, in these bodies. These bodies which are the sensory receivers for inspiration are also the very boundaries of our existence.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book “The Sabbath,” says: “Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness of time.”
Tyranny. Holiness. These are words seldom used in our day, in the realm of Man.
But there is another realm, which is where inspiration originates, and that is “time, which is eternity in disguise” (Heschel). Time can feel just as limiting as space, but that is because we are trying to force it to be like space: a commodity of the Six Days instead of the gift of the Seventh. Time is a doorway, not a wall. It is eternity in disguise, if we will let it be.
As frenetic as we can become in both inspired bursts and hustle, Sabbath is a great gift to the artist, as it purposely limits the world of space in order to sanctify the realm of time.
Growing up in a Jewish home, I valued the Sabbath, but more as a day simply to not work, and to take epic naps. During quarantine, however, as space became literally confining but the hustle retained its baseline air of panic, I had to bend the knee to Sabbath. It became a day to open the option of time, even if I could not open the option of space.
But that didn’t mean I stopped doing art. Instead, it took on a new nature.
Heschel’s daughter tells us that he, as a professor, still read books on the Sabbath, but only did spiritual reading—nothing related to his work. It wasn’t the act of reading, but its nature that changed. Reading took on the air of pleasure, of feeding his Six-Day-wearied soul, of reconnecting to the limitlessness of time and eternity. This is a great gift offered to us by the Creator and Lover of our souls.
I still create on the Sabbath, more than I previously had; but it, too, is deliberately unconnected to work. (I also take a nap if I need one!) The art I make eschews skill in favor of pleasure and rest. Deliberate imperfection is welcomed, because the primary focus is time. It takes the form of working with clay, painting landscape color fields or flowers from my garden, or practicing the Japanese art of Kintsugi as I meditate on forgiveness and reconciliation. My family can enter in to these forms with me; I can work at the dining room table instead of my studio.
Being an artist is core to who I am—it is my work, but it is also my rest. In creating in this way, untethered to earning a living, I commune with God in a different mode: one connected to time rather than space. Quarantine may have limited my space, but it opened up my time, and in the Sabbath, I can continue to receive that gift. It was always meant to be thus; we do not know better than God.