A Few Words on Courage and the Cultivating Project
I'm excited to announce that I've recently joined a team of wonderful writers, thinkers and artists over at The Cultivating Project. The purpose of this community is to provide a space for cultivating the good, the true, and the beautiful, and to restore, renew, and reinforce the individual, so I'm delighted to be a contributing member of this group and I hope you'll spend some time perusing their lovely website here.
The first thing I've written for The Cultivating Project is a rather lengthy and quite personal interview, in which I talk about my childhood, poetry, art, literature, the power of imagination, and The Letters From The Sea Tower.
Here's a little excerpt in which I share some of my thoughts about the concept of courage:
LANCIA SMITH: Would you give us some background to why courage is such a vital issue to you and how does that tie in to the Good, True, and Beautiful?
BRYANA JOY Well, in all honesty, I think one of the biggest reasons I find myself continuously coming back to the concept of courage is because it’s become an absolutely vital part of my daily life. I have some trauma in my past that still resurfaces in the form of severe anxiety and so I know firsthand that fear can be physically, morally, and emotionally debilitating. What I love about the word “courage” is that it doesn’t mean being the kind of person who is not easily scared. If it did, I couldn’t qualify. But no, it means the ability to do something that does scare us. And since I often feel terribly small and inadequate, and since there are so many, many things that scare me, cultivating and developing courage within myself is a consistent and essential need.
So how do we get courage? What does that look like in the real world? For me, courage is about perspective and imagination, and this is where the Good, True and Beautiful comes into play. When my surroundings are mundane and colorless and the world around me shrinks to the tyranny of the minute, it’s hard to have courage. It’s hard to face hardships when I don’t have confidence in the meaning of my work and my breath, when I’ve lost sight of the great and glorious story of which I am a part. So the way I get courage is by steeping myself in things that remind me of the wideness of the world and the illimitable goodness of God. And my hope is that my work will provide a space for others to do just that.