“When I was young my passion was art, eventually comic book and fantasy art. I’ve seen a lot of people lose their childhood passions, not only for art but also for life–just getting squeezed. I don’t have any answers. My passion was and is my art. However, there was a time when I became aware that I might be losing it. Having used my ability to draw to buy approval from my childhood peers, I entered the real world with my ‘cash’ in my pocket. I wanted to be published so badly that in the beginning I took on a lot of work that I hated.
Ah, but maybe a million people would see it and love me. I lived in fear. What happened? I found that the more I went to the drawing board or the easel to do work I hated, the less I wanted to go there. I was losing my joy, and I found eventually that my joy was more important than approval. I began to get ‘difficult to deal with’ and began to lose jobs. I became determined to, well, not so much ‘have it my way’, but to do work I loved. It’s not so easy to pursue, or even know what your heart’s desire may be. We as human beings have different stories but we’re all the same in that we identify the same feelings in each and every one of us. Fear is probably the most basic. All else is built upon fear. Hate grows out of fear, envy out of fear.
But I think that basically fear is certainly self-centered. It is the fear of not getting what I want or of losing something I have that keeps me out of the perfection of the present moment and suddenly living in the future. I have no control over the universe, of events yet to happen. Each and every moment, if I need to, I must remind myself that right now everything is ok. Right now I am alive, and have in my life those things that remind me to stay alive. I am loved, and more importantly I have the ability to love.”
— Jeffrey Catherine Jones