The Transformative Power of Art

Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness

When I look through the two-hundred-thousand-plus pieces of data my team and I have collected over the past fifteen years, I can only conclude our world is in a collective spiritual crisis. This is especially true if you think about the core of that definition of “spirituality” from The Gifts of Imperfection:

“Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion.”

—Brené Brown [Braving the Wilderness: the Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone] pp. 44-45.

High Lonesome

“Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope…. Only art can take the holler of a returning soldier and turn it into a shared expression and a deep, collective experience. Music, like all art, gives pain and our most wrenching emotions voice, language, and form, so that it can be recognized and shared. The magic of the high lonesome sound* is the magic of all art: the ability to both capture our pain and deliver us from it at the same time…

—Brené Brown [Braving the Wilderness: the Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone] pp. 44-45.

*High lonesome is a sound or type of music in the bluegrass tradition. Its roots go back to Bill Monroe, Roscoe Holcomb, and the bluegrass region of Kentucky.