If you do invite her back into your life again, I promise it will serve you well. Your artist-muse

will help you shape and express your every emotion, especially those half-formed and confusing

notions that you find hard to put into words. She will leap to your aid, and help you take back

once more the delight that comes from focusing on this very present creative moment. She will

recapture for you the endless joy of dabbling and doodling, of playing and concocting, of putting

your endless imagination to work. These are the things every young child does instinctively. And

I’m going to make it my job to help you conquer any lingering doubts you may have about indulging

yourself and letting your creativity fly to the sky. I am going to give you my joyful permission to

once more make art.

New Ways and Old

All of us have had some acquaintance with hospitals, and with other places where health care is

offered. We have almost certainly either been ill or known someone who has been ill enough to need

this care. This book is meant especially for you or your friends or family members who have been or

are right now in this situation. Today’s hospitals are twenty-four-hour places, like police

stations and prisons, fire and rescue services, all-night cafes and grocery stores. Actually, the

bigger ones have got a bit of all of these: their own police and phone switchboard, mainframe

computer and helicopter pad, all-night cafes and cleaning crews, banks and post offices and all

manner of vending machines, laboratories and operating rooms, delivery suites and mortuaries. They

are not just twenty-four-hour places, they are small—or not so small—townships.

And it is within these townships that we human beings get sick and well, give birth and die. You

find newborns and centenarians, the prematurely old and those with a new lease on life. Here are

the over- and underweight, the addicted and abused, the halt and the lame, the healers and the

heal-ees, the prayed for and the pray-ers. Workers of every skill and age and ethnicity play their

part in a hospital’s dramas: high tragedy and soap opera, horror movie and high farce. You will

find doctors rubbing shoulders with repair men, nurses with lab techs, social workers with cleaning crews.

Despite all these life-and-death dramas—the miraculous recoveries and breakthroughs beloved by our

media and often the stuff of soap operas—most illness today comes on slowly and persists

chronically. Perhaps this has been the case with you. These are the ailments of our Western

civilization—legacies of stress-filled lifestyles and fast-food eating habits. These chronic

ailments—high blood pressure, arthritis, osteoporosis, chronic backache and headache, cancer,

cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, depression, anxiety and insomnia, hyperactivity and

Alzheimer’s disease—are much less seen in indigenous cultures, whose communities and ways of life

are mostly much more slow-paced and traditional. But the diseases I list here affect millions of

white North Americans and Europeans, cost billions in quick-fix treatments, and result in enormous

amounts of lost work and school time. The latest annual budget for American health care tops a

trillion dollars.

It is abundantly clear that hospitals and other places of health care need something more to set

beside the medical science that is trying to stem this tide of illness—something that will make you

really feel better, healthier in every way. Not just in body but in mind and spirit too. This is

what art and art-making offer—and I’m going to show you how.