Is art difficult?  "You have to understand how I consider art.  To reach the essence of it, you have to work long and hard.  What I want and what I am aiming for is infernally difficult, and yet I believe I am not aiming too high."  So remarked the artist Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo in July of 1882.  It's hard to argue with Van Gogh.  Creating is among life's most arduous undertakings.  While it is easy to remake what has already been made, it is far more challenging to make something entirely new.  Of course, it goes without saying that anyone who creates is building on, to use Isaac Newton's observation, "the shoulders of those who have come before" them, it remains that creating is a unique work of that most remarkable of all human faculties, imagination.  To imagine is to dream, and to dream is to let go of what is and think about what could--or might never--be, to set aside presuppositions and prior conceptions and resolve to step into whatever one's mind and heart conjure.  Creation is an blank page in a book that has yet to be written.  It cannot be conceived before it happens.
     So, too, art.  It's difficult to birth something that has not yet been conceived.  But somehow art happens.  Somehow, imagination overcomes the past and creates a future whose form and essence, though they may have been envisioned, are not fully know until they are before us.  It is indeed hard.
     But as Van Gogh observed, it's not aiming too high.  After all, it is what we are born to do.  As the creator God made us and the world in which we live, so we make the worlds we come to know and believe.  We create ends, we create destinies.  And we create because there are ends and destinies to be had, because we live in a universe in which destiny is more than an end.