I can't be an artist and stand still

I am a little bit sad that I am not an artist.  I have friends who do fantastic things with paint, chalk, and thread.  I've known the occasional person who could sing well or (more impressively, to me) write good music.  The ability to do any of these things is as far from me as the ability to walk on water.  I respect artists greatly.  I can't really imagine what it's like to have that creative impulse, to say to yourself "Today I will make something new" and then you just go and you do it.  Totally foreign.

The closest I ever got to producing something artistic was in the third grade.  I manufactured a particularly nice little snowman out of construction paper and paste.  In retrospect, the nice part of it was that it was all proportional.  Also, I did a nice job with regular shapes.  Round circles, square squares.  "I made a round circle once" is not the sort of thing you can really brag about in the art world.

I can't adequately visualize something that I would like to make, even with help.  I'm pretty much a failure in the creative vision department.  I was thinking today about my house, and how undecorated it is.  I have a few reproductions hanging on the walls.  Some of them are from Ikea.  Some are from one of the National Galleries.  I have a few small originals that friends and family have given me, but it's not as if I have anything arranged so that it's in a theme.  Or hung level.  Probably the nicest thing you could say about the interior of my house is that it's comfortable.  Which is less praise than one would normally give to the interior of a Victorian house.

I suppose I do feel a little bit artistic.  Sometimes I write things.  One time, in elementary school?  I wrote a story that somebody liked.  I was very proud.  I think it got into a literary magazine of some sort.  (An elementary level magazine.)  However, to me art seems like it should be more hands-on than sitting and thinking, and then typing.  (But then again I wouldn't say that Shakespeare didn't produce art.  Is it art before somebody voices the words?)

The other way I feel a tiny bit artistic is in movement.  Not your traditional ballet.  Not even your non-traditional getting down.  In dressage, I feel art.  Sometimes, when everything comes together and the horse and I move as one, I feel art.

I'm not sure if this counts as art, but when I'm out on a hike, and the weather is incredible, and I'm far from the sounds of civilization, and I am in the midst of natural beauty that cannot fairly be described, it feels like just existing and moving in the midst of that beauty is an expression of art.  I'm not sure why I feel that way.  It's not something that can be captured or displayed.  But it makes me feel the way a really heartfelt song, sung really well, can make me feel.  The chill on the neck, the flush of the ears, the buzzy feeling, the edge of tears. Art.