Life doesn’t offer any particular promises beyond opportunities, choices, and change, as far as I can tell from my current perspective. The opportunities aren’t always obvious. The choices are sometimes difficult to accept, to make, or to figure out in advance. Change is, whether we reach for it, or run from it. What we recognize as our opportunities does affect our experience. The choices we make do alter the flow of events. Change… well, change simply is, whether we see opportunities or hurdles, whether we make careful choices, or stumble on our choices through despair, anger, or eagerness. Life is not ‘one size fits all’, even in the most legislative sense; we are each having our own experience, and no amount of law-making can change that.
This is a strange contemplative journey I am on, these days. When I started this blog I felt so lost, and on the edge of discarding this one life I have, in favor of an unknown of a most permanent nature. I can’t always express the difference between ‘here’ and ‘there’, but I am in a very different place in life, and with myself, than I was then. This is not a journey with a destination – that is one piece of learning I feel confident I can count on. The map is not the world. The journey is not about a destination. The metaphor is not the experience. The point of practicing is not mastery – it is the value in the practice, itself, and in the journey from ‘there’ to ‘here’ and beyond.
What a long way I have come in such a relatively short time. 🙂 It’s a moment worth celebrating on a quiet Sunday morning. How about you? I hope you are also celebrating some worthy moment, great or small. It’s a good day for it.
I found myself feeling a little lost yesterday, as late afternoon gently became evening. Metaphorically, it felt a bit like stopping in the middle of a very long walk, looking forward and seeing only horizon…looking back and seeing…only horizon, and feeling suddenly without perspective, without context, without certainty of destination, or origin, or distance traveled. It was a very peculiarly sad moment, poignant, tired, and a little child-like. I put the day on pause at that moment, and sat down with myself over a nice cup of tea. I paused the music on the stereo, put down the paints, the camera, the clean-as-I-go chores, and took a few minutes to check in with myself. (That I can do this, and take care of me so easily, is a wonderful change over how I handled challenges or feeling ‘disconnected’ before I started this portion of my journey; it, too, requires practice.) I made time for meditation; there’s no stronger Rx for the pain of chaos and damage, and I found the evening easily restored to a comfortably pleasant experience.
I don’t really think of painting as pushing myself to any sort of physical limits, it feels easy in the moment. When I was finished with the day’s creative work, yesterday, I was in a lot of pain, and feeling pretty ‘old’. My joints ached, and were incredibly stiff. My muscles were sore in unusual places. I felt fatigued. I wasn’t as aware of this physical piece of my experience until after I took a time out for me, and re-centered myself, and re-engaged my experience with greater awareness, and presence in the moment. The afternoon painting had slowly pulled my awareness out of my ‘here and now’ experience into the strange space between colors and brush strokes, artistically engaged with the new work developing in front of me, but less engaged with the experience of me, in the moment. Clearly, more practice has value; I am stiff and sore this morning, and extra time with my morning yoga did nothing to make me feel ‘young again’. I can move with sufficient ease and fluidity to spend the morning painting, however, and that’s more than any Rx opiate could have done for me, and I am grateful.
“Wildflowers” 12″ x 16″ acrylic on canvas w/glow 2014
I don’t know how many more creative years I have ahead of me. (None of us do.) I want very much to figure out a better arrangement for creative working space. I’d value the luxury of permanent studio space, and while recognizing it as a luxury generally stops me from bitching about not having it, it doesn’t stop me from yearning for it. My always-available opportunity to meditate on sufficiency tends to be my lack of space to paint, how much I want it, and gently and compassionately finding my way to a place of contentment and balance without it. I suspect having space to paint that isn’t ‘weekends only’, or needing to be packed into a couple small boxes and put away when I’m finished, will remain a pleasant daydream well beyond any legitimate opportunity to meet that need. Becoming attached to any other outcome has only ever caused me pain. I’ve come close a time or two, but…
I blink away unexpected tears. Wow. I’m always taken by surprised how much the struggle for space to paint comfortably, freely, an in a comfortable emotional context, is part of my everyday experience, and how much it moves me. This is clearly important to me, and worthy of my self-compassion, support, and attention. Is my near-chronic desire for ‘a place of my own’ that I can count on more about artistic space than personal space? Is the ‘getaway’ I crave so often entirely about creative space and freedom? If that’s the case, do my opportunities, and available choices change? What meets that need?
Well, another Sunday; one more day to paint before it all gets put away for another time. So often I feel as if I am barely finding a comfortable pace and really exploring inspiration, and it’s already time to put it all away…
Untitled, unfinished background, 12″ x 16″ acrylic on canvas w/UV and glow.
Today is a good day to enjoy what I love about who I am. Today is a good day to choose well. Today is a good day to be grateful for opportunities. Today is a good day to savor the moment. Today is a good day to change the world.
