Christmas has come and gone and we’ve settled into vacation week. Changes loom heavily on the horizon. It’s puzzling how everything I knew to be true for forty years has been shaken at its roots; sometimes shifted and sometimes abandoned altogether in the past two years. My therapist asserts that circumstances are all around us, that we need to tap into sure things, that the only things that we can really be sure of are our breath and the ground that sits beneath our feet.
I’ve resisted this mantra for a long time, but change is ongoing whether I am willing to accept it or not. I’ve taken to reading westerns that my father had in my house growing up and drinking primarily decaf coffee but for my cup of regular to start my day. I’ve relaxed some of the rules for my kids. They have had so much change in the past two years it just seems unrealistic to clamp down harder.
But then, clamping down is just something that I’ve done to myself and everyone around me for ages, expecting everyone to function better while constricting worldviews. Shockingly this has produced inconsistent but generally bad results.
I have, after some trepidation, begun to start anew. Artwork was something that has been set to the wayside for the past two years. True, I’ve produced a daily drawing this year, but I have not been centering my existence around the amount of artwork I can produce.
This freedom sounds innately good, but there is some question as to how one creates and what they might create in the mindset as well. I have struggled with this. Not so much as a sense of artist’s block, but more in a sense of being conscious of what I am making. I’ve begun to liken it to recovering from an injury. We do not immediately dive into activity as usual. We find our edges, sometimes pushing against them just a bit to see if we can go a bit farther or achieve something new.
Last week I began to think about the way that color seeps and dries as an event. I had seen a painting in pastel colors of stripes and I suddenly found myself yearning for a flat tipped brush. I hadn’t used one in ages, but I found myself resolutely and indeterminately focused on watching paint dry. It was one of the loveliest afternoons of recent memory.
