A Language of Understanding (art journal musing + peek)
it all makes so much more sense to me without words. all the things i see and feel most deeply, and most want to express and explore in the nature of things.
and yet, my whole life i've been told and shown that words are part of my gift and medicine. life calls me back to the distinctly uncomfortable edge of translating those ineffable connections - from the visual, sensual, felt realms of experience - into arrangements of ideas when i write, speak or teach. Ideas that might, with god's help, spark a wider perspective, shine light on a bridge overlooked, or catalyze a small moment of healing and validation for another.
part of me would love to be an artist who could spend all day painting and making, knowing all along that she was called to this visual expression and sharing alone. or a writer who knew without a doubt that words were the medium for her, the gift, her way to sweat, evoke and inspire... maybe I would write a book, or blog more regularly. but what i find as my creative truth + process is a little more complex than that.
this artist energy, for me - this creative energy i can't deny - is one of BEing in life and relationship, and pursuing what calls forth my creative spirit into that engagement somehow. it's not one way of expressing or another. it's both/and and then-some. it is a dance of learning and teaching sharing.
it's not (just) a job. it's not just a 'body of work', per se, except what is to be discovered and expressed in this body of mine. it's a way of experiencing life, first. deep terrains of internal landscape that shape the navigation of life 'out here' where the world might observe but mere glimpses. and it just doesn't always look like what so many conventional ideas about 'artist' would have us believe....
and the rest, for me, is the very real struggle of working with what I can to let out from inside of my experience that beauty and pain and inquisitive nature which calls to be expressed, released, loved, evolved or blessed with the poetry of activated stillness. it's a stumbling on the page most of the time, and yet sometimes a resonance of recognition... however big or small or seemingly inconsequential.
sometimes, for me, it is line and color and the making of marks. sometimes it is words and musings and sharing bits of stories, healing or connections i have learned, sensed or witnessed.
always, what comes of my process, is merely an attempt at translating presence with all of this. evidence of my own quest for understanding and connection with life itself. and maybe it's also a morsel, perhaps, for yours.
and lately, i find more and more, at the end of the day, in the language of life and love and creative spirit... it all makes so much more sense to my soul without all the words getting in the way....
