Thoughts on Painting
There's a a melancholy beauty to the arc of a person's life. In order to feel the full breadth of life, we move through sadness, through longing, desire or passion. Often we try to avoid feelings like anger and despair, or grieving, and lose something important. When we survive truly painful experiences, through the act of survival we are made beautiful by our endurance, by our willingness to continue with life and still breathe in and out all day and eat food and get up. We have this existence, where we touch and feel and smile and taste and dream through the arc of our lifetimes. And throughout this life, we are immersed in an ephemeral environment, a feeling of the space that we are in, of the time that we are in, and how our history colors our experience, how we see that space, feel it, touch it. One can imagine our deepest feelings imprinting on the land. The landscape takes on our hearts.
There's also beauty in having empathetic company, to hold our hands or our bodies while we cry, or even while we scream. This is a most intimate thing. As with the hero's journey, there is transformation available when we pass through those tender, vulnerable, dark inner landscapes and embrace that we are the cracked vases of our lives. We could hide our scars, but we could also create within ourselves the Japanese practice of kintsugi, of mending broken pottery in a visible and beautiful way. Even our good memories are not made less beautiful if they also contain a vein of loss. In many ways they are actually more beautiful, more complex, more real.
