connection

Connecting the dots is what I am called to do.
The most satisfying way I do that is through painting.
Why would someone question the validity of what one is called to do?
Only through comparison and judgement would this be put into question.

I’m laying that one down now.
I paint.
That is my business.

We all have our calling.
For some of us it is a given, it has simply been the way we live.
Sometimes this is more challenging than you might imagine, to have one thing to do all one’s life.
To have the artha - the means - to pursue my dharma - my path - has been the baseline of what has held me through years of still life, landscape, self portrait, interiors and countless drawings.

My sight has been altered.
I cannot say ‘changed’ as that would imply something like changing my clothes or shoes. I didn’t change my subject or learn a new approach. It wasn’t like that.
But process painting caught me and has carried me while I found my feet and my sight on this new earth.

Tonight I recognized something.
I am attracted to my paintings. Through them, while I paint and when they are completed, I connect to something deep within myself.
 
Painting is how I listen and follow the call I hear, enacting a mystery play within my own life. I am the player and the stage. Many characters arrive to express what is unknown to me.
But I am not the director.
The director is that which I listen to, that which calls me, deeper and deeper in touch with itself.
This may be obvious to many in relationship to what they love.
 And tonight I put it into these words and say it for myself.

I am grateful for this life as a visual devotee of Love.
Now I know what love means.
It means to be held no matter what else is happening.
If we don’t get in the way of aggrandizing this most creative of impulses, we are fed by what we seek and are met and self expressed by the call itself.

I bow to what has held me when others could not.
I owe my life to it.