who am i

i began to paint
a face
oh,
my father it seemed

another session began
the lips of my mother
whispering near

angel wings
laden with blue and white

the brush moved everywhere
and the eyes lightened
they became the eyes of a child




myself
renewed,
again....

musing on courage, smitten by the Friend within

We are developing trust in ourselves 

to meet what hides in the dark.

We discover ourselves

rooted in the truth

of a power known as love.

I’m smitten.

diving in and through

    first day

 several days later

I had hit a real snag and my mind was holding control of my process.

It was holding hard and tight.
I painted the sharks, the thoughts, and this hairy being swimming for her life, away~

The story exists when it does and the hold it can have was felt anew.

It was a means to an end.

I paint to discover what lies beyond the mind's control.
Then the trust appeared again, the going in, the letting go, the curiousity, the willingness not to know where this was leading.

Feeling what I was feeling was the way in.

The paint continued to carry me through, literally through, all the thoughts.

It works.
It is meditation in action.
The process clears the mind which enables the heart to breathe freely as it is meant to be.

"In my end is my beginning" Eliot wrote, "In my beginning is my end."
This painting is a celebration of life death life. 
It leaves me quiet, present.

hungry barbara was thirsty, too

thirsty for the real
as odd as that tongue felt,
it was right.

She's got my whole world in her hands

I brought this painting home from my studio last week. 

This is how the process continued. 

I had been entering entering entering, making smaller and smaller marks, and then yesterday the feeling of purple rose up, and this purple one embraced and seemed to carry the whole. I needed to paint larger and larger areas of color. The judgements were loud, "this is not process painting" -"I'm missing the connection." 

Gladly, I just let myself paint the large purple figure and the green landscape she stood on. 

She holds everything and everyone. 

The process continues now, I am in it. 

Trusting that the process works when I allow it, I notice that I like to paint. 

I like to allow myself to be on the path I've found myself on.

Thankfully, there is room for humor on this path!

life desires to be known

So a few weeks ago
Turmoil was boiling in me
I was pushing up against her every where I turned
The old ways of shutting her down appeared uninteresting
And I paced the rooms
She wouldn’t leave me alone
I was cornered.

The form this cauldron had taken was a painting
A process painting
A painting whose only purpose is raw and infinite possibility.

And I was reaching a new edge
What used to open all the doors
Connecting the dots
Finding more and more layers of connection
Wasn’t the way this one was going.

So I paced.
And paced some more.
Then I went directly to the book of questions.
I had to find my own way into this source,
to the doorway of the secret waiting to be known.

I wrote down what I was feeling:
I didn’t know what was happening
In the painting in my life.
I felt turmoil.

The path in is always at the point of what is appearing.
I asked myself what would I paint if it was ok to feel turmoil.

The hint came by noticing my resistance to this state I was in.
I didn’t like it.

What would I paint if it was ok to feel turmoil?
My answer was great desire.
I sensed, that this pressure wasn’t turmoil, that is what I had named it.
It was great desire pressing to the surface for air.
Great Desire.

And what would I paint?
A penis emerged out of a black hole that had appeared earlier in the painting.
It had no meaning, no reason to be there, and now it was the place for this emerging energy to be given a form.
The pleasure in process is the letting go of meaning.
A form has a life of its own and I just get out of the way.
And more and more and more penises emerged out of the black holes.

My desire had been met, honestly.

The next painting I began with a great deal of openness.
And the head of a child began to take form and then another figure.
But when BK asked me what is one thing I would paint from the last painting,
I knew it was the penis emerging out of the black hole.

So I began again.
One big emergent penis.
For no reason but to express my desire.
Oh, yes, my mind had a field day with the form it took.

Then flowers filled the space around the tall presence of desire.
And again, my mentor asked...what was I feeling before I painted all the flowers?
I knew exactly what I was feeling. I had been stopped.
What was I supposed to do with a penis?

My mind was happy with all the flowers. I was at ease with them. I liked the story about devotion and the lingam and shakti. I also did really feel that the penis was inside me. And there was an innocence to the flowering.
But of course there was more to this than the idea of shiva and shakti.

Something more than stories feeds my soul.
Something in my own life was waiting to emerge.

And I began another painting of a tall erect penis.
No black hole this time.
And when the penis was complete, I waited.
It did not take long for the vulva to begin to wrap itself around the head of the penis.
The doorway was the womb.
I am living in the body of a woman, after all.
And this is really not about penises or wombs or vulva.
And I am present to the connections these forms offer me to meet.

All this
(life-painting-writing-being-learningloving)
is taking place through a body and I am at my own doorstep now.
I can feel that I am painting in a new less exacting way, that what I painted before is done, the paintings of this past year were the stepping stones to now.
I am at a new edge and I can feel the urge to shut down and turn away.

Process painting can be done alone but one won’t go as far as is possible without the support of another.
The best other is one who has already passed through so many doors that doorways are all she sees now.

Door upon door upon door.
And the wonder of unlocking the next one,
in whatever form it takes.

the touch of mystery

When can I say this all began?
How did I get where I am today?
Who am I?

I love these questions and today I am feeling how they have become my life, how they live with me, how they carry me along into the mystery, day by day, moment by moment.

This morning the mysterious process of creative living was underlined once again by the wise words of Julia Cameron.
Bless her heart. Bless her work. Bless her for writing and listening to her process.

It was her book, The Artist's Way Every Day, that still sits by my morning side, which I read through the fifteen months of my woodland time out. I know that those months are the ground for all I do, now. It was a time of such deep questioning, stopping and listening, and is indeed, how I arrived here. Its mystery is woven into me and is why I can write at all, now, and actually let my words be released, trusting them to be strong enough to fly.

Julia Cameron writes, "Mystery is the heart of creativity. That, and surprise. All too often, when we say we want to be creative, we mean that we want to be productive. Now, to be creative is to be productive -- but by cooperating with the creative process, not forcing it."

"Creativity requires a respectful reticence. The truth is that is how to raise the best ideas. Let them grow in dark and mystery."

Today I am celebrating every step through the "dark and mystery" that brought me here. I feel all my questions and how they have settled down into my body from my mind. I feel all the waiting, all the wondering, all the aching, all the confusion as I faced the mystery and found myself in relation to it.

Today I wanted to acknowledge all the hands that kept taking form in my process painting this past year.

They were reaching to touch me: red hands, black hands, pink hands. 
I was reaching to touch me and they were in service to this longing.

How strong the impulse was that it needed such strong colors! Yes, there were moments of judgement. Oh, the black hands! Oh, the red hands! So dangerous my mind said they were! But over time they no longer carried a story, they carried feeling, only feeling. They were necessary.

Yesterday the hands came again and took on a recently mixed soft pink color and they were my own hands, touching my mother's face and hair. I had begun to paint myself and could not ignore the resemblance to my mother. To allow both these realities is the way I came in touch with myself and what I was feeling. Mother is where my life, with all its needs and joys, began.

The mystery of process will bring more surprise to life through this painting.

I'm so grateful to life and the process that has brought me into such intimate relationship with the mystery.

That mystery has taken the form of many women who have supported me along the way. Most recently those women are Barbara Kaufman, the director of the Center for Creative Exploration and Julie Daley, the creator of Writing Raw and Unabashedly Female. Both these women live, work and play in San Francisco, CA.

I can't say enough about process painting or writing raw.
The mystery can never be fathomed, nor can we.

my new job:
wake up
feed the birds
make tea or coffee
ponder
be inspired
don't even try to fit this into words
write
or paint
do whatever comes first.
love being
such a mystery.

the twins

I'm a bit stunned by where this piece took me.
at the beginning of our class, one of the women shared that the definition of God is surprise.
indeed.


freed of the image
the brush knows
and dances,
surprise!