I share an excerpt from my morning pages:
August 17: Tonight at art, the sixth night of my painting. Side-tracks -- the black markings I put on the painting last week -- where are they diverting me from? What is the image that I don't want to paint? I have fallen in love with my hanging worlds -- my floating worlds and I don't want to change them. I have been painting around them, adding touches, but what are the worlds saying? What is their purpose? I know, constructively, how they got there: plastic wrap to keep the plastic plates of tempera paint from drying out between Tuesday nights, lifted off and then laid on the painting and pressed down and lifted off.
What is their true purpose as they float above the red corpuscles, the medusa's head of red whips? No, not whips. Red energy overlaying the yellow sunlight. Feeding the worlds; imploring them to find their health, safety. Healing the worlds: the worlds of hunger, of warring madness, of greed and me-firsts, the worlds of killing the environment...the habitats...the myriad of species, the worlds of hurting, the worlds of aggression.
Healing to wholeness...completeness. Awakening worlds to empathy, care-full-ness.
The worlds float and the blues of the ether swirl around them and in-between. All is hope -- or not. Is it despair instead? Sharp points daggering in. What is the truth? If the "cave of the heart is the home of truth" *, are the worlds hanging in the heart of the painting waiting for truth to be accepted? For truth to be spoken? For the truth of the horridness of humanity to be balanced by the truth of the kindness of humanity?
These are worlds hanging in balance, perhaps, the earths of imagination, of surrealism, the earths of pondering and around them are the ponderings: the daggers, the side-tracks, the flights of fancy, the palettes of colors, rainbows created from water and sunlight and ground from real earth - real minerals - real plants - that beautify the images. Is the whole unwhole? Needing what? Humanity? Pictures of the world?
With eyes wide open, we see the pain of humanity's inhumanness toward each other and toward other species.
With eyes wide open, we can choose another path.
New Verses to the tune of a Thomas Tallis Canon:
I sing of life upon this earth
I sing the gifts divine
I sing of hope that in us births
And through each person winds
I sing of the peace we could live in resolved despite all storms
I sing of the love unconquerable that breathes through all our forms.
With every hope so soon defiled
With lives in risk of death
Our awesome might is running wild
The question soon is left
Is there a retreat with dignity for warriors to partake
Resolving at last the enmity; whole worlds are now at stake.
I sing of hope's eternalness
Of life within the stars
I sing of love forever blest
But hard to find in wars
I sing of lives we spend among the blessed and bereft
I sing of the miracles that come if we choose kindliness.
* From The Way of the Wizard by Deepak Chopra.