I feel like a long-time friend once described- tumbled around like "I've just come out of the dryer." My art-making has been at a standstill as I've been overwhelmed with trying to sort out my mom's health and financial needs. She became abruptly confused and delusional in mid-May, and has not come back. Her need for constant supervision and care means an end to chapters in her life where she had once found meaning, and struggles for family to put new frameworks in place for her care and stability moving forward.
In the whirlwind of what must go- her art collection, her independence, her house, her recent memories- I reflect on what remains, and glimmers of new unexpected places where love and joy re-seed. She is charismatic and warm, as always. She loves art and music, and hearing about her grandchildren. She believes that she is once again running her art gallery or teaching school. She likes coconut cake quite a bit! My mom wants to go home, yet doesn't quite know where that might be... seems to fluctuate day-to-day, an amalgam of many places where she once lived and called home. Now I am struck with tenderness of both joy and sadness, in distilling values of what really counts in this life down to the immutable elements, what I see is Love and Joy and Peace. May my mom find this kind of home.
I think that I will paint these feelings and reflections, letting the canvas be whatever it needs to be. Maybe not something that ends up in a frame, or on a wall, but is nevertheless important. I thank my mom, along with many others, for affirming my calling as an artist. In her last house I found a book of my artwork in which I had inscribed "For my mom, with thanks for your appreciation, valuation, and affirmation of aesthetics." I also found paintings which she herself had done as a child, and one by my grand-father, and these I keep as deeply valuable in that inward way.
In these experiences, as losses pare away, the tender Joy which shines forth for me is the authenticity and importance of my calling as an artist. Something stirs more powerfully, more freely inside me to create, to do my purpose. I am grateful today to walk on, into my studio, warm up with gestural flashes, and develop works-in progress. I'm in the midst of completing a series of paintings of area streams which will be in a joint exhibit this fall, and to do this work, I myself need to be in the Current. I feel closer to this than ever. How Joyful, Loving, and Peaceful!
