Disconnection with the earth - Mistakes ~ Wonders
In my haste to select some colors out of my disorganized paint box (disorganized due to my hasty packing in NYC and hasty unpacking in New Mexico), I didn’t really read the labels.
As I noticed how oddly the paint was mixing with water, I considered that the paints are old. Friends often dump their unused supplies on me, and I gladly take anything. Sure there’s crust at the end of the tube, but there’s something squishy inside. Old paints to me are like aged perfume - different, yes, but not exactly bad. Actually interesting.
But washing a brush in the bathroom, I noticed with frustration that the paint wasn’t washing out. Oil paints have a distinct smell to them, and I suppose my nose must be a bit blocked up because it was not until I came to terms with the stubborn black smudges and globs in the sink that it finally dawned on me I grabbed a whole bunch of oil paints without realizing it.
This ruled out the possibility of using any plant matter - I have not experimented with oil and organic matter yet, and doubt that it would be very successful as a quick drying time is essential to my process.
But sometimes mistakes turn into pleasant surprises.
One must wonder whether mistakes really exist after all.
There are moments we never forget in life. Sometimes we don’t know why we have not forgotten them like so many other forgotten moments; we were not intending to hold onto the details as they occurred and their significance is not clear. And yet they remain forever etched, surfacing at times that only accentuate our inability to understand why we are remembering, and why now.
Other memories contain clear lessons.
When I was young, my older sister and I did not get along. We were both artists, and I think the one thing we respected about one another was our respective talents. Grumbling once over a mistake I made in a sketch, my sister reprimanded my dissatisfaction in an eerily authoritative and wise voice, “True artists always know how to fix their mistakes.”
This was an eery statement because I know her to throw out failed works and start over. But I took this wisdom to heart every time an image seemed to falter thereafter. Those words acted as a pressure against my confidence, always bending me towards a greater will to succeed.
The onset of feeling failure is a stressful moment. Interestingly, this painting began as a loose imitation of a photo I had seen before, an image of a very stressed woman. Her anxiety was beautiful, and it reminded me of a quote:
Stress is basically disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.
—Natalie Goldberg
I believe that stress is most commonly experienced when things don’t go as we planned. Our inability to control the situation frustrates us, to the point at which we close ourselves off to the possibilities that are present.
Every seeming mistake is an opportunity. When we remain connected to the earth, to our breath - to innate purpose and being, we can begin to see these opportunities.
