I didn’t sleep too well last night, though Stephen Colbert tried his best to help. I imagine you didn’t either.
I huddled with the flannel sheets and quilts until I finally slept. That’s when I knew.
No, not the election results. What my Work-in-Progress painting wanted!
You see, I’m not totally in Georgia at the moment. I’m also, virtually, at an Intentional Creativity® event in California, with paint sisters from around the world. The paintings we’re making began with working titles along the lines of Legend… the Mystic.
This retreat, like so many good things, is kind of hard to explain. There’s meditation and teaching and carousing and drumming and, well, painting going on. The picture, above, all coded with things that matter to me, is what mine looked like when I gave up on election returns and went to bed.
But, before I say more… a snippet from my email, which made me feel better enough to engage with my literal canvas again here in Georgia:
Prayer for the Morning
~ Audette Fulbright Fulson
Did you rise this morning,
broken and hung over
with weariness and pain
and rage tattered from waving too long in a brutal wind?
Get up, child.
Pull your bones upright
gather your skin and muscle into a patch of sun.
Draw breath deep into your lungs;
you will need it
for another day calls to you.
I know you ache.
I know you wish the work were done
and you
with everyone you have ever loved
were on a distant shore
safe, and unafraid.
But remember this,
tired as you are:
you are not alone.
Here
and here
and here also
there are others weeping
and rising
and gathering their courage.
You belong to them
and they to you
and together,
we will break through
and bend the arc of justice
all the way down
into our lives.
Amen. Amen. Selah.
And now, back to California.
This is what the eventual she looks like now:
First, let’s be clear… there is symbolic meaning in the the color change but it has nothing to do with political parties.
Well okay, maybe just a little. You see, as soon as this step is dry, there will be another step and things will get quite different. For now, though, what I can tell you is that, while my Muse was whispering directions in my ear, she also suggested a new working title for the painting:
Beware of Nasty Ladies in Thin Places!
Stay tuned…
ps… Many thanks to Dr. Leeann VanDyk, President, Columbia Theological Seminary and my dear paint sister & friend, Wendy Dewberry, for sharing!
pps… For more about the notion of thin places, click here!
ppps… Thanks be to Bill who’s off shipping Etsy sales to their new forever homes!