An instruction from Spirit

“Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction.”

Rumi

This is a long story which I am challenging myself to tell as briefly as possible. I am not prone to being concise so we shall see.  In a nutshell my tale reduces down to this, twenty three years ago I received an instruction from Spirit. Clear as day I was told to paint. As noted in Weaving Seaweed I have always been creative, but. painting, p-a-i-n-t-i-n-g, that has been a whole other challenge. The instruction was however so clear I knew I had to honour it.

I’ve seen myself more as a maker of things.

A thread of creative constructing runs through my life, turning wool into felt, fabric into clothing and so on. I know I can do that. Painting however, that is fraught with dis-ease and discomfort and debilitating self criticism.

What happened all those years ago was this. I attended the Hoffman Process, an intense week long retreat where we did a lot of meditations and visualisations. During the first one we had to imagine ourselves in the future. Guess what I saw myself doing? Yup painting. I came out of that session saying, “well that can’t be right, I don’t paint.” From then on, in every visualisation all I saw were paintings. It started to freak me out.

“I do not paint. I can’t paint. This is some kind of weird mistake.”

When I expressed this discomfort to my teacher she suggested I study the Artist’s Way. Well…you know how when you are on the right path things fall into place? Guess what? Someone in Brighton, where I lived at the time, was running the Artist’s Way as a course. Within a few weeks there I was confronting my blocks, going on Artist’s Dates and scribbling out Morning Pages all while trying to parent 3 year old twins.

And, I started to paint.

The first things I painted were the abstract images from those visualisations. To my utter amazement a friend, who quite frankly was a landscape kinda guy, came round and he loved the first thing I ever did. The orange, yellow, red and gold swirling mass resonated with him so much I gave it to him.

Using time grabbed while my twins where at nursery I did my best to let the paintings come.  Since I had no idea what I was doing I booked myself on my first painting class.  One day during this time I discovered my daughter lavishly spreading paint around on my canvas. I looked at her work and then mine. Oh my God I was, and still can be, so bloody uptight about it all. She on the other hand was free and unfettered.

I need to channel my inner 3 year old.

I continued to paint off and on until another more productive period came during my recovery from CFS/ME. I was doing a lot of therapy at the time. While off exploring some inner landscape I started seeing images of things I had to paint, so I did.

Now as I write I am aware of something I have never seen before. Paintings came to me in altered states of reality, when I was off in other realms. Mmm, very interesting. I will pocket that.

Ok, enough words for now. It seems this tale is going to be longer than I thought. I still haven’t got to the seaweed talking bit. Next time hopefully.

Freedom

“The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”

Steven Pressfield