When Inspiration Strikes

Beauty is Everywhere

When I am working on a project or trying to learn something or just plain twitchy and nervous I have to move.  I need to physically move my body to energize and reengage my mind.  I think more clearly when I am moving.  When studying in college I used to march around my room, like Harold Hill, swinging a stick while singing the seventy sixth billionth genius and species of whichever taxonomic phylum I was trying to memorize that day. I thought this was just a weird character trait of mine but apparently I am a kinetic learner, according to people who know things and measure such things.

Conversely, moving also quiets my mind.  Yesterday I found myself moving around the yard, tidying, pulling weeds, and cleaning the pond.  I HATE pulling weeds mostly because I don’t like bugs and the effort always takes so long.  I didn’t plan to do yard work.  It happened sort of spontaneously.   I had an overwhelming urge to take control over something.  Angrily, I stabbed at those tenacious thistles. But eventually as I allowed my body to sink into the rhythms of digging and pulling, I found a quietude that was soothing.  And once the twitchiness had ebbed a bit, my mind opened to the palette around me.  Inspiration struck.

Texture, contrast, pattern, mood, patina, symmetry, color, movement - all things that I respond to viscerally. Everywhere I turned yesterday I found these in nature.  And each one was more beautiful and moving than the last.  Simple things that awakened my soul.  From beyond the pale of worry and indecision, I found some clarity of purpose.

God’s not so subtle reminder that I need to pull out my paints again.  When uncertainty strikes and the cacophony in my brain becomes too much, I find solace in painting.  And I forget that, ALL THE TIME.  My left sidedness often drowns out the right with its pragmatic Darwinism.  But every now and then in the battle over primacy and survival, the right side exercises her fittest-ness by opening my soul to a Maslow-like sanity-depending basic need to create beauty from beauty.

Most will notice the flower, I notice the colors on the leaves and the reflections of light.
Just like a Vermeer.

And that is just what I plan to do.  Paint something.

All photos by mrs. V

kisses, mrs. V