from a diary of going sane through painting and meditating

7/16
every single blade of grass and leaf is casting shadows on the space around and under itself. when you get stuck, especially when oil painting, it is effective to deepen the shadow, which will highlight those lights even more. what is the shadow below my heart highlighting?  the shadow seems to hurt my heart a little and make me have to care in spite of whether or not i feel in the mood for caring. but as long as i am stuck in this body it seems i must continue feeling these feelings, these changing cloud formations that gather and rain and then dissipate the pain of loving someone i can't help, and that is more often me than any one else.  in desperation i keep trying to let it all go, the desperation being the thing that both stops and starts me, keeps me trying to make something beautiful or at least interesting out of this tangle of love and grief and longing and beauty that keeps rearranging and adding on to itself and losing leaves from this long standing tree that can not flee the soil of my story.  but is it really a mess?  nature looks like a mess when i try to paint it, it is too big and complex and detailed to contain on a canvas.  i have to squint and settle for simple lines and hope the colors speak truth and i go between despair and not knowing and joy of mixing the right colors and seeing where they go.  seeing.  it is my practice of which i begin blind and at some point that comes sooner if i stay happy, i start to see and it is not awful or convoluted or infected.  it is just shape and color and right in front of my face.  why is it so hard to see.  why must i speak so many words to myself before i can quiet down enough to see.  why.
when i was meditating my heart was full of flowers. painting was happening and i was just watching and i was watching my person painting and i was looking and the paint was going onto the canvas and i was in colors and i was color.  and yet i only paint a few times a week instead of all of the time. i have an image in mind of a person who works and works and works at their craft and that is not me but it is the different type of person.  that person is plugged in all the time.  it's easy for that person to paint all of the time because that person knows how to paint and knows she knows how to paint and remembers how to paint.  not like me, i who get stuck and i who can not see the next direction.  or is it really so true .  well it sure helps to have another more experienced painter come by when i am stuck and point out what i could not see because i was stuck.  but maybe that teacher gets stuck too and maybe she sits and sits and looks and looks.  maybe she puts it on her dresser for a day or a week or a month  until she sees the thing that will unstuck it.  and surely she has other paintings she works on in the meantime.
i end up with three paintings and i get stuck on all of them.  and then i have a sickness.  a mess of sicknesses. in the middle of painting, (before the later stage, when i get on a roll) is so peculiar.  in that middle stage there are monsters in my head and they hate me so much.  they really can't stand me, and they make me clumsy as hell.  they drop my paintbrush into the long grass and trick me.  finally the lost paint brush turns out to have been in the paint thinner and not in the grass, as i thought it had been.  they make me think i am losing my mind.  and they mix up huge globs of paint that i have no right to, because paint is expensive.  and they make me paint my face when i don't mean to, the side of my nose, in pthalo blue, a blue so deep and gorgeous it stains, but it's not gorgeous on my nose.
they hate me.  and they loose my invisible glove goop i bought to protect my hands.  they spit into the paint on my canvas and make it take forever to dry and they sneeze orange blobs into places no orange belongs.  and they tell me this is a good idea.
This is why I don't paint day in and day out.  But really I think I’d rather do that than nothing.  And what is nothing, there is no such thing but it is something I dread and seem to spend a lot of time worrying about doing.  Nothing looks like sitting still.  It feels like a too full stomach and a lot of sitting and a lot of thinking.  Thinking about not thinking and not doing all the things I wish I could do.
Like going back to work as a therapist and doing hospice counseling and selling my condo and buying a house for me and David here and gardening.  Especially gardening which I have convinced myself that I don't know how to do, even though I spent decades in the commune doing it in the noon sun in July and it was so awful no wonder I believe I don't know how to do it.
The problem is I don't want to do these things enough to do them.  The problem has been sticks in the stream around my heart, tangled up in fallen leaves that got tired of casting shadows and turned to muck in the water.
When M. got sick I told him to just pick one thing and do it all the time.  I got him a guitar but he didn't use it.  A good bike.  He gave it away.  A car.  He drove it to NYC and left it there.  I ran out of gas along with that car and then I bought him acrylic paints.  And he painted a few abstract paintings that he said were the best paintings in the history of painting and then he locked them in the cabinet I got him and couldn't get them out for a very long time.  And now he says he has been painting.  And isn't it interesting we are maybe for a few minutes or a few hours a day saving our own lives with this stuff, this color, this terrible monstrous sadness and damning voices that hate ourselves because we are getting older and no richer or more loved.  ... Well, maybe more loved.