Two small Inner Summits, erupting. 8×8″
It’s all I’ve got made in the studio from the past month, which is the way it goes sometimes. Lest you think my little contemplative art projects are meant to reflect some kind of calm inner spaciousness. Actually as depths are explored and accessed, energies light and dark (especially dark) are unearthed.
It’s fitting and a gift that I am headed out today, back to the Grunewald Guild for a week of workshopping these Inner Landscapes with folks. I am coming off three days helping facilitate a three day online conference for the day job, which went swimmingly, but requires a patience and calm that I learned a long time ago how to externally project. To perform for others as needed, cultivated over years of working in IT and dealing with stressed out people who couldn’t make their computers work and needed a problem-solver/scapegoat. But the internal stress of all that never moved, it just built up and accumulated over the years.
I found myself last evening post-conference with a very agitated mind looking for things to do – check email, notifications, chats, calendars, mute/unmute buttons – because I’d been so wired to do so. My busy mind would not be still. I walked Green Lake, which helped a little. I ate a pizza, but I was still hungry. I dreamt I was being chased by suited goons and needed to repeatedly change costumes and wigs as a master of disguise, to avoid being identified – and underlying the dream a deep feeling that I did not want anyone knowing who I really was.
I have been trying to figure out forever how to develop “thicker skin” and not be so sensitive about things – when things don’t go my way, when the world doesn’t align itself the way I want, or small things like the asshole on the airplane the other week or the drivers who don’t stop for a body trying to use the crosswalk. I get AFFECTED. Angry, frustrated, hurt, longing for things to be different. It churns in my gut and in my throat and it does not feel good. Feels kinda shitty!
What I know now is that thick skin thing ain’t happening for me. Best I can do is feel what I feel and find ways to move those feelings through – walking has previously helped me but lately it’s not enough. I’ve added yoga and a punching bag to my routines. And these paintings. Allowing myself to name and feel and drip paint and play with color and stretch and sweat and punch until the yuck energy of the feeling has moved through, blockages released, and something resembling a state of okayness returns.
Anyway, art! Glad I have it. I hope it helps you find ways to move your own stress and feelings and emotions to a place of okayness, too.