Those critiques in art school make more sense to me now.  A lot flows out of us unintentionally and we aren’t even aware of it. From our body language, facial expressions, and of course the words and images that we piece together and document. Our meaning can be very obvious to other people, and we can completely miss it. 

We can’t paint without saying something in the image. You can learn a lot about young children from their art.

I often draw and paint in a purposefully detached manner, and then later I feel almost like I can view it as an onlooker… a bystander. These abstract paintings are neither random nor contrived. They are satisfying and often enlightening for me. 

I feel like a child, unconcerned about precision, let alone perfection.  I break the rules about how I thought art supplies should be used together.

Dreams are another example of our mind piecing together what at first glance look like random bits of information. They’re not random at all. The story lines are complex and intertwined. They are poignant and tell a story better than my conscious mind ever could. 

A while back… a year, or years ago, I sent a friend request to someone I had been engaged to 40 years ago.  I let that line soak until I almost forgot about it.  When I got no response, I cancelled it.  I wasn’t trying to rekindle anything.  I was just curious about the paths of life.  I wanted to forgive everyone.  Not everyone needs forgiveness.  Maybe I wanted to ask for forgiveness.

I just woke from a dream where I had gotten a package in the mail in response to that friend request.  It was hundreds of handwritten pages on newsprint, interspersed with ephemera from my life in 1980 or 81.

I awoke in the darkness of my bedroom, pondering the dream.  There was a time I would have considered this a nightmare.  There is no reason to fear what lurks inside us.  I can own it now.  In the past I may have made choices I wouldn’t make now.  In the past, I thought differently about the facts of my life.  I was programmed for shame and fear.  Now I’m able to look at the artifacts with some objectivity.  With kindness.  With forgiveness.

She was better off without me.  Not because there was something wrong with either of us.  We were just incompatible.  This is not unusual.  Not scandalous. The parting of our ways may have seemed sad at the time, but the real tragedy would have been staying together. 

Even then, at 20 years old, I was trying to piece a family together.  During the decades that followed, I tried many approaches to creating the family I dreamed of.  I seem to have left a pile of debris in my wake, but that’s not accurate.  It’s not debris.  It’s nothing to be threatened by.  It seems more like the candy that’s still squashed on the pavement after the parade has gone by.  I want to look at each item.  I don’t need to cling to every page, every shard.  The details flow out onto the paper in brushstrokes or words, they appear in dreams.  This backlog of experiences is the museum of my life.