I can’t see my finished artwork before I start it, just like I can’t see my finished life before I live it.

I often have a pretty good idea what it will look like, but that is only if things go to plan. I can stick with a plan, and paint a forest scene or whatever is in my mind, but I can also change my mind along the way. I might say I’m going to walk to town, and then see an inviting trail along a creek, and change my direction.

One time, I was all set to go to college in Arkansas, and then one day I suddenly changed my mind and went to one in Michigan. I already had my dorm assignment, and some of my friends were going, but they went without me.

Plans change for a variety of reasons. Something compelling and unexpected might lure me. I get caught in the gravitational pull of something else.

Maybe I just change my mind because plan A wasn’t working out.

Most things can be undone.

I do a lot of things, and many of them are creative. That doing inspires me. If I grab hold of that moving paintbrush, the inspiration is just there. The images trickle down my arm and onto the paper or canvas. If there is not a picture in the queue, then any brushstroke can inspire the next one. Sometimes I ask a brushstroke to look like a walrus, sometimes I don’t ask it to look like anything but a brushstroke.

I put messages in my work. Sometimes the message is “this is a painting.”

I have many themes that recur in my art. I reiterate them, but each time, they come out differently. I change from one project to the next. No two sunsets, no two bonfires, snowflakes, roses or paintings are exactly alike.

The messages are sometimes clear, and sometimes cryptic. I’ve been staring at an abstract painting that hangs next to my bed, and I keep seeing more and more in it.

Seeing is a process that I can’t rush.

I fall asleep in one painting, and wake up in another, even though the colors and shapes have not changed.

I don’t remember wanting to be creative, or deciding to be an artist. I think your consciousness sort of grows as your brain develops. The lines are blurred, and to realize anything is to realize that it’s already happened, or started happening a while back.

I must have been very young when I first held a crayon, and touched it to some paper. I don’t remember. I must have liked it, because I kept doing it.

By the time I realized that I wanted to do it, I suppose, I was already doing it. I liked it better than I liked other things. More than math or spelling.

I think creative people get comfortable with art the way other kids got comfortable with numbers or labeling maps. People in all fields are creative, even if they are not all artists. Creative scientists discover new truths about the universe, or develop new medications or procedures.

Creative people pay attention.

People who are not creative kind of live on the surface, watching movies made by creative people, and following trends rather than being innovative. Maybe they look at the work of creative people and say to each other “imagine doing that.”

I’m not trying to be exclusive or judgmental. I’m not saying everyone should be artists. Everything I have experienced influences what I create. This includes training, but I don’t believe training is necessary in order to create art.

I believe we’re all creative in our own way. We’re enough as we are. We also have the ability to learn new skills, especially if there is a reward in it.

For me, the reward is in telling my story through words and pictures. I acknowledge and validate myself, and in the process, I gain new insight and forgiveness.

I used to think, and often said, that my parents didn’t like my friends.

I sort of get it now. I admired the kids who were different from me. The ones who did and said dramatic things. They swore and smoked. They didn’t inherit conservative religious views from their parents, or in some cases, they rejected them.

One of these friends ran away from home, and I was called into the principal’s office because I was one of her few friends, and I had recently been seen talking to her.

I went out with my parents and her parents to look for her. We found some of her belongings in a wooded area, but we didn’t find her. She had cut her long hair off. Sometime during the next week she was found, and ended up in a car with my mother in our driveway, where mom suggested she might need a good spanking, and she told my mother to go to hell.

Her dad had been a Boy Scout leader, and she was used to camping. I was a bit envious because our family never went camping.

Years later, I lived with that family for a while, and then I understood why she had run away.

The last time I remember seeing her father, I think I got out of his car at a stop sign. It’s all a blur, but I think we were helping someone move something in winter. I just knew I wanted to get away, and I did.

I thought of several of my friends and relatives as rebellious. Now I just think they were normal people who expressed themselves in ways I didn’t dare to, and I admired them for it.

I was impressed by what I thought of as shocking behavior. My mom probably knew this. I never wanted to get into trouble, but I wanted to be interesting.

A lot of what I heard in church, or read in the Bible didn’t make sense to me. Naturally I had a lot of doubts. But we believed we had all the right answers, so if I had doubts, I was supposed to just accept what I was told. I was supposed to have faith. When it came to anything outside of our accepted doctrine, we were supposed to study it carefully and then reject it… or simply reject it right from the start. The one exception was conservative evangelical fundamentalism. That, we were to accept without question, whether it made any sense or not… whether it was kind or not.

One day I asked my mom how we could know that the Bible was true, and that Jesus really was who he said he was. She told me that she just knew it in her heart. She said she knew it so strongly that she didn’t have any doubt. I don’t have that kind of faith. So I asked her about Muslim suicide bombers. They believe in their religion enough to die. Was her faith stronger than theirs?

I asked this question at a youth retreat during my senior year of high school, and all the other kids gasped. I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I struggled with doubt, and I wondered what was wrong with me that I couldn’t just believe what I was told.

Probably, my doubts came from it being all made up, just one of thousands of supernatural myths, the followers of each believing theirs is the right one.

I’m not trying to convince anyone to agree with me, but just to think for yourself.

Somebody recently asked me who I would be without kids. It’s an interesting question, because I tend to think of myself primarily as a parent. The nursing, painting, writing, photography, performing weddings and all the other things I do are in support of my family. I will never be without kids, even though my kids are now adults. I was changed forever when I became a parent.

At the same time, I was painting long before I had kids.

I don’t want to reinvent myself, but here is another example of this retrogenesis that I’ve been noticing since early summer. It’s the opposite of reinventing when you discover something from your past resurfacing.

I don’t want to reinvent myself, I want to embrace who I already am at my core.

As my kids get older (and I get older, too), I find myself returning to things from much earlier in my life.

If I return to drawing the way I did in Jr. High, I do it with the addition of everything I have learned and experienced in the decades between then and now.

If I return to my childhood bedroom, I see it through the layers of time that has passed since I lived there.

It’s the same place, but it is not the same. It is like visiting the ruins of Cair Paravel, and finding the knight from your old chess set.

I’ve dreamed of that place. I’ve strained to remember as many details as I could. Going back fifty years later, I found that I remembered it well, though the house and I have aged.

I went by Brabb Cemetery where Elisha and Mary were laid to rest almost 150 years ago. I imagine them returning to the farm and walking through the same rooms, as I did. What stories might they tell… how the house and the world have changed since their time.

When I was young, I didn’t think of history. Maybe that is because I didn’t have much history of my own. I was interested in the Brady Bunch, Wizzzers and playing with my friends. I never guessed that one day I would cherish those days. I would not have thought it would take me 50 years to loosen my grip… that I would cling so tightly for so long. I don’t need to. It is in the fiber of my being.

Maybe it is time to loosen my grip on a lot of things.

I think of people I have known. Friends I have lost touch with, or maybe connected with briefly via social media. We never had a falling out, but at some point one of us took an exit ramp and followed the highway in a different direction. Now we are strangers who remember a brief time together.

It can be fun to reminisce, but I don’t need to be reminded of how goofy… how crazy I was. I was compensating. I was insecure and hyperactive. I was unfocused. That’s why I acted that way. I was imaginative and sensitive. I’m sorry I was obnoxious.

The same person asked me what I’m going to do different now.

I still want to help people, but I can’t save the world. I still want to entertain, but I’m not happy-go-lucky. That’s how my mom described me in a questionnaire before I went off to summer camp in fourth or fifth grade. I’m not the loudest kid on the church bus anymore.

When I write or paint, I glean information from the electrical impulses that have entered my brain. Unless there was something installed before my life experiences, that is all I have to go on. I extrapolate meaning. I move the puzzle pieces around.

My brain doesn’t see. It resides in the darkness, enclosed in my skull. It receives electrical impulses from my eye, and usually believes what my eye tells it. It interprets what my ears strain to pick up, and for me, this is a somewhat less reliable source of information. The nerve endings in my skin help me deduce the physical nature of objects. My olfactory nerve and gustatory system give me clues through smell and taste. Based on these impulses, my brain builds an interpretation of the world around me.

I was recently told that my brain hallucinates my reality through this information.

When I paint, I select from the colors I find on the shelf in my studio. I mix the paints together, and I try many combinations of brushstrokes. The supplies are limited, yet the possible combinations are infinite.

I don’t have a favorite color. Every color is important both in its own right and also for its role in combining to make other colors and shades.

For a while, people thought yellow was my favorite color, and yes, I was obsessed with it. Still, it was not my favorite. For a while, it was my signature color. Here’s what happened:

I decided to buy a bike. For me, style is sometimes more important than function. I wanted something like the bike I had as a kid. Fat tires, single speed, coaster brakes, saddle seat, full fenders. The owner of the bike shop said he didn’t have anything like that, but I found one in his catalogue. The Atlas bike.

Oh, that’s more of an industrial bike.

He said those were heavy duty and usually used as rental bikes. Sounded perfect to me.

They only come in one color. Safety yellow.

I bought the bike, and had him add big baskets on the sides, and a chrome headlight. I felt like Pee Wee Herman. Then I got a matching yellow helmet and a yellow bell. That’s how my yellow phase began. I even bought a yellow car.

That bike was fun and stylish, but it was heavy, and I couldn’t ride it up the hill from town to my house.

In the early 1990’s, I went through my red chapter. That’s because I ran a coffee shop and art gallery out of a red caboose.

In the late 1980’s, I had my black and white period.

I don’t have a favorite color. I like magenta but I dislike mauve. I don’t like green for cars, and rarely wear green. I use it a lot when I paint trees.