Room for All of it

Room for All of it  sharpie drawing

This is another piece of art that will win no awards, but this 29 days of sharing was never about pretending to be the best or to make even 'passable' art, but to speak more to the powerful process of creating, connecting with my art, and sharing it.

It was last November, and I was inspired to draw a crown with flames coming out of it, placed over a big heart. I can't quite remember why, but it felt to be a powerful symbol of the moment that was beckoning to be on the page.

The interesting process around this drawing was how much I actually struggled with it. I couldn't get the crown straight, but kept going trying to salvage it. I wanted to do some reflections on the crown--couldn't make that work. The rainbow lines around the heart gave me big trouble.

It felt as if every aspect of this was just fighting me to remain imperfect, no matter how I tried to fix it.The heart was growing too big to look like a heart anymore and I was running out of page.  But I kept at it, because I had committed to finishing it. I was trying with all of my might to practice what I preach to my girls, which is stay with their art and to see where it goes, even though I was just a moment away from throwing it out and starting over the entire time.

The most intense part was the inside of the heart. I drew a nature scene with mountains and flowers, and that didn't work at all, so, I added a big lake, which really didn't work, and on and on, until it got so muddled up, that I surrendered and colored the heart scenery over completely in black sharpie. The entire time I was feeling very disappointed that the drawing was such a 'fail', as it had looked so nice in my head.

So, I had this uneven crown, flames that didn't quite look like flames, and a very imperfect rainbow frame around a BLOATED GIANT BLACK HEART.

It really is such a curious thing that it didn't end up in the garbage at this point.

However, one last desperate attempt had me running for colored pencils, and suddenly, the black heart became night sky, and I literally felt the vastness of night sky fill the emptiness of this heart-void, and experienced the relief and release physically in my own body, as if bounds in my own heart were released. It felt like the most gorgeous heart opening. I felt fresh possibility and meaning, beyond ideas of perfection right there within me.

I felt a newness--that I had done nothing wrong by struggling with this drawing, but perhaps everything right, and how perhaps the greater intelligence had planned to lead me to greater definitions of beauty my soul sought.

And suddenly there was the thought, Room for all of it. I knew I had to write this across the heart.

Instantly, this became one of my favorite pieces. It was so imperfectly perfect, because perfection had lost out, and because I stayed with it, and remained open to a deeper experience of it, a vastness emerged. In the heart of it there was room for all of it, and something fresh calling out from a space beyond good and polished--a language wishing to be spoken and understood that could only be communicated by embracing the imperfect, the wild and the unpredictable, and giving it space--looking at it with eyes half-shut, to see a blurred, but bigger perspective, and then to find new focus within this much bigger perception.

My black charred sharpie heart, destined to be the open heart--to hold the vastness of a boundless universe, where it seemed eternal embers waited to birth the stars.

On the back of the drawing, I found I'd written this:

Higher Love. Mature love and kindness. Trust that everything is as it should be and working itself out with great intelligence. Just keep being love. Aware love, not fix it or save them love, just a soft place to land.

Sing, dance, and work in images of the soul through art, writing, collage. Grow things, even it if takes time, attention and care. It is what you  most wish, to be free from a conditional, finite, rendering of reality. The stone is breaking off to reveal a golden heart.

Thanks for reading:).