{"id":5133,"date":"2017-05-24T14:45:39","date_gmt":"2017-05-24T21:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeinfullcolor.com\/?p=5133"},"modified":"2017-05-24T15:09:29","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T22:09:29","slug":"may-24-2017-whispers-become-passions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeinfullcolor.com\/dev\/life-stories\/may-24-2017-whispers-become-passions\/","title":{"rendered":"May 24, 2017 – When whispers become passions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Getting there with my parrot tulip painting – and contemplating what’s next.”<\/p><\/div>\n

There is this idea in our culture that what we should do is find our passion.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, we hear that this passion is like a switch \u2013 you come upon a way to channel your energies and boom:\u00a0 You fall in love and are lit a-fire with the burning need to do this thing – at all costs.\u00a0 It does sometimes happen this way; I had an airline pilot, a captain on 747\u2019s, take a color class once.\u00a0 She said that the first time she took a lesson in a small plane, she was hooked.\u00a0 She sold everything she could to take lessons and made becoming a pilot her whole life.\u00a0 My sense, though, is that this is rather rare – mostly it\u2019s not how it goes. Much more often, finding what we would re-arrange our lives for isn\u2019t quite as immediate or unequivocal.\u00a0 How is it, then that we who aren\u2019t \u201cstruck by lightning\u201d can end up living our passion?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m asked quite often by those who have just met me how long I\u2019ve been painting.\u00a0 The answer I give them is that it\u2019s been many years since I started, but if my painting life were a mathematical curve, it would be exponential \u2013 relatively flat for a while, and then in a short time it shot up.\u00a0 Day one was a Saturday in June of 1992 \u2013 25 years ago next month.\u00a0 My mom and I thought it would be fun to take a one-day, adult-ed class:\u00a0 Painting Flowers in Watercolor.\u00a0 My first painting was a somewhat awkward blue-violet Dutch iris on a quarter sheet (11\u201dx5\u201d) with a plain white background.\u00a0 I found the drawing frustrating, but using color was fun – yet still no flaring passion had yet been sparked.<\/p>\n

I went home and over the next few weeks painted three more quarter-sheet paintings of tulips, sweet peas and a big, pale pink camellia.\u00a0 But after that, because my life at the time didn\u2019t support my being freely creative, my energy and impetus to paint petered out.\u00a0 Looking through my stack of early art, there\u2019s evidence that I did paint a bit in the years that followed, but only sporadically – usually on vacation.\u00a0 More farting around than passionate!<\/p>\n

About the turn of the century, when my Joseph and I had settled in to doing life together, I picked my watercolors back up again with a bit more enthusiasm.\u00a0 But painting didn\u2019t really grab ahold of me until two major circumstances impacted me \u2013 one internal, the other external.\u00a0 In 2004 came the unthinkable realization that I wasn\u2019t going to have any children in this life.\u00a0 This enormous disappointment left a chasm in my soul that sent me looking for something to put my energies into – something more worth spending my life on than working in the corporate world.\u00a0 The external force came in 2007 when I started showing my work \u2013 having an audience put a real fire under me to finish my paintings.<\/p>\n

Ten more years down the road and I have come to know this life and these paintings as a direct outcome of how my life unfolded.\u00a0 I love to paint, I love working with color, I love supporting others in their painting process.\u00a0 Just recently I\u2019ve started to notice something else – a deepening sense of appreciation for my paintings.\u00a0 I was in conversation with a gallery owner from out of state about representing me and my work.\u00a0 Looking at my website she expressed interest in my most recent paintings.\u00a0 The idea of crating and shipping these paintings I\u2019ve just<\/em> finished – the ones for which I still can feel the struggle of making them \u2013 brought up a clear \u201cno\u201d from somewhere inside.\u00a0 I want to have them close by – to be able to show them myself for a while first.<\/p>\n

In one of my recent posts on the Beatitudes for Artists, I said that if there is one thing to pray for in becoming an artist it is this:\u00a0 an irrepressible desire<\/em> to make it.\u00a0 I quoted Renoir as having said that for him the urge to paint was as persistent as the urge to pee.\u00a0 When I first read this in the margin of one of Julia Cameron\u2019s books, I wanted to paint that<\/em> badly.\u00a0 (It\u2019s interesting, isn\u2019t it, how I had a desire to have the desire<\/em>?)\u00a0 So how and where do we get<\/em> this desire?\u00a0 Initially it comes from the mysterious place that is the source of everything that makes us us<\/em>.\u00a0 It\u2019s this place that whispers \u201cwatercolor\u201d or \u201cpoetry\u201d or \u201cthe piano\u201d or whatever it is we hear.<\/p>\n

Then what?\u00a0 In my experience, it happens more like my exponential curve \u2013 we try it once, have a positive experience and then our desire grows a bit if we find it enjoyable and have had some level of success at it.\u00a0 This then makes us want to attempt to do that again \u2013 and\/or to try something else.\u00a0 For some of us, at some point, painting – or whatever is our art – becomes what we do and who we are<\/em>.\u00a0 We get to the point where we can\u2019t imagine being without<\/em> something to paint.\u00a0 Before the one we are working on is done, we are already considering what we\u2019ll paint next.\u00a0 We can even feel a bit of panic if an idea isn\u2019t readily arising.<\/p>\n

There are other factors that come into play.\u00a0 Working a full time job, moving house and home, and serious Illness \u2013 ours or a family member\u2019s – are often what use up our energies and keep us from creating.\u00a0 But \u2013 as in my experience \u2013 loss can actually have a catalyzing effect.\u00a0 After the acute grief has passed, loss can re-orient us; it makes a space in us that pulls away our resistance to create.\u00a0 Looking at it, these circumstances are often out of our control, though.\u00a0 We can\u2019t really avoid life\u2019s big obligations and we never go about seeking life-changing loss.<\/p>\n

Lately I\u2019ve been questioning the whole idea (that is so very American) – that we can do anything<\/em> we want to.\u00a0 That, with enough hard work and commitment, whatever we set our sights on is a real possibility. This is a very attractive idea \u2013 one that calls to people from all over the globe – and<\/em> there are many examples of famous lives that prove it to be true.\u00a0 But I wonder just how universal it is.\u00a0 It takes a huge amount of desire\/energy to overcome any circumstance and to sustain the commitment over time – in order to change our lives in a big way.\u00a0 I wonder just how many of us can self-generate the kind of will that can keep up the energy necessary.\u00a0 And then there are those of us whose lives are shaped by responding to what comes our way, rather than from a fire that arises from within us \u2013 a feminine rather than a masculine orientation.<\/p>\n

I wanted to need<\/em> to paint like Renoir did, but I didn\u2019t actually rearrange my life<\/em> to paint until circumstances arose that both stripped away my inner resistance and<\/em> gave me a reason to.\u00a0 The way I know myself to be, the way I am wired, I can\u2019t imagine it having gone any differently.\u00a0 So what does this mean?\u00a0 Should we just be fatalistic about our desires and our creative lives?\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 But there is another piece.\u00a0 The thread that has woven through my life in all of this has been to become more and more awake and present to my inner and outer life.\u00a0 I first learned – and since have made it a practice – to pay attention<\/em> \u2013 to my desires, to my pain, to what is going on in me and around me – so I can hear the messages that life has for me \u2013 so, then my responses can become more conscious and intentional.<\/p>\n

I once read Victoria Moran advise to \u201clive the chapter we are in\u201d \u2013 as opposed to a chapter yet to come. If we are caring for someone we love, or are having to work very hard in some other way, we are pulled away from our creative work, then this<\/em> is the chapter we are living.\u00a0 Not being able to pour ourselves into making art is normal.\u00a0 I\u2019m finding myself, just as I was last week, ending with the question that I started with still lacking a pat answer.\u00a0 Passion, where it comes from – and how it sometimes grows and sometimes doesn\u2019t – is still pretty much a mystery to me.\u00a0 I don\u2019t question that we hear these whispers, though.\u00a0 What we can do is honor the whispers, offer them our appreciation and hold them for safe keeping in our souls, knowing we will act upon them when life turns the page to the chapter that is theirs.<\/p>\n

With my love,<\/p>\n

Cara<\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is this idea in our culture that what we should do is find our passion.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, we hear that this passion is like a switch \u2013 you come upon a way to channel your energies and boom:\u00a0 You fall in love and are lit a-fire with the burning need to do this thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMay 24, 2017 - 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