In the Paint

When we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey.—Wendell Berry

I spent the last few weeks working over an essay about a recent encounter with my unconscious. I recalled Carl Jung describing similar encounters as a “deluge.” That word stayed with me. I worked on this damn essay, but the material was not done working me over yet. So I circled and circled the thing, pages spinning out through corridors and into blind alleys. It swelled. I deleted. It swelled again, until it collapsed. I could not land the plane.

When I gave it up at last—I had to—something unfastened in me. And I sat down to paint.

Since I became an empty nester last fall, I’ve been painting a lot. But it’s been sludgy or parched by turns, and there’s been little to show for the effort. There’s been an unmaking at work in me this last year. Still, I’ve taken up the brush, like any devotee. I’ve pushed the paint around. I’ve attempted to trust the desert, and the strange, new sense of unfamiliarity—the worry even—that I may not be able to recognize myself in this place anymore. Tight, self-conscious work filled my sketchbook and the recycle bin. I tried again. Had I ever known what I wanted to paint? Had images ever come to me unbidden? Had songs ever woken me in the middle of the night? Had lyrics ever announced themselves through the sound of wild water, or my own glad tears? Where was that old feeling that was once as familiar to me as my morning tea ritual, as a book open in my lap at bedtime? Where was my own clock-bending urgency, the romance, the fecund earthiness of making something?

Well, here. Here was something coming up from the ground, down from the heavens, and all the more mysterious for its long absence. It is not jet-fueled, nor ecstatic in the old fashion. But steady. Insistent. A pace of disclosure and an intensity befitting someone on the cusp of 55 earth years. It’s the branding of the weld, the path between town and the wilderness, the place where the worlds touch. Or this is how it feels to me; dangerous to parts of me that still cling to the side of the pool. It’s the tension of opposing forces—that which I’m aware of about myself, and that which is still unknown to me. There is still so much unknown to me.

I’m grateful for this moment and this wind at my back, and it’s my offering today. To you, Dear Friends, and back towards the source from which it arose. May we all begin to make our version of dangerous art for this moment.