Go Big or Go Bust: Day 216 (on panic, pain, and Stephen Colbert's life raft of acceptance)

I'm fortunate to have never had to battle depression.  In fact, I've hardly ever been depressed.  But today it's been in a downhill slide since before hauling myself out of bed.  I'd like to think this mood was caused by the second half of that hummus sandwich on the way home from the rodeo --or the barely five hours of sleep.  So I fought it off but it came back.  Again.  And again and again. 

I was starting to fear that the underlying panic (that I'm blowing it, that I'm blowing everything) has solidified into the new me.  

Here I thought it was good to have hopes and dreams (especially supported by astrological forecasts) that the whole 'vision board' thing was a healthy discipline.  Too bad, with my willfulness, it all turns into torture. 

So, not liking pain, I've been scouring for help.  "Plans but no expectations" says John M. Carroll, the (biblical era-type) healer who works with visualization and has helped me and thousands of others with conditions and/or diseases which sometimes (apparently) spring from inner turmoil.  "Forgiveness, no judgment or feeling slighted".  I'm sure he's right, but today I'm not hearing it.

Luckily, Jessica Arinella sent me a cover story on Stephen Colbert which is saving my life.  In the last third of the article, Colbert talks about suffering, about loving your failures and about the importance of accepting them.  "Acceptance is not defeat.  Acceptance is just awareness."  Whattt. 

Many years ago, I had a mentor in a successful artist.  He used to talk about the precious state of feeling completely defeated, that in that moment, your skin is "stretching".  I would think but not dare to say, "Easy for you to say, you with your museum retrospectives and your big career." 

Today his words came back to me with force after reading Colbert's words.  Combined with my late mentor's image of the stretching skin, an action-step came clear: I relaxed into the horrible feeling of my skin 'stretching' and, in an instant, the panic and the pain lifted.  Poof.  GONE.  It was just like the shift of hunching my shoulders and tensing every muscle to not feel a blast of arctic wind vs. relaxing and experiencing the cold as just another feeling.  Once the resistance is removed, it's a state without a positive or a negative charge, like a color. 

Go Big or Go Bust: Day 199 (musing about the emotional life of birds while I paint the barn)

I was painting the barn this morning and thinking about last night.  We'd been at a friend's house for dinner and I was sitting next to a very successful sculptor.  She mentioned that she was having a hard time with small pieces, that big pieces are easier for her.  (And when she says 'big' she means 'huge'.)  And then she went on, that when she finishes the piece she's working on, she's going to go back to drawing.  The impression I got was that she was going to spend weeks, maybe months, drawing.

Her humility and her acceptance of the trouble she was having surprised me as did her solution to go back to square one.  This is a woman who has shown in the best galleries and been famous for decades.  And that she would talk so frankly about her difficulties moved me, especially because we'd only met one other time.

But aside from being inspired by her openness and her humility, her solution (to go back to drawing) made me jealous.  It's such a simple solution!  Everybody knows that drawing is the basis of visual art.  That's how I got started on the path to becoming an artist and that's what I did at the Beaux-Arts for years, learning to 'see'.  But never having gone to film school, I don't even know what would be the equivalent for a filmmaker.  And BOOM, the answer came flying at me: it would be listening. 

The next thing I heard was the birds above me, a combination of crows and pigeons.  And very quickly, more was revealed: there was a whiner in the group.  Most of the birds were going about their business, talking in a chipper or businesslike way while they got their worm breakfasts ... all except for this one bird.  He sounded like he was feeling very sorry for himself, the bird equivalent of moaning.  And he kept repeating his miserable moan, over ... and over.  And over.  All I could think of was his poor mother who must be embarrassed by his behavior but powerless to control or hide it.  Even if you sent a bird to his room-equivalent, everybody would still have to listen to him. 

And then it hit me that it's likely that birds (and most animals) live in a state of acceptance, that they probably don't even label this bird 'A Whiner'.  It's hard to imagine that they don't recognize that he's got issues, but it seems more likely that they're just "There he goes again."

As this seems to be coming at me from every angle, I'm going to take it as my homework for the day - work on *acceptance*.