Visual Journey Week 12: Reclaiming Our Wild...

While Swimming in Peanut Butter Soup

Thoughts this week on remembering, honoring our truth, and finding our own deep peace.

I have been journeying through reclaiming a wild that is relentlessly finding me, no matter how hard I resist it. To resist, to push, to strive when all I really want is to lay on the warm, brown, earth and stare at the blue sky; motionless.

A passing cloud to watch.

Listen: The wind rustles in long grasses.

Peaceful, stillness.

Returning to what was means that I’m letting go of past stories that have in many way defined my life or limited me. Letting go of relationships that no longer provide nourishment and embracing what is coming. Releasing to make way for remembering. A lost, dusty treasure chest full of forgotten bits, buried deep under my still body, is resurfacing. It’s taking its time arriving and I’m patiently waiting (or at least trying to, even when I’m swimming in peanut butter soup) and watching as butterflies, flowers, bees and everything else finds me.

Inspired this week by Allesha Hradoway. Her heartfelt and authentic presence in the world is courageous.

Create some space, it began. Stop looking to everyone else for answers in your own life. You won’t find them there. Move inward. Let what’s inside come out.

Take one small step by one small step into the unknown, it implored. You may need to recalibrate, but keep going. If you don’t see anyone ahead of you, that doesn’t mean you’re going the wrong way.

Trust yourself, it said gently. You have what you need to start this journey, and the wisdom to discover the rest along the way. You can’t bypass the hard parts, but you can choose to show up anyway.

Reflection Series: What's Alive Inside You? The longing to be visible, to be witnessed, to be held.

Equally inspired by Shinjini, author of Studio Diaries. This week she reflects on her Three Tiny Things Project.

“…But the Three Tiny Things Project turned into a practice that helps me to not just look outwards, at my sweet little life, but also to look inwards, at my big, stormy feelings. Along with the observations on the birds and squirrels that visit the tree outside my window; the stray cat that comes to the door, demanding to be fed; the feeling of paint covering my fingers; I’m also noticing my exhaustion, all the ways in which I still am beholden to toxic productivity, and how my journal holds all of my worries.”

Art at the speed of life. On the cumulative power of creating in tiny chunks of time plus an update on my 100 day project

Working on creating from that deep, intuitive place inside of me. A vulnerable and authentic place. Creating art that I want and need to make. Not the art that makes all the money or gets me to the next big thing…just my art, full of textures, colors, mistakes, marks, wanderings, pathways and new stories unfolding.

In gratitude,

Char XXX