There are a million shades of grace

I love to think about emotions in terms of colors. Sometimes we feel love and it’s red other times we feel love and it pale blue. I began to think about how everything we experience has color and that colors change through time. They change through how we change as well. One day I began to cut up some piece of artwork that I didn’t like. “Cut them up, let them go, and see what new things you can find”, I told myself. It was freeing to do that. To look at each piece simply for it’s color and not for how it fit into the whole image. As I cut I began to see connections of color, and then I began to hear words that would represent parts of myself, parts I am constantly struggling with. I found that the pieces fit in so many arrangements and they all seemed OK. There was a rhythm to it in a way, a rhythm that made it all work fine. This act of arranging and re arranging reminded me that sometimes we need to take the “remaining pieces” of ourselves, and find a new ways to make them fit. It’s the act of moving the pieces around where we discover a million shades of grace.

*I would recommend this exercise for anyone. Take a number of pieces of your old artwork, the ones you don’t care for. Chop them up into shapes and put it back to together in a new arrangement. See how you can redefine things. Where does it lead you? 

Creating

(To create what's in your minds eye is like chasing a dream. Let go of the vision and embrace what spills out onto the page)
I was listening to a great interview on NPR with the author Ann Patchet. She said something to this extent "I have an amazing book in my head but as soon go to to write it, I kill it". This idea really resonated with me. I began to consider, how do we get so attached to that vision we see? I realized that most of the time what comes out is NOT the vision we had but something else. I guess I know that "something" needs to come out, regardless of wether it's great or not. It's taking the chance, rolling the dice to see what it will be. This idea seems to apply to life too. We get so attached to the dream we have for our lives that we spend so much energy chasing the life we envision. What we really need to do is embrace what we are, all of it, everything that spills out into the world.