Last week I occupied myself with three small paintings. Two were disasters, requiring immediate Gesso interventions. One was worth keeping, the first one.
Looking at it, though, I can see the proportions aren’t right: too much container compared to the tulips.
Well, neither are the proportions right in my life – they haven’t right been for a year!
A Year Ago
On March 5 2020, three cases of COVID appeared in Montgomery County. Only the day before I jotted down in my journal: “Fears over viral pandemic.”
Did I even know what “Viral Pandemic” meant?
Last year I couldn’t have imagined over 2.57 million souls lost to a pandemic, and 521,000+ in the US . . . What’s more, reaching herd immunity won’t mean returning to the normalcy I keep wondering when we will get back to. (Dallas Morning News 03.06.21)
Meanwhile too many leaders don’t know where they are seeking to lead us.
Color me blue . . .
There is not enough Gesso in the world to cover up the mistakes all kinds of leaders have made that led us to the undreamed of reality that is today.
“I wish people were not more skeptical of God, but of other humans.” (Employment lawyer Ed Sullivan, Fallout from the Ravi Zacahrias Abuse Begins)
But in the meantime, on my sun porch, Gesso made it possible to redeem two of the three small paintings. Somehow tossing the canvases didn’t seem right.
Color me . . . determined.
It was a “do what you can with what you got” opportunity.Anyway, repainting gessoed canvases is more fun than hunt dust bunnies , or sort through old photos.
So, I chose colors and flowers and took another run at repurposing the failures.
Thinking about daffodils and tulips, I listened to Home by Marilyn Robinson. She is quite adept at portraying the struggles folks have with religion, faith, and the God of the Bible. Her characters help me see the value of forgiving failures, real and imagined:
One of the characters said:
“There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding. … If you forgive, [the pastor and father] would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.”― Marilynne Robinson in HOME
The posture of Grace, however, . . . making sense of how crazy what normal is now . . . feels like extreme Yoga.
Everything today is a stretch, right?*
Just saying.
Consequently, I am breathing deeply this week, looking forward to connecting with my first COVID shot, and camping on Psalm 131.
Here are the rescued – three small paintings on the reclaimed canvases.
Reimagining
My Imagined Bluebird with Coffee
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