Starting anew
We humans like to slice time into manageable segments so we can measure our lives, frame them in the context of our dreams, and look back, later, to see how well they flourished.
It’s a beautiful way to assign meaning to our lives, and to participate in the way they unfold.
If we could enter each new year with an empty canvas, it would be great. But we bring everything that came before into the new.
It’s ok, though.
Our previous experiences are necessary to what we want to create.
Engaging with the canvas
Like the painter whose canvas needs just the right color, their palette knife enters a dance of mixing, pushing, caressing and blending the existing globs of color, until the right one appears. It doesn’t show up out of nothing; it is birthed.
So it is with our life's canvas. It is never empty, but it holds all the right elements for birthing something new.
Learning to live with the creative spirit of the artist gives us unlimited ways to make the canvas of our lives exactly as we want it to be. Out of everything that already is.
Some people's canvases are made of paint. Others contain words, or music, or movement. The creative possibilities are endless. Let the one that speaks to you teach you how to live as a co-creator of your life.
Keeping the spark alive
You are human. You came from the spark of the ultimate act of creativity. Pay it forward by engaging with a form of expression that helps you keep that spark going.
For those who love painting with words, here’s a program that provides the inspiration to bring all that came before into the new chapter of life we entered on January 1. It is nothing more than a series of prompts to explore who you are, over and over again, in ways you’ve never thought of.
Haiku is simple, and yet it can never be mastered. It teaches you to say exactly what’s on your mind in 3 lines and 17 syllables.
Who cares, you might be asking?
Only the most precious parts of you, I would answer.
And if none of them make it onto your canvas, well, that would not only be your loss, it would be ours, too.