- Published on
"A Lazy Day is Really Hard Work" and "Doing Nothing is Something", mixed media on cradled wood, each 8 x 11 x .75. Ready to hang. Available here and at Artfinder.
Try to spend a day doing nothing; we call that a lazy day. Although for many of us who are used to running around from this to that, a lazy day is actually very hard work! It's not so easy to just be. If you can be happy, relaxed and smiling when you're not doing something, you're quite strong. Doing nothing brings about quality of being, which is very important. So doing nothing is actually something. Please write that down and display it in your home: Doing nothing is something.
- THICH NHAT HANH, Your True Home
That crafty universe dropped this passage in my lap just as I finished having a very lazy day. Or, I thought it was lazy. But doing nothing is doing something, so maybe I was not lazy after all?
Try to spend a day doing nothing; we call that a lazy day. Although for many of us who are used to running around from this to that, a lazy day is actually very hard work! It's not so easy to just be. If you can be happy, relaxed and smiling when you're not doing something, you're quite strong. Doing nothing brings about quality of being, which is very important. So doing nothing is actually something. Please write that down and display it in your home: Doing nothing is something.
- THICH NHAT HANH, Your True Home
That crafty universe dropped this passage in my lap just as I finished having a very lazy day. Or, I thought it was lazy. But doing nothing is doing something, so maybe I was not lazy after all?
A Lazy Day is Really Hard Work
Doing Nothing is Something
Doing nothing is necessary, productive work. It can even be hard work, if you're used to being very busy, or if you feel guilty when you're enjoying a box of bonbons and pajamas and Netflix.
I wonder what would happen if we felt guilty for NOT being lazy? Hmmmmm. That's going to require a bit of thinking while doing nothing else. But wait! Thinking is doing something so....oh my. Now I've twisted my thoughts into a knot.
About the art - acrylic over an underpainting of leftover paint. Gelli-plate printed collage materials and oil pastels on top. Finished with a background layer of acrylic mixed with gesso. Liberally sprinkled with love and good mojo.
Because your art and a delicious poem landed in my inbox on the same morning, I just have to share the following words from poet Henry Taylor.
Art and Life
In the Portland Museum of Art’s snack bar
one July morning, a young woman worked
at the board that lists the specials of the day.
From her little stepladder she leaned in
with various colored chalks, using both point
and edge, adjusting with her fingertips,
experimenting with size and color, print
and script, once or twice stepping down and back,
then homing in on what was to be solved.
The whole thing might have taken her ten minutes.
At last she moved a little farther back
to see how what she’d done had changed the room,
while we, who had the good luck to be there
at the beginning of her day, beheld
the change she couldn’t know that she had wrought
merely by how her red hair caught the light.
Love your spicy girls, now they are into something!