Freed Beyond the Telling

Freed Beyond the Telling

"Freed Beyond the Telling" - mixed media on gallery wrapped canvas, 16 x 20.  Ready to hang.  Available here and at Artfinder.

Women are appearing in the studio.  Pushing out from the canvas, telling stories with their eyes.  I sit quietly with them, listening with something other than ears. 

"All we want is to be freed beyond the telling of what went wrong or how we failed.  All we want is to be freed into living the one song that keeps lifting through our hearts.  Sometimes I think that what we call coincidence, what we call obstacle, what we call the miracle or surprise ---are all notes of the one song bringing us alive, throwing us into each other."     MARK NEPO,  Things That Join the Sea and the Sky

The one song throwing us into each other...echos of Hafiz (a Sufi poet) "​God and I are like two fat people in a small boat - we just keep bumping into each other and laughing" (my favorite poem of all time).

Coincidence, obstacle, miracle, surprise as musical notes of the one song.  These things that thread us together and bring us alive.  There have been some obstacles - oh yes.  But the coincidences (serendipity, synchronicity, magic) have lead to some surprise miracles that lift me into the one song and set my heart soaring.

In this painting, the layers are built and then heavily washed again and again and again.  Each washing leaving a little of the layer, but also moving some of that paint in an uncontrolled manner.  The telling of our stories, even the "what went wrong or how we failed" washes away some of the hurt but leaves a little shadow of what was, blurring into other stories until, one day, we are freed beyond the telling into living the one song.