Hitched to Everything

Hitched to Everything

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"Hitched to Everything"
oil on copper panel
12 x 12 x .25 inches
This item is unframed. (click on the image to purchase)

...when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe - JOHN MUIR

When we set down our (heavy, well-constructed) armor, drop our (towering, fortified, impenetrable) walls, leave our (perfected, fine-tuned)  hyper-vigilance on the curb, something happens.  We feel everything.

We feel the sensation of the wind on our skin, the sun on our faces, the sand in our shoes.  We feel the weight of a lifetime of learning the hard way, disappointment, disillusion and longing.  We feel the preciousness of the beings in our inner circles - the fleetingness of our time together, the moments we have remaining.  We feel the aging of our bodies, the softening of our minds, the finiteness of our energy.  

And the media we absorb - we feel how it impacts our moods, our thoughts, our sense of safety and wellbeing, our very dreams.

And in that moment of emotional bombardment, in the wave of feeling and even potential overwhelm, we just may see clearly that we are hitched to everything.  We think of ourselves as separate, as individual, as apart.  But we are deeply interconnected with all of it.  All of it.

With this may come the realization, and the acceptance, that the present moment is truly all we can reasonably handle.  It is all we can feel, all we can see, all we can process.  It is a relief to set aside the future and the past for the small (tiny, infinitesimal) now.  Oh oh OH!  There it is.  All I can handle.  All I can be.

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​About the art:  this is a paint-over of a piece I was quite dissatisfied with.  But as with so many things, that underpainting became the foundation and texture of something else.  Moving intuitively with a rubber wedge and palette knife, creating a meandering wander through a landscape of bare trees, laying on paint and carving back through it with the wedge to create texture and to expose the under layers.  Resisting the urge to overly define.  Allowing the eye to fill in the blanks.  Have I been here before? 

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The May Reader Giveaway continues!  Leave a comment on any blog post this month to be automatically entered to win a piece of  original art - FREE!  I'm curious this month - how many of you listen to the blog?  How many read?  Is there something more (or less) you'd like to see?  Thanks in advance for your feedback - this community of readers is exquisitely wise and insightful, and your thoughts matter to me greatly. xo