Watercolor and Collage: an Exercise In Letting Go

I'm afraid I have been rather more than nuts the last few weeks. It goes far beyond a love story, but that was the easiest to write about.  I think we all hit dark times and we all hit walls that, for a time, we cannot find a way over, around, or through.  We bash against them for a bit, somehow think that by sheer will power, or even through sheer love we can break the wall down. Sometimes nothing works at all and we realize we are simply hurting ourselves more.

I've just been getting all mixed up about what's love, what's pain, what's wanting, what's the real deal. Agape. The only part of religion I ever really "got." For me? Every major religion boils down to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Bam. That's it. Everything else is just static and our humanity getting in the way. Some of that humanity is fun, mind you, but it's still not agape. "God's love." I don't believe in the Kahuna in the sky pulling strings. And if God is unknowable then I will just not worry about what or if God is.

I am finite. Lately? I'm so finite, I cannot see past an hour from now. So what do I do with all this? It isn't really about my broken heart or dreams because of any one person. Never has been. And it isn't so much about where I live as the process of decisions. It's about figuring out what to do and how to create a new life again, when the picture is more than bleak: health, finances, family, loneliness, where to live.  While I can visualize possibilities, there are too many unanswered questions and too much real, raw pain to be able to think clearly for now.

I have had real trouble thinking and  I am not accustomed to that. It scares me to death when I cannot reason.  I have not been behaving with grace, just panic and craziness. This past week it all came to a head for me and while I am not vindictive when I lose it, it is still not easy for anyone around me. Or for me, for that matter, but wherever I go there I am, so... I'm stuck with me.

 I know many people hit those places; I had not been here since my husband left and my daughter went into treatment, and then when she died. Those two times were times when I lost myself entirely for a time. And  once before that, after an incident of brutal violence... I did through this as well.

I need to look at how to get up again, not just where.
***
We can say that when you hit the bottom you have no choice but to get up, but that isn't true. People do choose to lie down. And sometimes they choose to "fight" like a runner or a swimmer. Hit "ROCKY." Sometimes they have people who pick up the pieces for them and who take care of them out of love. I have people around who are helping me that way and I am so very, very lucky.

But they cannot save me and shouldn't.  And R.? He does not need my anger or to be loved to DEATH through this. I can laugh at myself in this. I SHOULD for Heaven's sake. It's a little dumb, all this angst at 57. The love is not dumb, but the drama is. I can't undo the last week, but there is no shame either. 

Strong people can break sometimes. I broke. So I have to put me back together again somehow. And even if R. had chosen to be the man he presented and promised, I'd still have had to put myself back together again. That thought, unfortunately, while it floated around in my brain so that I could express it, did not fully sink to the rest of me until the middle of the night. Long after I'd been nuts this past week. Oh well.

I hate this being human and flawed crap. HIGHLY over-rated. My blog reflects my best intentions sometimes, but my heart and ability to act on those intentions lag behind.

So where's the watercolor and collage stuff? Hey. I meander. There's a reason I love rivers!

***
Which brings me to watercolor and collage. It's no fluke that these are the media that draw me! I love pen and ink, too, because my sister taught me to draw. I connect with her when I do little illustrations, and intricate "doodles." But pen and ink is all about control. Even acrylics and oils... You WAIT a lot to do layers. You can scrape layers off or paint over them. I used to watch the precision of my sister and envied her that.

But for me? Here's the big surprise. Not. I was never satisfied with my work. I spent too much time scraping off "mistakes." Painting over. Trying to plan and plan and plan. I gave up in despair at my own  "failure."

But out there in PA? Sharon was teaching us contour drawing and we had GIANT newsprint pads. I drew my roses in the lower right hand corner and they looked like roses well enough, but Sharon said, "MY GOD, woman, you have ALL THAT PAPER! What are you  holding in so tight that you have put yourself in that corner, with  nowhere to go?"

There was my life, right there. Putting myself in a little corner, or allowing others to do that for me — that does amount to the same thing. I let my marriage shape me into a caged panther. That was the image I had of myself. I was a panther in a cage in a crate in a closet in a room with no windows. That was how I described myself in my journal, the year my father died. Just before the flashbacks begain and I got help at last.

And here I am now.  R. awakened the untamed person  in me again. I don't mean that in any negative sense at all. I am not a tame sort of creature. My life the last six or seven years—since I hit fifty and had a wonderful birthday with a man who I know is a friend of my soul, of that untamed spirit, and I tried briefly to honor her again at home—has been about trying to be what I am not. Trying to fit suburbia, trying to be the good sister, the good aunt, the good friend.  I forgot how to be Jeannette.  I hit a bottom about a year ago, trying to come up with a plan to make a living, to work around this worsening spine. I thought of Paint, Paper, and Pens. The workshops for stay-at-hom parents, or perhaps people out of work... something to do int he DAYTIME. Not a course in drawing.

It was about a course in letting go! It was about helping other people unlock their own creative, untamable spirits! I wanted to get people to play with art, to just let the medium dictate direction. I had an exercise planned where each person would swap off the picture, so there could be  no plan. For every step there would be a simple "assignment," then the picture would be passed on, so that at eh end of class, each person would have a completed work that was ALL OF US together.

I was just beginning to awaken with this studio of mine.  When all the time, the planning, and the trying to do things above board and "right" exploded, the awakening was still too new. I had no time to really work at an alternative before Stanford appeared. THAT was my knight in shining armor. The work that had given me a career, given me some sense of accomplishment and challenge was there again and  thought I'd be fine.

I wasn't fine. The work that called me was my art... were my arts. Writing and painting. I wanted to paint. I had to earn a living though. I didn't want my son to have to take care of me. All these old things closed in around me again and I slipped back into that person who wanted to do "the right thing" was there. Boxing me back into my little corner. I began great guns to paint again, but then as the work for Stanford became increasingly difficult and whatever is going wrong in my spine or elsewhere was showing me just how bad this was, I backed away a bit from painting. And R. appeared. Like music, WITH music, with his bigger-than-life, wonderful passion and humor, there he was.

Both of us dimmed... but suddenly we were shining again. The biggest appeal for me was that he wanted me to be able to simply paint and write when I wanted to, when my health allowed me to. He wanted me to be able to have choices for my life again, to simply be Jeannette. To fly. To NOT be tamed or have to worry about life so much. I wanted the same for him, to live out his own passions, not feel constrained by a veneer of the "responsible guy." He did not need the veneer--he was a good man without it. Both of us were imagining a different kind of life.  That was where he touched me so deeply inside. He spoke to the woman who kept choosing to draw in the bottom right hand corner, with nowhere to go but BACKWARDS.

So this week, when the feelings of being dirty because of the last six weeks drove me to the shower to get clean, something began to click in, even during the craziness. This is what many women who've been raped do, sometimes for any situation where we feel violated and betrayed again, we absorb the shame as our own, and think we can never be clean. WE already ARE clean and the shame is not our own, but we do it anyway... for a time. We think that everything going wrong in our lives is somehow because we. are. just. not. right.

Until we right ourselves again. And last night, when some sort of clarity hit, as I leaped out of bed because I was feeling that way again, I went downstairs to my studio instead.

I crumpled and tore tissue and I slapped some glue on it and put it on the paper. And I began to throw paint on the paper, and just watched the paint be absorbed, spread, feathering out in all sorts of peculiar directions. It may easily be the worst painting I've ever done in my life and I will never let it go. I had absolutely no control over how the paint would run. I could predict how the colors might blend and recognize a general direction the water would run, but  nothing more.

I did not have to think. I simply let the water run. I let the colors do what they would. I chose my colors, but let the rest happen. I trusted myself to simply play. I trusted my heart to come out there on the paper, and some of the colors make me cry. It is not a happy piece, but it isn't about terror. It isn't about angst or anything that big. It is a sadness there, on paper. Sweet. The colors over half of the paper are beautiful and soft, and sweet. It is uncontrolled, like me.

I do watercolor and tissue papers, or some of those marvelous handmade HOLEY papers... I love how they make the colors run. The textures are unexpected. I am never sure whether I can create what I have imagined... sometimes what I create is more lovely to me that anything I planned. Sometimes, not so much. I don't care. It's the doing that helps, and if the product pleases or touches, so much the better. And yes, the  metaphor is obvious, but so what? I could not feel it until last night... I couldn't get that distance from intellect to spirit until then.

All of this gets back to the same place, every time--honoring the artist, letting myself live freely.  So many have tried to tame me, to make me into what I am not. I love R. because he did not want me tamed... He loves that part of me, the artist, the one who grabs life with both hands, who loves all out, without holding back. And I do use the present tense. Turns out, though, that he, decided he didn't want to live with me, or that life after all. And other concerns trump whatever we might have had. He is who he is, and chose his path, and felt his own risks were too great and that the life he has now will be better, and it really is not my job to judge that. I actually understand those concerns from his point of view.  It is not fair of me to be angry for his choices--I can be angry at how he treated me when he made his choice, but not at how he lives his own life. That's not love on my part. That's just me wanting.

I can criticize him, but that's not fair, either. A life that is familiar, and offers continuity and calm for one person can have riches and offer real security and benefits... to him... How I feel about his life is irrelevant. My life as it stands is as far from secure as it gets, but I also realize I have opted for what appeared as safe too often myself—it was always an illusion for me, because I will  never be happy with my life unless I DO go out on that edge. Running to security in  my past spelled trouble, but that's me. My life. I have no right to judge him or to judge others, or their circumstances.

I come alive on the edges of things.The border between the yin and the yang. I will always have that sense of loss because I HAVE now seen what life would have been with this soul I have loved for thirty years, to live that sort of artistic life with a true partner. He placed this in my hands and said it was mine, then simply removed it in the blink of an eye. For some of us we DO meet the love of our lives, someone who speaks to someplace deep within, at every stage of our lives. Some of us, inside, do mate for life. I did. And that's that. I do not have to mourn him on my sleeve, nor beat my chest any more, nor allow the shame of older wounds take over. I can simply choose to love and be quiet.

And that is entirely up to me.

I have absolutely no idea how this poverty , this pain, this strange spine of mine will play out in my life. I can put myself in senior subsidized housing, in the lower right hand corner of my life... I can be the good aunt, sister, friend. I can try to control it all with a plan that will get me through. I would  not be unhappy, and there would be times I probably would be more than just content.

But, as I talked about a couple of entries back, I think that would be settling and I just don't want to settle.  There is more.  I can use this love, the agape of it all--the GIFT of love--as one of my colors, despite the sadness, recognize his color is unique, and one of my favorite colors in this life, no matter what did or did not happen, and use it with all the other colors I love. The colors my grandmother spoke of--I have been lucky in my life with all these people and all these colors. I need to be more like her, no matter where I must live... it's the how that matters most.

I can recognize my life as torn paper and color and water. I do not have to choose safe, thereby, for me, choosing fear.  There is a way to do this, no matter what the constraints of body and means. Even with a sadness here, there is also joy. For more joy, in fact. I have the entire pallet. The entire canvas. I can live it like my art, no matter what the constraints, and start each painting wherever I choose. That is how I can fight the fear, the pain, the loneliness. It isn't about fighting; it's about the living.

It will be entirely  up to me to learn to treat what lies ahead like watercolor and collage, and to find the beauty in the uncontrollable of my life.