The Wisdom of the Trees

Come Autumn, the pigment of the leaves dramatically changes from green to fiery reds, yellows, and oranges. The Phoenix burns. Leaf by leaf, the trees loosen their grip. And as the leaves scatter to the forest floor, so do they become the fertile soil which will bring new life come spring. Again the Phoenix will rise, as it ceaselessly does, year and year again. 

There is perhaps no greater teacher than the trees to impart the lesson of autumn: they demonstrate the beauty in surrender, the act of letting go.

It can be more difficult to find the beauty in the loss that occurs in our own lives. Unlike the trees, we are not so easy to trust that in the wake of death, or any type of ending, life will bloom again.

Yet our own cycles are as natural as the trees’. Even after devastating loss, the human capacity for resilience is stunning. We are capable of transmuting some of the greatest hardships into the inspiration for innovation. We are capable of enduring intense pressure, and often at the very last moment or most desperate hour, channeling that into epiphanies about ourselves and the world.

On a fundamental level, energy is just energy, and all it does is change form. Why then are we always convinced that death, literal or symbolic, is final? It is only through death that life is facilitated to be reborn, and vice versa. Life and death are inseparably intertwined, and each inevitably gives rise to the other.

But death isn’t easy if we offer resistance to it. When change happens, or we know change is coming, we can do our best to hold it back (usually with disastrous consequences) or we can move with it. The latter is always gentler. And we can again turn to the trees and the beauty in their willingness to surrender.

This autumn, even amidst the high intensity of the season, my experience of surrendering to loss has been greatly aided by conscious acts of self-love. For me, this has involved a shift away from overexerting myself and pushing myself very hard, and toward a practice of patience and understanding as I move through life’s challenges.

We are so often cruel to ourselves when we struggle. We judge how we feel, what we think, and how we are responding to life. I’ve begun to approach myself with compassion instead, which has often involved taking moments or even days to breathe, rest, feel, and release on my own timetable. These may seem like luxuries to people who have little flexibility in their schedules, yet every soul has a few moments of time a day to attune to their needs and hold space for whatever is happening internally. We don’t have to, but it is worth reminding that even giving ourselves the smallest bit of love and affection can lighten our burdens immensely.

To all those reading, I hope you find peace this autumn season in witnessing the poetry in the falling leaves. May you rejoice in the splendor of your own spirit’s journey.

2019 Recap: A Year in the Life of an Artist

Just like other human beings, artists change a lot as time passes. We have lives that flow through the ordinary channels. We begin and end relationships, change apartments or jobs, and make discoveries about life and humanity. We’re a constant river, always becoming someone new, our presence in the world unfolding and unfolding.

One of my earliest works as an artist. Little did I know that art would begin to occupy such a significant role in my life.

For those of us who specifically express through a creative channel, change in our lives manifests in what we create. As a visual artist, I’ve watched my art evolve over the years. The tools I use to make my art have changed little, but what I create has grown in leaps and bounds. I love that I’ve organized my virtual portfolio by year. I like to go back and see who I was in past years by looking at what I created during that time. Each piece symbolizes something that I was working on internally. Often, I was struggling with something very dark and difficult. My emergence from a difficult state tends to be paralleled by the completion of a work of art.

2019 was a very significant year in my life because it was a foundational break in my preconceived life path. Having initially decided to quit my job in the corporate sector for medical reasons, I took my newfound freedom and ran with it. My success as an artist had been steadily growing for years, and I was beginning to show my art professionally. I decided, very seriously, to pursue art as my full-time career. At the same time, recovering from illness and an interrelated, deep and personal struggle, I hit the ground running but was very unsure of myself. I didn’t quite trust that I knew what I was doing, even though I was accepted into every gallery show I applied to, was welcomed as a visiting artist at a prestigious out-of-state event, and secured my biggest commission yet.

Transcendence, 2019. Private commission. To request a commission, please contact the artist directly.

I was experiencing such radiant joy at finally giving myself permission to do what I loved. I was also scared as hell. Mostly I was in denial that I was scared as hell, or maybe  I was 100% okay with being scared as hell because I would rather follow my heart for the first time in my life instead of live the rest of my life in a perpetual state of frustration and longing. I had been desperately unhappy at my previous job, and the prospect of looking for yet another job in the field I had been educated in felt like I was damning myself to eternal torment. And it wasn’t just that I wanted to become a professional artist. More and more, I began to feel as though I was being called to it. Both as an act of profound personal healing and as a revolutionary act urgently needed by a world in its time of need.

Even so, I really didn’t know what I was doing yet. I wasn’t a seasoned businessperson, so I was playing everything by ear; I didn’t have any kind of strategy put together, I didn’t know the first thing about strategy. But I needed to get my bills paid, so there was a lot of pressure on me. I couldn’t just mess around. So I was trying to put a bunch of puzzle pieces together – social media, gallery shows, public appearances, creating new products, networking both locally and nonlocally – full force, for the first time ever. And of course, I was also trying to create as much art as I possibly could, out of necessity as well as eagerness. I was moving as fast as I could, trying to process and comprehend it all.

The year ended both as a success and a failure. I had created and done so much. I wasn’t an internationally acclaimed artist, but I had certainly learned what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. Above all else, I had gained immense insight into the herculean effort required to be successful as a professional artist, and was beginning to awaken to the fact that I was willing to work for it.

In 2019, I began to open myself to who I really am. That isn’t to say I’m quickly approaching an answer to the question Who am I? I don’t think that’s a question anyone can ever fully answer. But by giving myself the license to do what I really wanted to do, I began to unravel years and years of repression. I started to look myself in the proverbial eye instead of shrinking away into a version of myself that was presentable, but not really the fundamental, unabridged, passionate, strong, FULL VOLUME me.

Find Your Center, 2019. I began work on this piece while struggling to make peace with myself during a time when I was experiencing a lot of uncertainty and self-doubt.

Here now in 2020, particularly with the changes that the quarantine has wrought, I find myself still in a period of self-discovery and self-reflection. At the same time, I also see myself emerging from the soft cocoon that had previously been my relative safe zone. As much as I grew last year, I was still unrefined, undeveloped, and rather shy. This year, instead of cautious venturing, I am beginning to open more widely to being present in the world. Indeed, this includes sharing some of my personal story on my blog! All in all, I am beginning to trust that it’s okay for me to share who and what I am.

I am a visionary artist, and I am passionate about healing, transforming, and evolving. It is medicine to me to continue to create. I hope that what I create awakens and inspires you, too.

Toward balance, and the healing within.

November has thus far been a beautiful opportunity to release into yin energy state, which is very much the opposite of my instinctive tendency to fill my life as full as possible with pursuits and activities, fearing always that if I am not creating then I am doing nothing meaningful, that if I do not stay active and engaged, I am losing invaluable opportunities which may never come again. That I can't ever take a break because I will miss something critical.

I am turning away from that more and more as I realize that my need to heal, and that it, me, the act of becoming, is more important, and that ceaseless frenzy of energy I have been trying to engage and output runs counter to my personal needs right now.

Releasing, stepping away - it is so difficult, because our culture does not encourage it. We are encouraged to fill our lives fully with activity, from working all day to binge watching television at night as we reach out unconsciously for food and drink to fill our bodies. When stressed, there is a pill to take or a tea to drink. Even meditation is a "thing" to try. A skill to learn. These learned ways of processing our world are shaped through the values our culture espouses and spreads from generation to generation, person to person, all enshrined in the lush promise of commodities and possessions: That we must seek them, must seek fullness. We are afraid of being without.

Finally understanding that I can let go for a while is redeeming, but also very frightening at the same time. Because I don't know what to do with myself if I am just sitting on the couch. I feel this is time I can use to catch up with a friend, do the last few things in my garden before winter, play with my cat who wants attention, read a novel, research that thing I wanted to learn more about, start 10 new art pieces, make myself a snack, take out the compost, organize my closet, anything, everything.

But it is also okay just to sit here and be still. For when I don't take that time, the clamor of life becomes so relentless that I do not stop to think and make the right choices for myself in a myriad of moments.

When I do not bind myself to the illusion that every moment must be full, I invite in room for change. I can listen for the flow in motion around me and not have to get involved. I can just sit. I can just be.