December 27, 2016 – The futureless present moment

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At the end of last year – 2015 – I made a promise to paint every single day this year.   And I did, until mid-June when I missed my first day.  I felt terrible, I reported in to you and re-committed.  Later in the summer – I forget exactly when, I missed a second day.  There were a few more after that.  Yesterday was the third in a row I didn’t paint.  It does feel like my promise has less of a hold on me.  But rather than looking at it as a failure, I’m putting it in perspective.

My guess is that I didn’t paint somewhere between 10 and 15 days this year.  This means that I put brush to paint to paper on more than 350 days in 2016.  If I look at this in regards to any year in the past, there is no comparison.  In October of 2010 I drove 800 miles to La Jolla and back, to setup and do an art festival all by myself.   After this I didn’t paint for five months!  Nothing until the next March – almost half a year!  This was after I’d been doing shows for a few years and had begun calling myself an artist too.  There were other winters as well when I didn’t paint for two or three months.

It was when I began to lead art groups, classes and workshops that my painting time became much more regular.  This makes sense because I’ve learned that I’m oriented outside-in rather than inside-out.  I take action in response to something from outside me, rather than because of some kind of fire in my own belly that directs me.  I don’t paint my dreams, my visions, I don’t invent what it is I paint, I record what I witness outside myself.  I didn’t set out to show my art at Marin Open Studios for the first time, I was coaxed into doing it by my friend Eleanor Harvey.  I didn’t set out to teach what I know about watercolor, I was pestered by Shannon Brown until I overcame my fears.  Because the structure of my teaching is on-going (except for this last week of the year) whenever I’m here at home, we gather to paint.  Since I started these groups there is always a painting that I’m actively painting on.  My relational nature is the organizing principle of my life.  If it weren’t for other people I wonder if I’d ever even get out of bed!

I’ve been uncharacteristically melancholy the past several weeks.  I don’t remember a time in recent history when I’ve felt this consistently blue.  I’m so glad for my relational nature because the only thing that seems to help is being with other people.  When I’m alone, though, my heart has been heavy.  The cause has to be my sensitivity to the state of our country and our world.  I don’t ever remember being this disconnected from my natural optimism.  Something I read in an email Betsey sent me last week helped shift things.  She wrote:

“… it’s become apparent in ways it normally isn’t that the future doesn’t exist. Of course it never exists, and everything can change in an instant, but we don’t operate that way. We assume a future that will be at least related to the past. And why shouldn’t we, since that’s how it goes for much of the time. But for me that assumption is gone on several levels, and a lot of the time the effect is to push me into the present, which has been oddly consoling.” 

Yes!  The future doesn’t actually exist – except in our imagination.  Though I’d heard this before, as had Betsey, it fell over me in a fresh new way.  And it felt like a pressure relief valve was opened.  I embarked upon my annual Christmas cookie baking marathon with a whole different mind.  I wasn’t wound up with the tension of all the cookies on my list, I found myself simply unwrapping this cube of butter, or measuring out this cup of brown sugar.  Though I haven’t stayed perfectly there – always only in the present moment – it has been a place for me to come back to throughout these past days, busy with family and Christmas celebrations.

I don’t remember ever looking into a New Year with this much uncertainty.  My way has been to face new years with hope and wonder.  But this year feels so different.  If we come back to “the future doesn’t exist,” there really never is certainty, and this year is not really any different, except that the circumstances have us be more aware of it.  Eight years ago I put the words from a Christmas carol in our Christmas card:  “the thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”  Hope was easy then.  I felt a purity and an innocence that is not here now.

When I paid a visit to my dear Sister Mary yesterday, we talked about hope.  She told me that real hope comes in the face of all evidence that there is none.  I’m being supported from all over with this message.  An email Sandy Roos sent me included a link to this exquisitely meditative video of wildlife in winter and these words from Wendell Barry:  Be joyful even though you have considered all the facts.

Where does this lead me with my promise to paint every day?  And what about looking into this New Year?  This particular New Year is calling me to not resolve or promise anything.  What feels most true is to live “the future doesn’t exist.”  This will support me in strengthening my spiritual ballast, in practicing anchoring myself in the moment as much as I can, and in sourcing my own joy, regardless of “the facts.” As a born responder – someone whose reality is taken most easily, most readily, as a response to the world around me, this is my growing edge.  It feels hard, but so necessary.

The promise to paint every day year has strengthened my relationship with being a painter.  I respond to the impulse from within me to paint much more readily than I ever have.  Paintings come to be as successions of painting moments.  It is my tender, but undying hope that I will respond to my impulses to paint in even more moments as the coming year unfolds.  The paintings in me can only come through if I do.  And the art that it is in you too.  This means taking action in moments – specific moments – to pull away from what would distract and deter us and sit ourselves down to do our work.

I often write the phrase “I look forward to…” especially in anticipation of something enjoyable.  At the edge of a new year this would be the phase my optimistic self would use here.  But what if I don’t?  What if I, if we, encounter and live this New Year one moment at a time – as much as we can?  It feels to me a bit disorienting, but it also takes off the pressure.  Most of what has unfolded so far in my life I could never have dreamed of – both the joyful and the painful.  So why not let the future show itself to us as it arises?

In this moment, with all my love,

Cara