May 24, 2017 – When whispers become passions

There is this idea in our culture that what we should do is find our passion.  What’s more, we hear that this passion is like a switch – you come upon a way to channel your energies and boom:  You fall in love and are lit a-fire with the burning need to do this thing – at all costs.  It does sometimes happen this way; I had an airline pilot, a captain on 747’s, take a color class once.  She said that the first time she took a lesson in a small plane, she was hooked.  She sold everything she could to take lessons and made becoming a pilot her whole life.  My sense, though, is that this is rather rare – mostly it’s not how it goes. Much more often, finding what we would re-arrange our lives for isn’t quite as immediate or unequivocal.  How is it, then that we who aren’t “struck by lightning” can end up living our passion?

I’m asked quite often by those who have just met me how long I’ve been painting.  The answer I give them is that it’s been many years since I started, but if my painting life were a mathematical curve, it would be exponential – relatively flat for a while, and then in a short time it shot up.  Day one was a Saturday in June of 1992 – 25 years ago next month.  My mom and I thought it would be fun to take a one-day, adult-ed class:  Painting Flowers in Watercolor.  My first painting was a somewhat awkward blue-violet Dutch iris on a quarter sheet (11”x5”) with a plain white background.  I found the drawing frustrating, but using color was fun – yet still no flaring passion had yet been sparked.

I went home and over the next few weeks painted three more quarter-sheet paintings of tulips, sweet peas and a big, pale pink camellia.  But after that, because my life at the time didn’t support my being freely creative, my energy and impetus to paint petered out.  Looking through my stack of early art, there’s evidence that I did paint a bit in the years that followed, but only sporadically – usually on vacation.  More farting around than passionate!

About the turn of the century, when my Joseph and I had settled in to doing life together, I picked my watercolors back up again with a bit more enthusiasm.  But painting didn’t really grab ahold of me until two major circumstances impacted me – one internal, the other external.  In 2004 came the unthinkable realization that I wasn’t going to have any children in this life.  This enormous disappointment left a chasm in my soul that sent me looking for something to put my energies into – something more worth spending my life on than working in the corporate world.  The external force came in 2007 when I started showing my work – having an audience put a real fire under me to finish my paintings.

Ten more years down the road and I have come to know this life and these paintings as a direct outcome of how my life unfolded.  I love to paint, I love working with color, I love supporting others in their painting process.  Just recently I’ve started to notice something else – a deepening sense of appreciation for my paintings.  I was in conversation with a gallery owner from out of state about representing me and my work.  Looking at my website she expressed interest in my most recent paintings.  The idea of crating and shipping these paintings I’ve just finished – the ones for which I still can feel the struggle of making them – brought up a clear “no” from somewhere inside.  I want to have them close by – to be able to show them myself for a while first.

In one of my recent posts on the Beatitudes for Artists, I said that if there is one thing to pray for in becoming an artist it is this:  an irrepressible desire to make it.  I quoted Renoir as having said that for him the urge to paint was as persistent as the urge to pee.  When I first read this in the margin of one of Julia Cameron’s books, I wanted to paint that badly.  (It’s interesting, isn’t it, how I had a desire to have the desire?)  So how and where do we get this desire?  Initially it comes from the mysterious place that is the source of everything that makes us us.  It’s this place that whispers “watercolor” or “poetry” or “the piano” or whatever it is we hear.

Then what?  In my experience, it happens more like my exponential curve – we try it once, have a positive experience and then our desire grows a bit if we find it enjoyable and have had some level of success at it.  This then makes us want to attempt to do that again – and/or to try something else.  For some of us, at some point, painting – or whatever is our art – becomes what we do and who we are.  We get to the point where we can’t imagine being without something to paint.  Before the one we are working on is done, we are already considering what we’ll paint next.  We can even feel a bit of panic if an idea isn’t readily arising.

There are other factors that come into play.  Working a full time job, moving house and home, and serious Illness – ours or a family member’s – are often what use up our energies and keep us from creating.  But – as in my experience – loss can actually have a catalyzing effect.  After the acute grief has passed, loss can re-orient us; it makes a space in us that pulls away our resistance to create.  Looking at it, these circumstances are often out of our control, though.  We can’t really avoid life’s big obligations and we never go about seeking life-changing loss.

Lately I’ve been questioning the whole idea (that is so very American) – that we can do anything we want to.  That, with enough hard work and commitment, whatever we set our sights on is a real possibility. This is a very attractive idea – one that calls to people from all over the globe – and there are many examples of famous lives that prove it to be true.  But I wonder just how universal it is.  It takes a huge amount of desire/energy to overcome any circumstance and to sustain the commitment over time – in order to change our lives in a big way.  I wonder just how many of us can self-generate the kind of will that can keep up the energy necessary.  And then there are those of us whose lives are shaped by responding to what comes our way, rather than from a fire that arises from within us – a feminine rather than a masculine orientation.

I wanted to need to paint like Renoir did, but I didn’t actually rearrange my life to paint until circumstances arose that both stripped away my inner resistance and gave me a reason to.  The way I know myself to be, the way I am wired, I can’t imagine it having gone any differently.  So what does this mean?  Should we just be fatalistic about our desires and our creative lives?  Maybe.  But there is another piece.  The thread that has woven through my life in all of this has been to become more and more awake and present to my inner and outer life.  I first learned – and since have made it a practice – to pay attention – to my desires, to my pain, to what is going on in me and around me – so I can hear the messages that life has for me – so, then my responses can become more conscious and intentional.

I once read Victoria Moran advise to “live the chapter we are in” – as opposed to a chapter yet to come. If we are caring for someone we love, or are having to work very hard in some other way, we are pulled away from our creative work, then this is the chapter we are living.  Not being able to pour ourselves into making art is normal.  I’m finding myself, just as I was last week, ending with the question that I started with still lacking a pat answer.  Passion, where it comes from – and how it sometimes grows and sometimes doesn’t – is still pretty much a mystery to me.  I don’t question that we hear these whispers, though.  What we can do is honor the whispers, offer them our appreciation and hold them for safe keeping in our souls, knowing we will act upon them when life turns the page to the chapter that is theirs.

With my love,

Cara