Grounding

Space to breathe....

There are times when life becomes overwhelming at such an accelerated rate that the need to reground myself becomes a matter of survival. Usually this is a result of some thing, some change, some reminder, which spurs a rise of fear tied to my ideas of survival. Some thing that threatens my health which is so precariously balanced on a pricey grocery list... some thing that steals into our rent money, or the money we owe in taxes. Today is one of those days, though the blow actually came yesterday when we (3 months late) finally received Jeff's new contract for his main income source. Though we were made to believe (again) that it would provide enough space not just for the work they require, but also for the income that we require, it does not. For the second year in a row we will be finding ways to support our family on only 30% of what we used to, and roughly 50% of what would meet our needs. It will be another year of getting seriously creative.

When we stepped away from a six figure salary, and the solutions that provides, we had only an idea of what we would go through on the road to learning to sustain ourselves more fully. How could we have more than an idea? We've done it. Year by year we do better. Month by month we learn to meet our needs in new ways, on less money. Each time we have believed that gig was certainly up we have come out, wiped our brows, shaken off the panic and moved on, but it feels like a Herculean feat.

Each time I hit our budget looking for something new to slash, believing that there is something that I missed, and finding that of course, there is not, I find myself eying that grocery budget... wanting desperately to slice it in half, hack at it until it is small enough for me to stomach, and the panic rises as I realize that I simply cannot cut it any further, because doing so means swapping nutrient dense foods for fillers, things that will, in short order, begin to attack my health and the ability of our family to function.

These are the times when I must put down the numbers, force myself to breathe, and find a way to regain grounding. These are the moments where there is nothing for me beyond faith, release, meditation/prayer, and more faith. These are the times that I pull out my old journals searching for those entries when I struggled with the big fears, with no outs, and then rest in the understanding that I did not perish, that the world did not end, and a way through was provided and often walked without knowledge that it was the way through. In times like these, as we contemplate the expense inherent in investing in future self sufficiency on top of our survival expenses, I realize that sometimes there is nothing to be done but have faith and be willing to do what it takes when the opportunity presents itself.

It is times like this when the desperate need to do something can only be met by making space to breathe. It is times like this that I am thankful that the very biggest breathing room is provided in the forest outside my door, wrapped in more forest, wrapped in expansive desert, surrounded by epic prairie and more desert. Just the idea starts to pull my breath in and out again. The tight ball of my heart starts to loosen, my brain ceases the panicked circles and lies down on the floor of my skull to close it's eyes for a moment... so that I can stop figuring and go back to living.

How do you ground yourself? What do you do when life as you know it seems that it cannot work?

A New Kind of Freedom

I'm headed into my 4th week of school and finally feeling like I'm on the verge of integrating all that comes with it. I'm feeling happy about having done it too. The assignments for both my writing and drawing classes are really pushing me through my resistance to both. It's been a curious thing to watch myself deal with the internal struggle; to listen to that one sided dialogue that usually goes unnoticed and is therefore readily accepted as true.
I've been holding a lot of powerful assumptions about art, my relation to it, and who gets to be "an artist." These are ideas so insidious and dangerous that they have, on hindsight, quite changed the way my life turned out... the path that I chose.

Yesterday I was sitting in the Youth & Family Center while the kids ice skated, quietly sketching a woman who was reading across from me, and a much missed friend walked through the door with her son. She's had quite an experience traveling the globe since the fall, and I loved to hear the accent slip in and out of her voice. It was new and suited her well, but I never got to mention it. We fell into rapid conversation about gypsy wings, being in the moment, trusting in the outcome we can't see yet, and raising kids with the tools for a world we can't yet imagine. Somewhere in there we slipped into 'being an artist' talk. She is a working artist. As in, she makes her living in the world through her art, in a way that I grew up believing was only for the one in a million Picasso, Miro, etc. The new and more frequent modern art successes seemed distant, unpredictable, and lacked rhyme or reason to me. I've never understood extreme abstract work. I simply grew up with the belief that what you do when you grow up is not Art. Art school was for people who would ultimately wind up teaching a bunch of half interested high schoolers. Not once in the 13 years of primary school art classes, National Art Honor Society gatherings, or AP art courses, did I meet "an artist." Not once did I see evidence of a person like myself who continued to make art beyond their school years. Even when my teacher pressed me to apply to art school did I consider it. I had a few friends who went, who believed that they would be potters and painters 'when they grew up', but I thought they were crazy. Even if they didn't have experience different to mine to draw on, surely making that leap eventually put them in a position to gain it... to see that all important example of the 'real life artist.'

My friend and I talked about how many would be artist children fall to this idea of art being only a hobby, and how she could see me struggling with it even now that I know differently. Such a deeply held assumption can be hard to break. Intellectually, I could make many arguments to validate it, and my mind throws them at me every time I open my pencil case. It berates me with them when I make my tuition payments, and when I get up before dawn preparing to leave my family until dinner for the day of classes.

Now it's an act of showing up. It's a realization that I unneccesarily let go of something that was extremely important to me, and now I'm going to at least give it my best to show up and see what happens. It's an effort in telling my brain to shut up, and continuing to hold the pencil after 5 hours of class when I want to quit and go home to pull the covers over my head. It's trust in the hidden purpose of the drive.

Day by day it's getting easier. With every assignment that I resist I come out the other side with less to lose. I have new space to make art that's just for the sake of making art. I've started to enjoy it again. I've found little pockets of peace and smiles in pulling my sketchbook from my purse, and that's a new kind of freedom.