It has been awhile since I sat here. Staring at this white space, fingers poised and feeling half afraid. Afraid to mar it. Afraid of leaving yet another unfinished project to haunt me. Afraid that it won’t be perfect or I’m not ready or….Just afraid.
Life has been a blur of moments when laundry looms large and strength is small. Days when I spend more time homeschooling away from home and home surfaces threaten to become a study in microbiology. Weeks when the calendar entries thicken and patience runs thin. And months when joys and sorrows trip over one another in a dissonant rhythm that threatens to crowd out the harmony of life well-lived.
So I once again find the cursor and place fingers to keys on this canvas of a screen. Sometimes I put fingers to white and black keys and try to find the rhythm again on the page before me. In a few of life’s recent celebrations, I have spread the canvas with clumsy fingers over the scarred 15-year-old table and held it in place with china and spring flowers and lovingly crafted sustenance.
Yes, I know the art expressed in quieting a nightmare or changing sheets of the fledgling potty trainer at 2 A.M. The new understanding dawning on the face of a son from my careful arrangement of facts and figures. The true and noble calling of sorting his laundry and my thoughts before thoughtless words can soil the fabric of marriage like those work shirt stains which can never quite be removed.
Yet while the easel supporting my art is this family whom I have been so graciously granted, there is a longing to pull out a fresh canvas and try again, with trembling figures to craft. To create beauty. I desire to let the raw materials of this life flow into an expression of the best that is within me. And sometimes the worst.
So, I hope with the arrival of spring flowers to grace this canvas with more of my art. Unique to me, undoubtedly. But because it is unique, I am the only one that can create my particular brand of art.
As are you. What is your canvas? Which art stirs you as you work long hours crafting a living and a life?
I’ve seen art worked against a blue sky with a camera. With paintbrush and colored pencils on a blank sheet of white much like the one before me. The art of dainty decor added to a blank wall or a whiteboard filled with diagrams, figures and ideas.
I know artists who smooth a blank white canvas over a hospital bed and inject their art with an IV and a kind word. The canvas of a lawn which has grown long or a car engine which has stopped short.
This beauty is buried within each of us, and it longs to be free. However, each of us carry a different type of beauty with us. There are some people that only your art will reach. And maybe a few that will be touched by mine.
So grab your keyboard, your hammer, your pen or your brush and dust off the canvas. I would love to have you join me in creating beauty this May! And for the not-so-beautiful which will inevitably leak out? Someone just might need that, too.