This is the a-ha that came at the end of the paint blobs and the morning pages. :-)
My journey to today’s art combined morning pages and a serious amount of flow and following that flow from one moment to the next in an engaged, awake fashion.
It wasn’t giddy like my creativity sometimes is as I meander like this, but it was definitely potent.
I am going to share some process photos and then, if you care to, please read along to the narrative of what took place in the “pregnancy” of this continued work-in-progress.
I feel better than I have in weeks. Morning pages + blobs of cheap acrylic paint = a magic formula.
I used tissue paper to blot up excess water, paint and to randomly mush colors. (highly technical/academic terminology!)
I know there is still more this work-in-progress wants to say to me. For that I am so grateful!
I woke up this morning half-way between a lucid dream and a flashback, both involving memories of living in Frazier Park. The lucid dream was from the days before I moved there and then the flash back was from images after my daughter was stillborn there.
I was walking down the road that rambles from I-5 through Frazier Park, Lake of the Woods, PMC and beyond until it spits you out onto the road to the Cuyamas. I used to walk along this road, out past where houses were on an almost daily basis in Spring, 1990. In my dream/flashback I was walking my dog, Loo, a chow-mix, yellow. He was a crazed dog, a hyper lion maned barrel of energy but in those days he was my companion in silence.
I would pick one foot up and put it down, one foot up and one foot down, one foot up and one foot down, Loo’s leash my connection to the world outside the soles of my feet, the world beyond the socks the shoes, the relentless yet stagnant energy as I tried to make sense of what made absolutely no sense.
We walked into the sun, Loo and I, toward the angling sun not quite at the sunset stage but definitely preparing to wave goodbye again. I remember everything in shades of yellow. Wheat, burned yellow, blonde burnished not like Crayola yellow.
In my memory the grass looks dry, like our grass in the valley today but I know it wasn’t… or perhaps it was the sun’s reflection or my tumbling thoughts and pain that felt infinite and not at all a space I wanted to stick around in very long. I wanted to figure my way out of it, I wanted to put it in a container and slap a lid on and declare it over.
It must have been early-ish March the bunnies started appearing. I always saw them as they were running away. Perhaps it was Loo who was seen as a menace, out before me causing them to run. Maybe they smelled the lingering scent of death emanating from my gut.
This is where I was in my non-language awareness as I became fully conscious, Alice on my belly, Beth on my feet, the silence of veteran’s day morning allowing the luxury of a mid-week, sleep-in sort of day for the kids and me.
(I know) I also thought, “I want to paint that” and then the inner conversation of “I can’t paint that” and then, “try an abstraction” followed by, “you can’t take something that feels that poignant and make it into an abstraction!” followed by the ever wise, “Why not?”
I tore a page from the dictionary and put down some blobs of acrylic and started letting the paint talk to me.
Out of the yellows and oranges I hear/think/feel, “there has to have been a sky” so I add some blue blobs into one corner. I add water, I look at the blue becoming something and realize, “There has to have been a sky but my head was down so I couldn’t see it.”
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And now, I feel better than I have in weeks. In every way! All because of a "failed" friendship, intense and unfinished yet finished. Stillborn. Ironic in the perfect sense. Grateful.
This post is inspired by (and a reflection of my participation in) Art Every Day Month, a creative adventure hosted annually by the incredible Leah Piken Kolidas. Join us and be inspired!
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming Fall and Winter, 2014 and beyond. 
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