Spring Arrives As We Move Into Winter

“Growing into your future with health and grace and beauty doesn’t have to take all your time. It rather requires a dedication to caring for yourself as if you were rare and precious, which you are, and regarding all life around you as equally so, which it is."― Victoria Moran

What do you and I want to do for the rest of our lives?  I spent my whole career being THAT.  Afterwards, I was a writer and I was that.  Then I was/am a painter and then I was becoming what I am today.  Somehow I have set goals, I guess, or found an interest and then became that.  It was how I was defining myself.  But, when I strip away all the trappings, who am I and why I am I still here, and how do I make the rest of it have some kind of meaning?  A purpose, a reason to be, I am sure, and then being that as long as I can and then changing it up when I cannot be that any more.  Don't wait for others to define us.  They haven't a clue.

What, now, gives you a sense of purpose?  What gives you joy, peace, tenderness, love?  We are all unique and our uniqueness will give us unique things of joy, peace, tenderness, love.  What do you wish to expend energy on?  What keeps you here?  Consider this deeply.  Make a list of things that give you purpose.  

I love my art practice because it is there I become whole.  It is there I become soul.  It is there that I feel I am worthy of much and deserving of much.  It is there where life does not make demands of me in any way.  It is there the world, my world, feels whole.  It is there that I strengthen myself and my resolve to just make it through some days.

I have let go of many things, even precious things, to have this peace I so long for, to gain new purpose when an older purpose runs dry, and to stop chaos and drama and things that make me restless or weary. Sometimes purpose finds me in that, I think up something new to do for each day, be it a new recipe, a new way of arting, a new job to complete.  

I think it takes some time just being quiet, to stop and be still, for me to reaffirm my purpose.  The whole time I am arting, it is, in that stillness that healing from life happens.  It is there that I accept my limitations, and experiment in ways to get around the arting difficulties I am having.  It, then, is how I can learn, that stillness can help me in other areas of my life, especially in knowing purpose(s).  

While engrossed, lost, sunk into the beauty of some type of meditation that comes over me, in arting, I connect to myself beyond this earthy sphere and connect to my soul/spirit, through Muse, and I explore, deeply, the rhythms of my own truths.  It fills and fulfills me.  It gives me a deepest meaning.  It, then, urges me to continue on, picking up a brush, day after day, touching the keys of my expression and typing what I am thinking about, and cause poetry to happen in color, shapes and words.  Be it ever so humble, it is a purpose.

©Carol Desjarlais 4.19.19