Mosaicing ahead with a little detour...

This week I have again been working on several mosaic projects.  This is the one that I am working on presently.  It is a stained glass mosaic like the one on the heading of my blog.  I like the sparkliness of the glass and the brilliant colors.  

I also had an interruption in my projects with a request from my middle son.   He is involved with LARPing which is live action role playing and he had just finished a shield which needed a design on the front of it.  So he asked me to paint one for him and I did.  It was fun and I think it turned out well.

  There is not much in the artsy world that I don't like to do, draw, paint, decorate, garden, sew, build things, etc. etc, but I think of all of the mediums available to me,  mosaic work has become my favorite.  There is something about the act of placing piece after piece that is so meditative. Believe me the brain gets a good workout.

But for me there is more to it than that.  I can come close to the idea that I want to express...and taking broken pieces and making something beautiful speaks to me of redemption,  the possibility that all things can become new.  It also reminds me that each life I have contact with is not complete, but is gradually being put together into a work of art, and whether that work becomes beautiful or not remains to be seen.  And it also reminds me that we never have a whole picture, only parts of a whole, and so we shouldn't be too quick to judge based on what we see, because we can never see things completely clearly.

Sonia King, a mosaic artist that I greatly admire had this quote in her book and on her facebook page.

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." - Anaïs Nin

So in many ways, the process of doing a mosaic is for me a search for truth. Because with every little piece I glue down I discover something else.  And when I apply the grout and wipe it away I see something that oftentimes surprises me and goes a little beyond the vision I started with.

 

Recovering the Drive to Create

Sometimes I run into a brick wall and I stay there.  I cannot see anyway around it, over it, under it, or through it, so I just sit and after awhile the wall gets so large that I think I will never get past it.  I have been there for these past few months. Inspired, working hard, and then slam, the wall.  Writer's call it writer's block, a creative block, a life block.  So what did I do? 

I watched all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire slayer,  I read a very large book series, and I began rereading Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax books.  Oh, and I sat in the dark and tried to talk to God....

So first let me talk about Buffy.  I know for some of my friends, Buffy will seem to be a disappointment, but let me tell you there was much about Buffy that spoke to my life.  Because Buffy is an analogy for the things we face in life.  Except in Buffy the enemies have faces that she can fight.  And I will also say that anybody who will give this series a chance will see so much profound insight into the human experience and to our need for each other that it will change them.  It is an amazingly well written series.  It is unique, and profound, and even though you might not like or agree with everything, there is much there that can be learned from this series about comittment, dealing with life's difficulties, friendship, loss, laughter, not giving up, and unconditional love.

There was one episode in particular that spoke to where I was at.  It was an episode about fear.  There was a party at a house where everyone who entered also entered their own personal fear zone.  The things they feared were real to them and were destroying them, but when the demon of fear that was causing all the chaos was finally caught, he was very tiny and not horrible at all.  The things we fear can seem so big and overwhelming, our worrying about tomorrow, our imaginations can overtake us and turn us into quivering bowls of jello.  But when we actuallly face them, they oftentimes are not very big at all...

I easily get overtaken by my imagination.  I can write in my mind terrible scenarios that paralyze me into inaction and cause chaos and confusion in my life.  It is creativity out of control....but if I remember that what I fear is often worse than the circumstance itself........well, then I can change in response to it.

A common theme in everything I saw or read was overcoming fear.  Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of loss, fear of gain....we can fear anything and it can stop us.  Am I totally free of fear?  No, I am often caught up in fear... but I remind myself that love casts out fear.  And I start a new conversation in my mind with good thoughts and positive conclusions.  Does that mean that everything will be cotton candy from now on?  No, the world is full of unhappy things, and sad things happen, but I don't have to dwell on the possibilities of evil, I can remember what is good.

And I can look at that wall and begin to draw on it, maybe just a stroke of a color, or a sliding of a pen, but before you know it, I have drawn a window that I can see through to the other side of the wall, and if I keep trying I will create a door that will open to the other side.