Just for the Fun of It

When I started this Art Pilgrimage, I didn't have any rationale I understood. It was just for the fun of it.

And that is why I am reading things like this enormous book on Art History. I can't give you a single good reason for it. I have no plans to be a curator, an art historian, an art history teacher.

When do we stop doing things just for the fun of it? When do we begin doing everything in life for "a reason"?

I don't know. But I'm done with that. I really am.

But here's the strange thing. There have been "outcomes" connected to my pilgrimage. Ones I didn't foresee. Ones that go past amorphous (and wonderful) happenings like personal satisfaction and spiritual awakening.

In a convoluted path that would take too much room to explain, the Pilgrimage led to a poetry book. Then someone wanted to buy one of the art pieces I posted here (I gave it away... why not? :) And, most recently, another piece was chosen for an art show in Germany. Um, what?

I am not saying all this to try to impress you (we have a different kind of relationship than that, I hope). I am saying all this to give you a nudge. Are there things you've been wanting to do "just because"? Do they seem frivolous, out-of-place, hard to justify or explain?

All the better. These are deep places. Why not... jump in.

Lost

I do not have many words these days. It is inconvenient. I have multiple speaking engagements on the horizon. I feel a bit lost (it is, I guess, the quintessential experience of being "at a loss for words.")

Imagine the comfort then, when I found this tonight...

"And remember the journey of the children of Israel as the followed God out of Egypt and into the wilderness. Tracing their route throughout the forty years of wandering... would suggest that they were lost. But they were precisely where they were supposed to be..." (from Benner's Sacred Companions.)

Where am I? At a loss for words, I seem to be more in pictures these days. Maybe I am lost where I'm supposed to be...


"Lost Where I'm Supposed to Be" in soft pastel, by L.L. Barkat

Thresholds Give

"Thresholds give, stars disorient," says the poem. It is a French poem, and I've had to do the work of translating to find the beauty. It is my way of trying to learn the language, and I feel so small in the face of my goal. A language feels endless, especially before you develop basic fluency.

So I must be patient, build layer upon layer, feel my way. It is the same with these pictures that visit me half-formed in the night. I have to take time to discover them once I sit down with paper and pastel. I feel afraid at every step, unsure of how to get where I'm going. Or how I will know when I've arrived.

The world feels upside down, constellations I knew flee the sky. I'm working in the abstract, something I've not done before. Drawing is no longer realism; it is simply color, form, movement. I turn the page and draw from different directions.

I don't know how I'll end. A feeling just comes at last, "It is finished." The threshold gives. And I lay my paper down.

Universe in pastels, by L.L. Barkat.

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On a totally fun note, I just won a lovely t-shirt for posting to welcome InCourage. Out of over 200 entries! The stars are smiling and so am I.

Coming into Wild Roses

"Did you used to draw, Mommy?"

Why yes, I did. Before my career as a designer. Before someone paid me to do art and my love for it completely died.

So of course they ask, "Can we see? Do you still have your drawings?" It's not the paid stuff they want to see. They want to dig back, discover what I used to do, when no one was looking, when no one asked me to whip up a logo, cut and paste a brochure.

I go to the attic, dust off a brown leather zip case.

Here it is, a gathering of drawings and paintings from childhood and young adulthood. "You were really good!" they encourage me. Why, it's true; I wasn't half bad. I can't draw like that anymore though. And I have no desire to do so. Those were detailed drawings, painstaking, realistic.

That is past. Now I draw with my whole arm. I seem to be drawing in circles. I am pulled towards the abstract... something I never attempted before. It's as if I am coming into my own. I don't want to be an artist, like I said before. I'm just moving in circles, finding healing in colors, form, a kind of fluid dance. It is, in its way, a journey that takes courage. No promise of pay, no adherence to my previous ideas about art, just a knowing that this is the way I will pray and walk... as if into fields of wild, wild roses.

Wild Roses in soft pastels, by L.L. Barkat.

This post is to welcome InCourage, a gathering place for encouragement. Do you have a story to tell in celebration? Stop by and add your link.

OTHER LL POSTS TO WELCOME InCourage:
Baby, You Made My Decade, at Green Inventions
Nothing in Return, at Seedlings in Stone

Pointless

"What's the point?" he asked.

"I'm not sure," I answered. "But I think it's about spiritual growth."

"What's ART got to do with spiritual growth?"

This conversation is going nowhere. I cannot explain myself, the way an abstract painting cannot defend how very real it is despite its ambiguities. I cannot defend an art pilgrimage.

Surely, it's not something I will make money from (the major mark of worth in our culture); in fact, I will spend money... on art materials, donations, museum visits, maybe even a retreat or two. How can I explain that it's about showing up?

Showing up for what? Life, beauty, connection, healing, dreams. How can I explain that sometimes there is no other point than this: a journey calls and we answer?


Abstract Seascape, in gouache, by Sara B, 12. Used with permission.

Dragonfly Bush

I am walking now.

But when did I begin? Was it as a child with those first crayons, which I lost to the burning barrel one by one, watching them melt before my eyes because I'd left them out and this was my punishment? Was it in the fields picking wildflowers, hot pink and cornflower blue, to press between pages of a book? Or was it in middle-school art class, as I sat trying to capture things realistically with my pencil, while my friends went out the side door and got high with the teacher?

Where did this journey start? Was it when I morphed from editorial assistant to graphic designer, in a technical writing department, because I was the one who could sorta draw and was not afraid of the new computer tools? Did I start this path when I went to Paris and saw 'real art' and came home to dump my design career and become a teacher instead?

I do not know where I began. Like the spiritual pilgrim who cannot say where she first stepped onto the road, felt it beneath her feet, noticed she was not alone. I do not know.

But there are things I have done and will do to say, "I'm on a journey." Just the other day, I donated to International Arts Movement. It was easy with Paypal. Then I set off for AC Moore and filled my cart: gouache, watercolor, soft pastels, sketch books, acrylics, canvases, brushes. On my Sabbath, I sat quietly and tried out the pastels. I may not want to be an artist, but I'm thinking I should be a participant rather than just an observer. I will commit to at least a year of focused "pilgriming," making art and viewing it and reading about it and discussing it.

I feel shy participating. My skills are simple. It's like being a child in a grownup's world. Is it a coincidence that my first attempt was an empty, dead bush being graced by powder-blue dragonflies? I chose golden colors for the water over which it would lean, made mistakes that caused me to blend things I hadn't intended to blend. The bush became one with the background.

My girls said the picture looks like a desert, with the sand swirling, rising. Why yes. And perhaps that is no coincidence either. A tentative bush in the desert, graced by dragonflies, breathing blue-flamed beauty... which burns but does not consume.


Dragonfly Bush in pastels, by L.L. Barkat.

Impostor

Night falls and I am restless. "I'm beginning," I think. And my mind crowds with details.

What to bring? What to hold? Release? Who will I meet? Where will the road take me? Does it matter? Maybe the road is my destination?

And this...

"Not you. You aren't even a real artist. Worse yet, you don't want to be. Your own daughter, only twelve years old, is a better illustrator than you. Someone will notice how flimsy, how barely there you are, how totally unsuited for this journey. They will laugh, or show you the exit ramp."

Do all pilgrims feel this way?

I wake to a new day, rain-heavy. Is this a good day to begin? Maybe I should stay inside just a little bit longer, rethink things.

But Joan, Christine, Joelle, e l k, Erin, and Stefani have already waved hello, as if I was really going, as if I was not the impostor I feel myself to be.

Sculpture by Maureen Connor, 1990.

Pilgrimage

I know.

When you go on pilgrimage, you're supposed to start walking. Somewhere. The truly faithful might even journey on their knees.

So what does it mean when you go on pilgrimage, but you have no particular destination? No map, per se? Just a sense of 'this is it' and a few stray bread crumbs thrown into the path by life, or God, pain or dream, hope or confusion?

Looking back over my journals, I was struck that there has been this quiet idea in me for a while. It's been so quiet I couldn't even hear it until now, when a few things disappeared from my life, and a few other things showed up unexpectedly. Anyway, I'm going on pilgrimage. What kind?

Just this...

Art.

Oh, I have almost no idea what it means right now. But this space will become my studio and journal, my walking stick and resting place. And you are invited to linger with me.

Considering

Found this quote from Scott Russell Sanders in Landscapes of the Soul: A Spirituality of Place (by Robert Hamma)...

Thawing dirt also breaks the grip of winter in me. The promise of new life in that loamy smell gives me courage to ask questions that I have been afraid to ask.

Maybe that is one reason I came out here. To smell Fall and Winter, to feel Spring on the air and my taste buds, to find courage in the shadows of the pine and questions new-dangling from silken lines of spiders' webs...

Illumination

I had been taught
to love the light,
the way it crisps color,
casts shape in my
sight, throws
shadows like
dancers on the
wind. I had been
taught to love
the light and
despise darkness
as if it only harbored
sin. What did I know
about the way light
lies, leads me
to think I know
the path to tread.
Darkness should
be, I was told,
a thing to dread
but as it goes
I'm steadied in it,
stilled, sculpted
into a magnet for
sound, a silent
one who's wise
to wait,
listen,
be
found.

More poetry at the High Calling: RAP: Nepotist's Delight

Chasing Morning

Plane hurtles down the runway. I close my eyes and wait for lift-off in darkness. Soon we are... airborne, headed East, chasing morning.

Beside me, my children gradually drift to sleep. I fidget, wishing I could ignore the night, let my body release, relax. My muscles twitch. Peace will not come.

Hours later, sun shines strong over France. Wide awake, I think how it is still dark back home. It comes to me, suddenly, that there is always morning somewhere, even as there is night on the other side of the world.

Such is also true of spiritual night. Morning exists, if not in my place, in my time. And I need not chase it or fight the darkness. Morning will dawn, will come, always, always comes.

I need not chase the Morning.

Alteration Found

Let me now admit that the marriage of two minds
came without impediment, much. Who knows
exactly why it was such, except that the neurons
seemed to know exactly where they wanted

to go, past stars and tempests. Beyond brief
hours and weeks, until by now there is little
relief from the dendritic march. I cannot, want not
to roll up the surprising sacred pathways,

retrace, erase this hopeless tangle,
these rivulet reaches of love.


RELATED:

LL's Find a Poem, Pick it Up

Anchor

Water plays at my edges, laps, beckons. I am free. I am really free.

Wind nudges from the side, the back, sets me rocking, floating under a blue sky. I feel at ease. The sun melts my cares away.

Still, there is just now need for anchor. A place set in time, in space. A particular sandbar I want to explore. Where I'll leave my mark no matter how temporary— by building sand castles, digging trenches, setting a leaf flag to fly on a stick. And it will leave its mark on me, as I gather wet sand and pile it on my legs, my arms, to slough off even more cares of the day.

Will you, will you be my Anchor, Dear One? Enable me to play, even as I drift around the point, the weight, the center that is You? Will you, will you be my Anchor?

Seed

Out in my secret place this cool morning, the sun comes slant and soft, plays upon my skin and the myriad leaves that tremble. The yard is wild— tall grass, field grass thick with seed and the edges of the place flecked with purple spike flowers, pert buttercups. Forsythia bend, unruly, and dandelions puff with seeds waiting for the wind. Raspberries have overtaken the raised beds and blueberries in flower are pushing towards sweet seed.

On every side, there is birdsong and the rustle of leaves. The swing hangs empty, moved only by the breeze. And somehow I feel like a child again, ready to lie down on my belly, look at the world through grass arches, ready to open my soul to Your seed and your Spirit which waits, poised. A seed head on a slim, smooth stem.

Reaching

The other night, I ran through the neighborhood, just as the sky was entering that lovely stage of cobalt blue... when the clouds were still barely visible. The atmosphere looked wrinkled, as if someone had dropped a veil over the earth.

And against the cobalt sky, I could see the branches of old trees. Black and serpentine, reaching, sprawling, curving, turning in on themselves and outward toward the dome of the heavens. I stopped. My heart beating fast, my mind open, reaching.

I thought of what it is like to learn to love You. Some see it as a path, straight and narrow, simple to follow; growth is a formula from a book, a set of rules. And maybe I see it this way sometimes too. But this night I felt like one of those old trees in Your presence... my heart sometimes dark and serpentine... reaching, sprawling, curving, turning in on itself then outward towards You.

For a long time I stood there, looking up at the branches painted black against the blackening sky. The trees were beautiful, still growing, even as night fell... then I set my feet again to running.