Like diving off a cliff…

“Beginning is often the hardest part. I often urge clients or students to just begin even if they don’t know what to do. This is like diving off a cliff for some. What does it mean to just begin? How does one just simply engage in beginning? These are not easy questions to answer, but as Rilke urged us, we must stay with the questions themselves because, as he says, one day we might learn how to actually live them.” – Mitchell Kossak

I had a bit of a revelation today. I realized that I actually need to indulge my desire to paint freely in an improvisatory fashion. Doing this seems to get me into a deeply meditative, contemplative, “flow” state. The brilliant thing here is that I can do this using the magic cloth. It allows me also to really play around and discover how a Chinese brush works, to learn the ins and outs of what it can do, without worrying about either “wasting” supplies or creating a product that isn’t “good enough.” The product disappears, the process is central. While I understand that a big part of the point here for me is to learn to embrace creating “product,” at this point, I’ve come to realize it’s immersion in the process that has to come first. And there will always be room to “improvise” and to “flow.” I’m learning a form, but that doesn’t mean I can’t play with it.