I am not altogether certain what I am taking away from Gethsemani but I can quote Merton again from my heart on this:
I know that every time I have come home with something tremendous, though my hands were empty.
Thomas Merton
In numerology I am in the cycle of years at ‘1’.
I begin anew this year.
It can explain a lot about the past few years if I let it; all that falling away and falling down and letting go of…. As is said, one cannot receive what is held out if one’s hands are grasping the past….
That’s something else this week on silent retreat has made me see; I struggled a heck of a lot more than I thought I was struggling, since 2018.
Struggling: Grasping.
Those closest to me know I have been anything but calm, cool, and collected about the upheavals in my life, and the worldly upheavals that affected my life. It’s been a battle between external evidence and internal knowing: They sometimes do not meet in the middle.
This is in part anyway I think, the long road to faith. Faith not so much in a divine power or a bigger plan at play-that too for sure but that is too ambiguous to grasp when one is slogging through a decimated career plan and balance sheet: They just don’t hold water worth drinking….
No the faith that’s come to me is not tha;, or just that, in a heftier dose. It is faith in my convictions.
Convictions about encaustic.
Convictions about art at all, and creating in general.
About what it really is deep down, the power of it, the place for it, and the necessity and reality of it in every life.
Faith about my tenacious persistent determination to bring it more to light. To-as my tag line has said for decades-reach more, teach more, inspire more, and the truth of this deep down, for me.
I’d nearly given it up at the close of 2018. No wonder I’ve been in an existential crisis for three years; I’d been ready to toss away my truth, my courage, like pearls to pigs. Wasted the value of the talents given to me as gracious gifts and treasures. I didn’t see then what I can see now; they’ve been buried in my backyard all along, just waiting for me to turn the soil so they could rise to the surface once again.
I often write in closing my journal thoughts ‘In you I move and breathe and have my being.’ So Christian of me. But it’s not used that way per se. I write it and give it pause; for years wondering why I do this; is it habit alone? And does it hold real merit and truth?
I think I can say, today anyway, that I repeat this line in my journals not with the sense of a deity in the sky ruling my breath and movements, but of a place in myself that holds host to the universal energy that is always there, always good, always true, and always working.
This I can grasp a bit better today.
I am still frightened of the desires and hopes I possess; I really don’t know if my strength is such that I can bring them about anymore.
I don’t hold the zealous conviction or naive ingenuity I did over a decade ago when things like EncaustiCamp, the five books, two years in Australia, buying a castle in the southeast…all these things came to be.
I am tired of the zeal, and I don’t feel so naive anymore.
But what of the energies these manifest from? What’s underneath?
True self perhaps, seeing as how they are still yet persisting; true self still speaking and wanting to be heard?
Serious about God, playful about life.
Is this a gift then, a package for me to open and reveal another layer of my personal divinity? Is this a gift of taking hold of the ignitor that naivety can be, yet now weaving it to the wisdom of experience, and calming assurance that aging naturally gives, so that my efforts and ambitions are not zealously exploited but rationally instigated?
After beginning in numerology why not throw it all out there and add in tarot.
I pull a card for my birthday new year: The 2 of Pentacles.
The fool, as he looks, playing with two discs, intertwined by a cord holding them steady in harmony.
This of course, speaks to me as well. (I am choosing to listen after all, here at this silent retreat; everything has something to say when you set yourself up to hear.)
This tarot to me says keep the naivety of the fool, but realize yourself to be at a new, more wise, expression of yourself; harmonizing your talents (another word for the pentacles) and playfully experiencing life (look at those boats in the background!).
Energy is in this card. Energy I need. Energy, harmony, playfulness, fruitfulness, connection, virility, supply.
Serious about God; playful about life.
If you trust me with this gift my God, I too then will hold it and believe it, and use my strength to keep moving in the world I have created, and still yet create, with the best of my talents.
And just because you put another layer in this picture so as to make sure my self-doubts got no airtime; you’ve had me see that the past year’s creations in paint have all been about finding my communication. Poetic Graffiti; Morse Code; Petals and Tears. All these collections I’ve been unable to see the point behind suddenly revealed themself in an instant, in a cow field, just now: Thanks for that. I don’t know yet if I have found my communication, but I can see that you do, and I’ll settle for that for now.
in love.
trish