End of a fall day.  A full fall day.  Remembering gardens and becoming re-aquainted with a me I once knew.  Remembering the flow of paint in brush, wondering how I had forgotten, wishing I could go back and do it over again.  Are the things I am doing compelling? I do not know the answer yet, but I do know that they feel full and important and at least headed down the right road because the paint is thick and white.  A backpack full of spirits.  A long walk two or three times.  Arms tired but heart happy.  Happy to be happy again.  I've been remembering an old childhood friend-- a little girl with messy hair and enthusiastic giggling.  Naturally.  I think I saw her again today when I tied a string under my ponytail, displaying "grow" on a leaf across my forehead.  Realizing that I am silly and free and sprite.  That I do enjoy my life.  It's been a month this week-- four, nearly five weeks, and each day feels better and it seems that I am finding a self that I knew was in there somewhere, but I thought was not going to come out again.  Lost, like a childhood toy, or nonexistent like a retrospective memory bathed in rose-colored light.  But here she is, gleaming in the sun. I've remembered my smile and I recognize the sound of that old laugh.  

It's fall today and in true Colorado fashion, I left the house with a jacket and returned with a sunburn, the sunlight piercing t-shirts and bouncing off plates of glass covered in oily paint.  I'm finding a place for my heart, wondering if perhaps it really has been there all along and in the midst of everything else, I got too analytical and forgot.  But day after day as I fulfill 3rd grade learning objectives and pour my entirety into playing Candyland and making boats out of tin foil cupcake liners, I think I'm going back in time and finding the heart of the child I lost somewhere along the way.  And perhaps I'm just being romantic because the leaves are turning and I spent too much time in the Colorado sun, but it feels good to feel right, to have the imaginary weight lifted as I feel the air rush by beneath a bicycle helmet on such a full fall day.

I'm still asking questions that I do not know the words too.  I'm still trying and missing.  Most days feel like I've walked backwards, like I've wasted another hour with something else that didn't work because I don't even know what the goal is supposed to be.  Making good art.  I think I remember this being the idea-- I can't seem to quite figure that one out.  

It's a month into the semester and I'm still struggling this question of why I'm not tapping into the stuff that is in me somewhere. I've been searching my soul, searching my life for the time that I seem have lost the power, forgot the passion.  I'm searching to remember that artist I was a few years ago before I got too tired and too confused and too analytical.

I feel the pressure.  I feel the weight of expectation and I feel as though the push is only plunging me deeper into the darkness of all that I can't seem to grasp.  

You are better than this stuff, she says.  All that I possess buried in there without a vehicle.  I feel judged and disdained-- why do I care so much what other people think anyway?  Is she right?  Am I being wasteful?

I'm tired and afraid.  Isn't that what art is about anyway?  It is one of those hard things that is hard because it is so secret and so abstract-- this plunge into oneself deeply and seriously.  Taking all that you love and all that matters most to you and putting it on something very flat.  How does one go about finding such a thing?

Where will I go tomorrow?  What will I do?  Today felt like a failure, yet I can't wait to try again tomorrow.  I feel like I am on a long, strange search.  Like each brush stroke is full of idea and question and pleading that someday all the pieces will fall together and it will make sense and I will begin doing something real and meaningful and something that will stop making this source of such immence pressure frown. 

I mean-- where I am if I never succeed again?  Where will I be if every day still feels like a failure?  Does that make me a failure?  

I've been given a gift-- this much is true.  The trick, however, is figuring out why one has been given such a gift and determining how one might go about using such a thing in the way it was intended.  And I can't seem to stop wondering why there was no instruction manual that came with it.  I suppose the figuring was meant to be half the fun, but it feels like someone is watching me so carefully, I am being guarded and questioned and probed when it is such an intimate thing and it is something I hold inside me yet I know not yet how to possess it.  

I am afraid.  I'm afraid of not doing what I'm "supposed" to do-- and I think perhaps not thinking about what I'm "supposed" is the actual thing that is most important.  It is a strange balance.  Searching for the integrity that is supposed to be in place before the search begins.  Where am I to go?  What am I to do?  And why is this so hard?  Why is it so hard?

I want to use everything I have.  And as I've searched for the connection between my heart and my work, I've come to the conclusion that perhaps my work has been my heart all along and the thing that I've been calling "heart" has actually been an old me that simply needs to be left behind.  Maybe the aim isn't to bring my heart into what has been my work,but to bring my work into my heart because that is more of me than I ever thought.  Maybe this is the wholeness I've been seeking all along. 

Jesus said, "No one can serve two masters," and he also called us to take up our crosses morning by morning so that we can leave our old humanity behind and be brought to life in the newness of his creation.  Maybe I've been putting on all of this new life in what I've been studying, but I've been holding on to the old me too. I feel split between school and heart because the thing I thought was heart was just the old me that I used to be connected to when I was a child.  So I've been taking on all of this beautiful growth, but I keep looking back at the old stuff and have failed to enjoy all that I've received in the meantime.

Maybe I just need to let go.  There must be some old version I had of myself, my art, my work that just isn't anymore.  Maybe once I shed all of that and maybe once I let go of this claim to myself, to my heart and submit to the truth that comes in growth, I will find the answers I can't seem to find the questions to.  Let go.  Now this is something that I haven't much considered before.  Maybe I'll give it a try.  In the meantime, the search continues yet another day and perhaps the journey will serve as a place to shed all that has been holding me down for longer than maybe I even knew.

it's friday.  The last day of a long, packed week before a full weekend of catching up.  Every day has felt an entire day short.  Not enough time-- too much left undone, pushed to another day as more piles on.  It's been a struggle these days to figure out how much can be left in the in inbox as I take a long nap.  

So much of life feels like a series of hurdles to get past to get to the next thing.  Goal setting, forward thinking, planning and no time just for today to be today. I find so much of my time is spent looking at the clock, figuring out how much I can get done in an hour.  How much time can I spend before falling asleep.

Seasons of life.  I thought college was hard until I entered my senior year when I learned that perhaps it is actually just impossible.  In the midst of this river, how do I find the bottom to find today?

I've found myself searching for a few minutes of quiet this week, a few minutes of self-time between lesson plans, too-long readings that never actually get done, and wondering if I'll ever get a chance to paint at all.  I find myself closer to teaching-- like real teaching-- than ever and although I love it all, I wonder if I will ever sleep again.  I wonder if I'll get a chance to write and read and be friends with people without feeling guilty about all that is left undone.

Another inquiry I want to make is this:  have I had time to listen?  Are there things in my life that are the voice of the father that have permeated my blocked-in schedule?  How do you find space in this season to hear those voices?  

Earlier in the week, I vaguely remember a few comments about being versus doing.  How God sums up the whole of his being in simply I Am.   I am.  I wonder-- am I?  Is there time to be?  I was talking to a classmate earlier this week about how every instructor seems to make this assumption that their class is our only and most important.  And I wonder how to balance it-- how to make sense of my own life and still become the teacher and artmaker that they have been appointed to make me.  And solving that puzzle of whether or not any of that can really be accomplished without making that balance for myself.

Season.  This is a difficult season-- a challenge has been set before me and I find my greatest goal this semester has been the recovery of my heart in all the things that I do.  Where is the Heidi in the middle of everything else?  What is my desire? Does it lie within the bounds of all that I do or is it in some other, yet undiscovered place?  I am looking to rediscover that which compelled me when I first began, before my love and passion found itself under the shadow of calendars and assignments for other people.  Where is that place where I discover what i do for myself?

Today feels like a quiet day.  I've been looking forward to this moment in time, this hour after the big things are completed and I can move past these big goals-- first, difficult steps that I was expecting to gain a treasure-trove full of mistakes to learn from and in fact received.  

I find that a great deal of the work I've done in the past three or four weeks have been stumbling steps toward potential mistakes-- I am learning and making peace with this process of putting one timid foot toward from the starting point and gaining all sorts of insights from what not to do-- and hoping those who are appointed to judge and assess that activity will give me time and grace until I sort it all out.  

So it's friday.  Finished leading 16 9 year olds through the process of applying colored sand to paper and anticipating all the lessons to be learned after I go home and sleep for a little while-- before it all begins again next week. 

Desire

"Still, being is desiring: our bodies, our minds, our hearts and our souls are full of desires.  Some are unruly, turbulent, and very distracting; some make us think deep thoughts and see great visions; some teach us how to love; and some keep us searching for God."

-- Henri Nouwen, "The Only Necessary Thing," (Ed.  Wendy Wilson) p. 28

This week as I've been digesting the first chapter of this edited edition of various Nouwen writings, the focus has been on desire.  The thoughts about desire are ones that I have found quite appropriate this week as I've continued my quest towards some resolution of questions regarding where I am headed this school year and questions posed by others about what I really want-- and how those desires are manifesting themselves in how my life and work really play out. After reading the passage quoted above, I became aware of the weight of desire and had to wonder what my own desires are and if they hold the significance that Nouwen places on them.  Do my desires make me think deep thoughts?  Do I see great visions as a result of my desires?  Do my desires teach me to love?  Do the things that I want in life keep me searching for God?  Or do they do something else entirely. 

As I sat down to consider these ideas, I came upon the realization that perhaps I don't even know what my desires are at all?  How long has it been since I asked myself the question: What do I desire?  And is the question about what I want out of my life now?  What do I desire for the future, for today, for who I become?  Can our desires drive us the way Nouwen suggests that they do if we are unaware of what they are?

In my reflection, I came up with a few ideas about what my desires are and I came up with some more questions to lead me into personal research.  I discovered I truly desire to love people, and more specifically, I desire to love kids, to let them know that they are important and lovely and wonderful and alive, especially when other people have told them otherwise.  I desire to be a person that tells other people about the greatness that has been built into them by the father, to help them believe in the beauty that is inherent in their creation.  I discovered that I desire to be a person of joy and a person of strength and a person of peace.  I desire to be a person who knows how to love herself and I desire to be a person of beauty, a person that others love.  

In addition to these great, overarching desires, I also discovered some desires that I hope I desire.  As I stand neck-deep in my studies, I had to ask myself two very big questions:  1) Do I desire to be the best teacher I can be and 2) do I truly desire to grow as an artist.  These feel like questions that are constantly bombarding me, but not until I sat down in my old blue reflecting chair did I really ask my heart those questions outloud.  And following those questions came a "self-check" as they say in third-grade math:  does my life reflect those desires?  I think when we begin to assess these sorts of desires and gauge our commitment to them, that is when these deep thoughts begin.

Often, in conversation with people about where they are headed in life and what they choose to pursue inschool and life, the piece of advice that I find myself most compelled to pass on is the charge to discover first and foremost what they love-- do what you love and all else will follow. But now, I find myself asking, Do I love what I am doing?  

I realized sitting there a few nights ago, that if I truly desire to grow and I truly desire to be a person committed to my own desires, then I need to identify what it is that my life should look like to reflect this.  Am I living the life of a person striving to grow as an artist?  Am I living a life that dictates good teaching and love for children?  Taking assessment of my life leads me to a greater understanding that the failure to stop and take hold of my own desires has kept me from living a life that is truly meaningful and committed to anything.  It is so easy in school to get caught up in the flow of just getting through things and finishing the bare minimum for other people and forget that it all has to be about my own growth and my own learning-- learning is about as assessment of what I want and where I want to go.  What sort of person has God placed a desire in me to be?

So in a very personal way, I find myself asking a lot of questions about myself as an artist specifically.  Since school started, I've been asked to consider the level of engagement and commitment I have toward my own artistic growth.  Am I bored or is there something else going on here?  Do I desire to paint?  After reading Nouwen's thoughts, I need to figure out if I do have a desire to paint, if and how that fits into my desire for God.  Is this gift of creativity that I've been given one that I can and want to use in my pursuit of a life found in the Father?  How does my action of applying a brush to canvas bring joy and glory to the Father?  Does it bless others?  Does it help me love people better when I am committed to pushing myself creatively?  how?

As this part of my artistic and academic career focuses primarily on my independence as an artist, I've been thinking about my subject matter focusing on this idea that the father's face and breath become evident through what he has made.  Is this true also of me?  One of my art education instructor says often, "What we make flows directly out of who we are," an idea that I adore.  So is my painting a way of praising?  Is it a meaningful pursuit of the Father and what he has for me, or is there something better or different?  IS this a way I desire to live a life of worship?  

I don't know the answer to many of these questions, but I do know that I do desire to grow as an artist, even if it is simply because this is the place that I am now as a student, enrolled in a class.  I realize that if these are truly my desires, then I may be required to make certain sacrifices, I may need to rearrange some of my priorities, or maybe even more so, rearrange some of my attitudes and habits.  

What are your desires?  Are these desires that teach you to love more?  Are they desires that lead you deeper into the arms of the father?  Do you even know what your deepest desires are or are you living for the desires of some other unknown force?  My prayer that you would take time to discover these things for yourself as I wrestle through the desires of my own.

"Our desire for God is the desire that should guide all other desire.  Otherwise, our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls become one another's enemies and our inner lives become chaotic, leading us to despair and self-destruction."

I only have a few minutes before heading off to my dinner hour class to round out the last three hours of my 12 hour day, but I wanted to write down a few thoughts before I go.  

As I've written previously, I really desire for this semester to be one in which I find the ability to re-connect with my heart and climb out of a few pits, so I've begun a trek through "The Only Necessary Thing," a compilation of Henri Nouwen's thoughts on prayer and meditation.  The first reading that I looked over today was on the issue of desire-- the more we pray, the greater our desire to meet with the Father will be.

In the midst of a struggle I've embarked on this semester through an advanced painting course and various discussions about my own drive with my instructor, I found myself writing more about painting in response to this reading than I was thinking about prayer.  But I think, once again that art is so closely tied to our spirits, that I don't find it all that strange. The place I landed at the end of my writing was this thought that only through the work the Father does in me will I ever arrive at the place that I need to go.  So often, I get caught in this trap of thinking that I must accomplish all on my own-- to ask for the help of the grand Creator would be some sort of cheater method, but I realize that there is no other way.

I can't do this life on my own-- I've figured that out.  But sometimes it feels like I've walked so far off the path that there will be no return, even though his hand is only our call away.  I used to think a lot about how the one who really does the teaching in my life is the one who knows me as intimately as an artist knows her painting.  I need to be repainted this semester.  I need new desire for so many things and that is my prayer for the day.  Perhaps there will be more tomorrow, but for now it's off to Art Education Studio!

I cam e here with the intention of being good and getting much studying done, but instead brought my computer so I could be distracted by other things like facebook and headaches.  

It is the second week of school and fall has swept in and opened our drawers holding long pants and sweaters.  Things are back again, structure and obligation and readings and papers and painting and deadlines and work and children.  And I've been taking more naps lately.  And I've been feeling calmer, finding it easier to let go of a thing or two and actually remembering to take time for myself.  Doing things that are actually fun that make my heart feel ohsofull.  

I hope this semester will renew my love for the creative things that really make my heart sing.  My heart hasn't been singing about these things for a while and I feel little by little I'm getting the tune back.  Learning to remember that sometimes I just love creating for the simple act of creating rather than doing what certain "big people" tell me creating should really be about and what makes someone a legitimate creative person.  

I'm halfway done with my first little vessel in pottery class and am finding so much peace and joy in the quiet molding that goes on under the hands.  No shouting.  No arguing.  No crying.  Just making.  And it's refreshing.  It's renewing to find some relief from the struggle and find joy in the normal joyful things.  Maybe.  The relief from some pressure.

I feel like my writing here (and in other places) has become more sporadic and that which I do write is seldom meaningful or profound-- it is simply my life.  I am learning to love small people, finding myself thinking about little kids who struggle with reading while molding clay. I think perhaps I have begun to find myself in places other than the private space of writing-- I am growing into a world of activity where my life meets the lives of others.  I find the strength I need in the interactions, in the conversations, in the conflicts, in the hugs of those who surround me these days.  I feel less alone that I remember feeling in other times, other years.  The black and white heart that I had a few years ago has been softened by the heat and touch of hands.  I am different, but I think that parts of the other me are still imbedded like soil somewhere too.

"Everything you do expresses something about you."  Last night during, "Art Education Studio," my instructor made this statement in regards to the idea of "originality."  We were talking about how everything that a person makes is in some capacity originial because it came out of their unique ability.  I like this statement though, because it is a reminder that no matter how much posturing we try to do, the stuff that comes out the most is an overflow of who we are at the most profound levels.  No matter how hard I try to be the thing I think I ought to be, the thing s that I do still come from the heart of the matter.  Those little pieces of myself, those little shards at the center still determine the most about how I manifest me.  I don't have to try.