Anniversary Tape
Mind Hacks

"Cor ad cor loquitur" - Moominpappa

I have begun to paint again.  Watercolors this time; I've never used them before.  The painting has become a way to understand not only the world around me, which I see in new ways because I look hard at the light, colors, and shapes of things, but more importantly the worlds inside me.

I am astounded that I can draw the larger compositions from photographs, layering ten or twenty images one top of each other into a jumble of lines and shapes, and things begin to emerge.  Things that usually have nothing to do with the photos and objects I've been drawing.  Shapes looming out of the fog.  Being emerging from nothingness.

And I am sometimes moved to tears to find that the deepest most childlike yearnings and hopes of my heart are what emerge.  How can this be?  How can the objective lines of real things be superimposed and come out creating deeply missed surreal places and cherished things.

One is a harbor at sunset, with a sail and an egret flying towards a lit door that illuminates the blue water of dusk.  Another is breakfast in the garden, with the strong gold light of early day casting stark shadows of trees across the lawn.  Another is my alter-ego, red bearded Virgil Tangelo, in a big beached rowboat bubblebath, wearing an admiral's hat, dreaming of tropical nautical adventures while rubber ducks snooze around him.  An early painting in this series is a scene with sheep going up a steep hillside that I later recognized as Baou St. Jeannet in Provence, a place I never quite left after we visited in the late eighties.  The very first watercolor is a painting of green hills, giant dandelion seed globes, kites and goldfish in a deep blue sky.  It is my childhood essence of a perfect summer day. During dinner just minutes later my daughter played a new soundtrack from a Miyazaki film, and when I asked the name of a particularly lovely piece of music, she told me it was called, "A Summer Day."  The sudden synchronicity, after finishing my first painting in many years, made me weep.

These paintings have become prayers.  I sense God smiling and laughing at me and with me in these images.  I am loving and longing on paper without regard for outcomes.  I am experiencing the grace of redeemed dreams and the powerful healing that goes on all the time below the surface of all our unmet hopes and the lost lands of our childhoods.  We are made to long for Eden.  Heaven is where all the tears will be wiped away; I am crying those tears in color. 

I have been weary of the appearances and mirages of church community, and living out my frustrations in a different way than Moominlight.  Like another pappa I know, who finds peace from church politics in his pastures and says, "I feel God more while standing among my cows," I have had to duck out for fresh air and silence.  I know it makes Moominlight's path more difficult, but I couldn't breathe.  In my case the silence is of the time outside time when my mind is tied up in the creating, and another Creator nudges my hand to reach into my heart and pull out things that need the light of day.  The silence of chairos, balm for my heart amidst the noise of chronos.

Eventually I will be ready for church again, just as I am now painting again after blocked decades.  I will one day pick up my pallet and walk, just as He has recently cured my long mute artist.  In the meantime I feel like a hermit, praying in solitude and coming into community infrequently for the sustenance of the Eucharist.  I find I cannot go very long without Him incarnate in the host and wine.  I find that another comfort in this lovely wilderness I am wandering for a while.  In His mercy...  By His grace...

Moominpappa

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