I look around. It’s dusty here and a little damp. It seems I left my blog in the darkness and it’s started to grow moss.
Never mind, I like moss anyway. It gives character and somewhere for the bugs to crawl. What use is light if there is no darkness to balance it out.
I’ve been stuck. Caring too much, wanting too much, not wanting enough. The landscape has shifted under my feet and riding out an earthquake appears to be harder than surfing a wave. I don’t want what you’ve got, I want what I want.
I want to write. And I’m going to, even if I’m tired. Even when it hurts, I’m going to write.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
***
I’ve lived in my house for three years now and it wasn’t until my grandmother died that I hung pictures on the walls. Her pictures, the paintings and photographs that had lived in her house for as long as I could remember. I hung them and I thought of her and missed what used to be.
But you can’t go backwards. This life of ours dictates forward movement only and here I am, moving along. A snails pace sometimes, but it’s movement. Time passes and I pass with it.
Yesterday, I went looking for a manila folder I knew I had. Dusty and tired I eventually found it, the detritus of high school. Inside, paintings from another time, done when I had time to spare and no one wiping snot on my trousers.
Carefully, I pinned them to my walls, wondering if I was still the same person who painted them.
I haven’t painted in years, now.
***
Blogging is strange for me lately. Peeling off layers of my own skin to poke around underneath and see what falls out.
It’s still a shark tank out there and while I’ve got my oxygen, I’m not sure I’m going to last much longer.
Loving your paintings… The best way to survive in a shark tank is to become friendly with the sharks, indispensable to them, even. Like those schools of fishes that seem to follow the biggest sharks around everywhere…. I don’t think sharks can look backwards…. 😉
Your paintings are lovely. I’m not particularly artistically talented but I love to paint. I get the paints out with the kids and I can’t stop myself from painting. Colours pour out of me and onto the page. It gives me a different style of release to that of writing but just as helpful. I feel serene after I have done it. Also, unlike a blog nobody needs to see it, and even if they could, they wouldn’t know what they were looking at. It’s my secret language brushed onto a page. I think you should try it again. I bet you’d get some peace from it.
xxx
I love the paintings and I love your writing. I hope you stay. I’m relatively new to your words and I am greedy for more.
I have to disagree with Dorothy my sweeting. Ignore the fucking sharks. and if you must be in the same tank as them, stare the fuckers down and dare them to try and catch you.
You my darling girl have wings. All the sharks have is raw instinct. Remember your heritage, your father was a shark fisherman at one time and your mother whispers her secrets to the moon.
*hugs*
You are better than the sharks. You’re the warm blooded, intelligent dolphin. They are cold blooded and ruthless. You will prevail! xxx
I like your Art work Missy. I have some water colours here you can have if you like. If you mix them with snot you do get an interesting effect. Later on when you have some child free time, I will get you to decorate some pots. Your work would look nice on tableware.
Swap your oxygen tank for Nitrus Oxide or Mario’s Joanna – that should do the trick.
Sharks are a bunch of girls – just show them a picture of Roy Schneider and you’ll be fine 🙂
Bop the sharks on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. That should sort them out. Don’t forget, while you’re swimming with the sharks, there are an awful lot of us fishies here swimming with you. xxx
And I think I’ll be chuckling about Glen’s comment for quite a while!
Veronica, I want to see the yellow face in the middle close up. I love the way the image ‘moves’ on the paper. The watercolour above seems pretty lovely too.
You know, you are as good as the rest of us and all those doubts you have about yourself are unnecessary. I think sometimes you miss your grandmother so much because you found in her the comfort of wisdom that you can’t hear from her first hand anymore; a wisdom that reinforced for you exactly what I’ve just said – that you are as good as the next person. I think she fed that to you, to your Mum Kim, to your brother, to all of you.
I made a decision a long time ago that I would not have regrets, because life is for living and in living we love, lose, win and make many, many mistakes. it is the losses and mistakes that teach us the most for in them, we see our own frailties and are forced to examine the parts of ourselves that we don’t like or that leave us open to attack. The irony is in the latter; the parts of ourselves that leave us open to attack are often the kind, gentle parts of our soul, that allow us to give someone else the benefit of the doubt, or make us honest or give too much of ourselves. And people take advantage of that and use it as a way to take for themselves what they in fact lack in their own souls. so we learn to cover the exposed parts of our souls and bury the hurts; we build barrier round our souls and reinforce our characters with steel.
I do have two regrets, but even in them there are things I’ve learned that I would not have otherwise. I’m writing a pst long these lines now … your idea, really from reading your last few entries. Be proud of who you are and stand tall in your world. You have many people who look up to you, many of us a fair bit older than you who are impressed and amazed by your firm but gentle manner and very level thought processes. You remain, my bloggy big sister. X
I think it is a shame you don’t paint any more. (PS is there a like button here anywhere that I have missed?)
Alison D
There should be one underneath the facebook and twitter buttons?
Aha! I knew it was probably me not seeing the wood for the trees:) Liked.
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