Back in the 80's when I was studying illustration at Parsons School of Design, I took a class in colored pencil illustration. One day when we arrived at class, the room was nearly dark, and there was a slide being projected on the front screen. It was extremely blurry, but as we were taking our seats, I'm sure most of us assumed that the instructor would put it into focus before we started. However, as class began, he simply said, I want you to draw this image. Somebody summoned up to the courage to say, hey, it's not in focus. And all he said was, draw it anyway.
What we saw was several blurry fields of color -- say, orange, pink, blue and white -- and some greys around the edges. I thought, OK, well, I'll draw what I see. I used my pencils to sketch out five or six large, blurry overlapping circles of pastel colors, thinking, this is kind of boring. This is kind of bogus. When I looked up at the screen a few minutes later, the image looked slightly different, but I worked a little more at "finishing" what I thought was meant to be a picture of large vague blobs of color, and probably put my pencils down thinking I was done. However, when I looked up at the screen once more, the image had changed again, and I finally realized what was happening; the projection of the slide was getting sharper. I watched as, a few minutes later, the teacher turned the knob probably about an eighth of an inch more, and the image became sharper still. So I got back to work. I still couldn't tell what we were looking at, but as things started to get into focus, I added new details, darker lines, deeper colors and contrasts, more form. Near the end of the half hour or so, we all realized that we were dealing with an Impressionist still life of flowers in a vase, and fruit. This had been a deliberate (and ingenious) effort on his part to force us to focus first on the generalities, then slowly but surely add the details, rather than what comes naturally to most of us, racing to get all the details right from the start. (I also took a portrait class where I was forced, extremely nearsighted me, to draw without my glasses so I would focus on shading, not each individual eyebrow hair.)
This week I was reminded of these art classes, as perhaps a metaphor for a rebirth experience. Yes, I am working on a new aim or mission statement for my post-62 life, but I am going to try to keep each area of color as vague or general as I can. I want to let the goddess and all my friendly divine supporters have their hands on the slide projector knob. I want to let go of what Mike Dooley calls "the cursed hows" and resist my strong impulse to fill in all the details from the start, to race ahead thinking, "I need to contact this person" or "I need to do X by such-and-such a date" or "I need to go to Y." Even if my statement ends up being as vague as, "I intend to experience happiness, fulfillment, and abundance, and share those qualities with others" I trust that as soon as I have sketched those colors onto my drawing pad, I'll look up and there will be new clues to the emerging details. The sharpening of my picture will be instituted at the divine level, with me "drawing" it on the earth plane. Let's see how that approach to a richly-hued, beautiful, and fulfilling life works.
