Wednesday, November 29, 2006

I"m Being Followed by a Moon Shadow

Cat Stevens anyone?

World Market sent me an e-mail this morning, offering a special price on Moon Shadow wine. The label is a crescent moon on a dark sky with a graphic yellow shadow below. Simple. Effective. Lovely.

Whoever designed the label may or may not have been able to draw or paint in a way that reproduces an image realistically, but they sure as hell created something that spoke to me. I love the label enough to buy the wine just to have it in the pantry.

I am capable of drawing such a thing. What I'm not capable of--or not yet capable of--is letting go of the perfect images I want to produce long enough to embrace the simple ones I CAN create. I've longed to be an artist my whole life, longed to draw and paint and generate beautiful ithings.

That's not the kind of skill God gave me.

Still, if I could just quit lusting after what I don't have, I could use and enjoy what I do. It isn't just art I do this with. Add these to the list: men, writing, my body. Oh, hell. Just about everything, when you get down to it. This morning I long to break out of the cage I've built for myself. It's a physical ache that makes me want to claw and scratch and kick at things until I no longer have to present only my best self, no longer care what others think of my work or my house or my hips. Trouble is, it's like clawing at cobwebs.

This cage isn't made of steel or wood or resin--nothing that definite, nothing that easy to shape or change. It's spun from a thousand dreams and expectations and warnings and the stories I've seen play outover my lifetime. And like a spider's web, it changes shape when I bat at it, flexes in the wind behind my flailing, stretches to fit my fist, and then springs back into place when I turn my back, unimpressed by my struggles.

Like most problems, fighting it simply does not work. My dear friend and brother, Mystic Wing, would tell me (HAS told me, many times) that surrender is the only answer.

How do you surrender to a cobweb?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

When my mean alter ego, Genghis left me, I didn't want him to come visit you.

Sounds like the old inner Ayatollah has been ignited in you.

Maybe today you can stop writing, drawing, and stiving to be good enough, and just...BE.

And try going back through a few weeks of blog responses and listen to what some of your new friends have said to you. They know you now much better than some members of your own family, and they speak truth.

Then look for the inner personality that agrees with all of us. He/she is most certainly there.

Carrie Wilson Link said...

How do you surrender to a cobweb? You just do. Period. It's like anything, it gets easier with practice. If anyone can do it, you can, my friend.

Hey, did you ever get those prayer flags, or do you need me to send some to you? They are helpful in surrendering to cobwebs.

love.

Go Mama said...

Your writing in this post so captures the struggle and the illusive grasp we have of self-acceptance. So real, so human, yet so unreal, untrue.

How do you surrender to a cobweb? You recognize the truth, the gift of your being. You are the struggle, you are the imperfection, then you expand to become the cobweb itself, enveloping both perfection and imperfection, the whole broken wholeness, the divine within the human...all of it. You are that. You are not separate.

(And it does help to have cheerleaders and support along the way...rah, rah!)

Tongue in Cheek Antiques said...

You have the artist touch for words.

How do I surrender to cobwebs...I hang pretty things on them considering them silk threads to display something beautiful.