SEA BECKON, Sea-ing the possibilities

Leaning ‘gainst the port railing, arms akimbo: I rise up, a beckoning teasing the edges of my hearing—my eyes scanning the Mesmer-flicker mirror of the sea, searching . . . what? Mysteries, possibilities, becoming-s . . . the urge to inform myself (to form myself within) through forming myself into something new becomes paramount, priority.

There is a saying:

God can only do for us what God can do through us.

      — author unknown

Another saying:

Let go, and allow in.

—author unknown

So--question is: Will we allow ourselves to be amazing? To step out of bounds—out of outdated, limiting, restrictive, land-locked perceptions of how, and who, we are--can be; allow fresh briny breezes to blow into our scent-ual awareness , tantalizing scents, of what we’re becoming; in spite of ourselves; our own resistances.

Author Alan Cohen, narrates in his book, A Daily Dose of Sanity, that student, George Dantzig, upon arriving late to his U.C. Berkley math class, copied down the two problems on the board, assuming they were homework. Solving them, he turned them in to the professor at his next class and, the next morning George’s professor was pounding on his door: George had solved two classically unsolvable math problems!

Alan’s point, of that day’s reading, February 17^th, was that at times ignorance of what is “impossible” allows us to step right through walls of time-honored restriction, through waves of cultural resistance, breaching a strictly adhered limitation.

The harder limitations to shake are our own self-defined restrictions: we live in our own soup, most often convinced that it’s just the way things are. A second layer of this can come from familial assumptions: unlike many, I don’t have this familial layer to undo if I become a new me;—my family of origin dissolving years ago.

I’ve been blessed to live in several states, and, one of the blessings of new territories is that they don’t have you “pegged,” they don’t have any images of what you’re like from ‘way-back-when’—so, you don’t get any “That isn’t like you,” flack. Change in familial units can often feel threatening to the individual members who have developed emotional charges and attachments to having other family members filling a certain slot, being defined a certain way. That can happen even if they’re no longer in your life, if you still roll the same “film-strips” in your mind and heart.

So how do we get our own permission to change; into something we haven’t been before. Some of it comes from the inspiration of others: we become enchanted or intrigued by someone: sometimes it can be difficult to sort out if we’re really attracted to someone because we like them, or because we want to be them!

However, we also have an organic unfolding of soul-silk, the unfurling of a satin wave. We feel that Siren call from out across the seas of our awareness. We long, yearn to go to it. Question is, will we allow it.

Allow vs. permission: hmmm. Looking at the words: allow, I initiate; permission, I seek. So, there are two stages to it. First I seek my own permission to change, or grow, and then I allow it. I let it in. I try it on for size; I become it.

My creative energy tends to be organic, wild, sometimes messy, in a nest of basic order. Like the tides, the visual mediums around me surge and recede—natural objects; images of the sea or high desert, people’s faces, structural features of ships, homes, or a fan of clothing and textile images, featuring rich organic textures and color palettes.

And then, every so often, I need to bring it all down to a clean white slate, to clear the decks. Think: unmarked sand, un-trodden snow; or painting words on water. It usually arrives me because I've been praying for it. Something in me has been wishing that something would force me to pare down; that would require me to initiate a 'thinning.' I need that fluidity, the flexibility; the freedom to go with my own flow, to swim out to what is unfolding in me, to the surprise of me—the part that I don’t know yet: I’ve shucked down to undies, slipped through the railing, over the side, stroking out to what I’m becoming—drenched in curiosity; a sea-soup of greater possibilities.