The Direction of Intention

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When I was young I waited until the sun went down to paint. I waited for my parents to sleep, my brothers and my sister to settle and then I would get up and begin to work. My muse lived at night in the quiet spaces. I came alive when the rest of the world slept.

I had a wall in my bedroom that I painted with images from magazines or from my imagination. I worked in black and gray and white. I loved the limitations and the extremes of such a limited palette. I painted Charlie Chaplin and a Turkish marauder. I painted over them with a log cabin, my imaginary sanctuary in my imaginary woods. I told myself stories of living there as I painted and repainted the same scene. I loved the night and what I was able to do and feel.

The daylight always came like an assault. I could not focus with all of the movement and sound, my mind was pulled this way and back again like a game of crack-the-whip. To survive, I developed the skill of being able to disappear into drawings. I could contain the chaos in the movement of my pencil and channel it into an image emerging in front of me; sometimes I felt like I controlled the image but most times I knew it was coming through me; I was like the pencil, useful for the revelation of image and story though not the source. I didn’t think about it.

I had the eyes to see magic until I started to compare and to invest in what others saw. I had not yet learned that what they saw had nothing to do with what I created. They were creating something entirely different because their eyes were not my eyes. Despite years of evidence to the contrary, despite my love of the night and the feeling of revelation, despite knowing how to disappear and reappear, I began to think about it and so I doubted my capacity and assigned it a label: not good enough.

Not good enough always leads to a second label: fraud. Fraud is like a heavy older brother that sits on your chest until you can’t breathe. Fraud leaves you alone if it thinks you really are going to die – when your face turns read from too much doubt and lack of breathing, Fraud let’s up on you a little bit.

Fraud gets off of you when you stop trying to see through other people’s eyes. Just like an older brother, Fraud will let go when you stop fighting. Fraud has no fun unless you are resisting. This is what I learned: everyone has the eyes to see magic and your magic seeing eyes will return when you peel off the labels, let go the investments and breathe for awhile. The sanctuary doesn’t go away, you do. Choose to come back.

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