the days go numb
Gouache and pen on paper, August 2010
Why does life have to be a cycle? When you’re happy, you know something sad is coming next.
Everything passes. Good or bad.
What happens when you get stuck in between?
I don’t like in betweens.
waiting for the world to change
Ink on Paper, May 2010
Although we try to keep a proactive mindset everyday, at some point we do catch ourselves waiting. Waiting for inspiration to hit, for new opportunities to arrive.
This slipping–for days to become better on their own, or for elephants to fall from the sky–is there a constructive or win-win way of doing it?
When does waiting shift from being passive to active?
on waiting
Gouache on paper, 2002
My waterloo has always been patience.. I’ve always found it hard to believe in the “calculated jump” in actualizing a dream: what people call baby steps or weighing out options.. I find taking one’s time to be a great deterrent; it paralyzes. For me, when you jump, you jump. All out. Bahala na si batman. And so far, this structureless, armalite approach has worked for me..
Last year, though, I learned something about patience..and restraint…and all their wonderful, painful offspring. A difficult lesson (we stubborn girls don’t learn otherwise), but maybe impactful in a way I am only beginning to understand..
What does it mean to wait? Cris told me years ago that women, by nature, wait. It’s what we do. I refused the idea then, because waiting seemed so passive, reactionary, weak. And what could be more truthful than acting on gut?
But there is a steady power to it… to waiting without going insane… to letting things unfold, to not thinking too much, to welcoming the silence and (seeming) inaction that come with the wait.
“To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.” – Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet
