It’s April and it would appear that mother nature is having a meltdown. Where I live in the high desert of the Inland Northwest you can wake up to t-shirt weather: clear, sunny warm skies. Then, without much notice that clear sky becomes overcast bringing rain, sometimes fog and hail. For extra fun big fat flakes of snow could fall. All in one day. Choosing outdoor apparel can be challenging, but never boring. 

Each year, April is full of unpredictable stormy weather. I can relate. There have been many periods in my life when storms raged inside me. I felt as though I lived in an eternal April. Times when the only thing that seemed to relieve the distress was taking brushes, pots of paint, sponges, spatulas, and other various kitchen tools and pouring my heart out a large blank canvas. 

Gradually over the months and years a curious relationship developed between my anguish and my art. Hidden deep inside the pain was a paradoxical ally, a powerful propellent to fuel my creative passion. I learned that the tormenting voiceless energy inside, like a wild stallion ripping up the ground of my being on a rampage, could be reined in; harnessed for something greater under the spell of the creative process. 

Malcom Gladwell, in his excellent book, Outliers, postulates a principle to achieve expertise in any skill. He maintains as a general rule of thumb that mastery takes, along with innate ability, approximately 10,000 hours of purposeful practice. I can believe that. 

I don’t claim to have achieved expertise in my personal journey in art or writing, not even close. What has been important to me is to be the very best I can be in those creative endeavors. That’s where the principle of 10,000 hours comes into play. I have experienced something akin to a transcendent progression in both painting and writing through days, months and years of dedicated practice, both in front of a canvas and typing on my computer.

Over time I did notice a shift in both disciplines. As I yielded to the process, I became a conduit for something bigger, more powerful. I could literally feel a charge in my hands as if the paint lubricated a connection to an energy outside myself, and in a similar way when writing, words flowed onto the page. Time disappeared. 

What began as a solo act of desperation to shed my pain morphed into a mysterious partnership, like a lightening strike seeking a ground. Two disparate entities reaching for each other … magical.

Painting yielded more than canvasses filled with stories in color, it showed me a way to turn things upside down. When I was head-locked in a battle, with voices speaking lies into the seat of my wounds, I was like a hamster on a wheel. Around and around in the same dark cavern. Painting offered me a way to step out of the wheel.

Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.” As long as I futilely battled my internal monsters the war continued to rage. I began to recognize, as crazy as it seemed, the voices were an integral, vital part of me. Trying to eradicate my demons was impossible without eradicating me. I learned to mine them for riches they held deep inside. 

Rilke said it best . . .

“All that the rest forget to make their life possible, we are always bent on discovering, on magnifying even; it is we who are the real awakeners of our monsters, to which we are not hostile enough to become their conquerors; for in a certain sense we are at one with them; it is they, the monsters, that hold the surplus strength which is indispensable to those that must surpass themselves. Unless one assigns to the act of victory a mysterious and far deeper meaning, it is not for us to consider ourselves the tamers of our internal lions. But suddenly we feel ourselves walking beside them, as in a Triumph, without being able to remember the exact moment when this inconceivable reconciliation took place (bridge barely curved that connects the terrible with the tender … )”  Rainier Maria Rilke

Emotional pain is a human condition known to all of us in varying degrees. Paradoxically, I have found that, for me, hidden inside that pain is a passage to higher ground.This painting, The Scream, is one of many that opened a way for me to step into a mystifying acceptance with my tormentors. Is it easy to welcome those demons? Hell no, but they aren’t going anywhere, so you might as well get them jerseys and put them on your team.