Hiding

As I was looking through pictures of my paintings to post on my blog, I came across this one.  I painted this several years ago while my life was changing and I was facing challenges.  When I paint, sometimes I don’t understand what motivated me to paint what I did at the time.  In many of those instances it might take several years to realize what I couldn’t have before.

When I first painted the woman in this painting, at first her image was dominant, then she began fading , becoming muted into the background.  I write this as if she played a part in the actual painting of herself, and of course an image in a painting can’t do the painting, but she represented what I was feeling and it was the feelings  deep inside me that led the decisions I made painting.

I realized today that she had faded because she’d been going into hiding.  So apropos for what I want to share today, because she was me as I allowed fear to cause me to run into hiding while in the midst of a challenge.  When we dismiss our fear by hiding rather than confronting it, we lose that part of us that is alive, creative and inspired.  We sink deep into mindlessness, doing out of rote and necessity instead of out of a higher calling of purpose.

And, even more dire and harmful circumstances can evolve when we aren’t connected to our higher vibrations of love and peace.  It’s not because we’re bad that this occurs.  It is because fear creates more to fear.  In my case, each time I tried to hide to stay safe, I experienced physical repercussions.  Luckily none were severe and life-changing, but they did cause me to question why this was happening to me.  In each case I investigated, I discovered the fear that had sent me into hiding in the first place.

In the case of this painting, the fear was one of being afraid to move forward.  Actually, that was the same fear I have had countless times, but I’m stubborn, I guess, because I had to allow the fear to stop me so many times I finally was able to get the message that not doing anything about the fear would end up like this, the fear producing more situations to fear.

So, if you want to be free of fear, listen to it, tell it you know you’ve been afraid of this before but you’re no longer going to let that fear stop you.  Then take one step to confront the fear.  Providence will take over after that one step, or after several more steps, but those deliberate steps you make in the direction of what you once feared will melt the fear away.