Flow 5

It’s been awhile since I posted due to circumstances beyond my control.  I mentioned in my last post that I had the flu/cold.  Well, that progressed into an infection in my ear, causing me to feel fatigued and dizzy and utterly unable to concentrate, so I gave myself permission to rest.

I’m so glad I did that.  Painting this portrait and sharing the progress has affected me in more ways than my ability to share my painting.  It’s affected my understanding of the correlation between the flow in my creativity and my life in general.  To begin, I want you to know that when I first became an “artist”, about 50 years ago, the line between creatives and those who weren’t was definitively drawn.  Creatives were following a “different” path from normal people.  I felt like I lived in two worlds then–my creative life and the life everyone else was living.  People I knew would dismiss my difference by giving me “artistic license” to be unusual.

Dealers in art didn’t want artists to talk about the spiritual aspect of creating back then.  We’ve come a long way since then, but there’s further to go. I wondered why I was unable to paint when I was ill and about the correlation between Flow in my everyday life and my painting.  I was able to do everything I needed to do to take care of myself every day while I was sick, but had a hard time painting.

Csikszentmihaly, who I mentioned in the original Flow blog and whose talk on Flow is posted in youtube.com, says flow is what we feel when are fully alive.  It’s when we’re involved in what we do and in harmony with the environment around us.  It stands to reason that when we’re not feeling well, we can’t completely associate with the concentration needed to let go with what we’re doing.

And what is letting go?  It’s allowing Source/Spirit/ Universe/God to express through us.  It’s the spiritual aspect of creatives.  So then, I realized, in order to get to that state, we have to be able to let go of circumstances and events that would interfere with flow.  If we can do that, to let go from a state of our lives in general, why can’t we let go to be creatives in our everyday life?

The answer to this question is one I’m planning to discuss in the next blog post.  It’s the question I’ve wondered about for a long time, and now I think I have some answers.  In the meantime, the painting above shows the progress I’ve made since my last post.  I hope to have the painting completed by next week.

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Doretta