2/10/07 Purifying the Old/Letting in the New
I woke up Sunday morning with a tiny voice in my ear that whispered…”Check the heat in the gallery.”
When I walked over to check the therometer I found the furnace off and the heat at 34 degrees. The cold building led to a broken water pipe and water pouring in like a spring waterfall onto the floor of the gallery. PANIC!
I spent the next three days of hard work of moving everything in its way, drying it out, dealing with plumbers, insurance people, ServiceMaster of Kalamazoo and others. The following week was filled with wallboarders and painters scheduled to do the finish work and a meeting with the Amerigas officials to try to determine what is wrong with our furnace. (Three years in a row the furnace has conked out due to fine white dust that is clogging it.)
Once the dust settled, I asked myself what is the lesson I am meant to learn here?
It feels that this “crisis” (or as the Chinese might say this “opportunity”) is a symbolic washing away of my old life as a gallery owner and a purifying of the space for the new life of solo artist to come. It also seems to represent the fledgling shift in my thinking and my daily energies that I feel taking place. I feel my mindset changing from being a gallery owner whose focus was on finding artists and selling their work - to - being a solo artist who is focused on creating and selling my own artwork.
Hopefully the soft yellow paint “Provence Creme” that I selected will give the studio a fresh new look and reflect light as well. It looks like I will be spending the rest of the winter getting things moved back into place, sorted, freshly oganized and ready for my new creative work.
I am grateful for this amazing building I was blessed to build and to create art in. I am also grateful for the time and space to live this phenenomal creative life. Living the creative life, for me, is my spiritual practice.
“i DON’T THINK WE HAVE TIME TO WASTE BEING UNHAPPY,” From Everyday Sacred, by Sue Bender
