Finding Balance: A Daily Practice
Life can feel overwhelming, as we all know. Sometimes, there are just far too many things that need our attention, and alas, one too many items on the list to get done in a day. Our commitments and our goals drive us ever faster on the relentless treadmill, as we work ourselves into a frenzy trying to keep up with everything. I know I feel that way and my life is relatively uncomplicated, compared to many others. Here’s a suggestion, something that I have found has a calming effect, one that evens out the ups and downs.
I have a daily practice that helps me keep perspective and balance, in both good times and bad. When I begin the day with the daily drawing project project, I have given myself time to make the marks that reveal what I’m thinking and feeling. In so many ways, it can be described as a mediation practice, as I focus on the movement of my hands and the marks that come freely, without judgement, just as I would focus on the breath in a mediation practice. When I sit down at my drawing table, I take a sheet of the Japanese paper from the stack and begin with a pencil or ink, touch the paper and let the journey begin. I don’t plan, I don’t know what will happen and I don’t care. The most important thing is that the judgment is set aside and I don’t try to make “art”, I am just letting go. Instead, here’s what does happen…..there is a simultaneous immersion and detachment from the drawing process. Each moment, each mark, leads to the next until I know I have reached the end. And at that point, sometimes, but not always, I feel good enough about the drawing to view it in terms of its artistic merit. Many times I do not…and I don’t feel badly about it, because that was never the point. The point is to see myself be myself. Because the marks I made on the page that day are a revelation, a way to process the events of life and a manifestation of an inner landscape of thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain hidden. The drawing made each morning is a document, stamped with the date, an additional record in the ever accumulating repository of days.
At the end of the week, each drawing from that week is dipped in melted beeswax, which encases the drawing, creating a translucent page with an deeply enriched surface. I changed the process a bit at the beginning of this year by adding a second layer to the drawing. The second sheet is a sturdier drawing paper that has marks made with colored ink, paint, or perhaps a pencil wash, that engages in a kind of conversation with the beeswaxed drawing. I make these marks after the “meditation” drawing is finished. The two pages are attached to one another with small pamphlet stitches in each top corner.
When the inner critic is allowed into the room, it becomes clear that I am happier with some drawings than others and it is those drawings that will find their way here to the website and/or to the Etsy shop, but I go through the same process for each.
The daily drawing project is one I have maintained off and on over at least a decade and I can tell you that when I let it go for a month or so, it is only a question of time before I recognize what’s missing in my life. There’s a small empty place at my core that only the daily drawing practice can fill.