Bring Beauty Inside: this collection is not just about flowers
Flowers For Meg
12×9 inches
Acrylic on gesso panel
Do you know how hard it is for flowers to bloom? If you’ve ever grown anything from seed, lemme tell you, blooming is a gamble..and it’s a lot toil and labor! There’s the soil prep, the planting, the spacing, the depth, the watering, the pest control, the weather, the consistency…you get the picture. It takes a lot to get a flower to bloom, and then the blooms don’t even last half as long as it took them to get there! If you have kids, you can probably relate! What I’m getting at here is our Western culture values. Speaking in generalizations, we Westerners only celebrate the “blooms” here. If you can’t put it on a resume or give it a title, it’s not worth anything. As Gail Sheehy points out in her book, “Passages,” “The prizes of our society are reserved for outer, not inner, achievements.”
This is my son, age 4 or 5. We’d just been out in the garden, and I let him make his own bouquet, showing him exactly where to clip with the shears. We planted these gladioli rhizomes the first year we moved in the house, and they’ve multiplied and given us a bounty every spring. Oh the joy that comes from being able to create something so beautiful at such a young age!
Bring Beauty Inside is a reminder of exactly that idea: that growth is not just about “the fruits of our labor” that society can see, but about the inner fight to get through each day and if we’re lucky, stronger than the last. Life is hard no matter where you live, what you make, your health, your gender, your orientation, your religion—we all have battles that we face each day. Maybe you’re just trying to keep your newborn alive while sleep deprieved, isolated, and with bloody nipples. Maybe you dread going into work everyday and facing the dysfunction of your boss and colleagues. Maybe you’re caring for someone who’s dying a slow death. Yes, some of life’s battles far outweigh others, but life was never designed to be easy. Life was designed to be a fire—to purge us of our impurities and grow us to the fullest beings we were created to be.
When you look at a painting from “Bring Beauty Inside,” remember, what you’re seeing is the apex of fruition. This apex does not always happen despite all your hard work, so go easy on yourself. You can still do “everything right” and get stuck with a wretched boss, an L.A, fire can still burn down your beautiful home, your kids can still decide to estrange themselves from you as they get older. Although the blooms don’t last long, I take solace in the moments they’re here. With so much of life being purely survival, I find it ever more important to savor the moments of rest…when the flower has blossomed and the only thing left to do is put it in water and enjoy it while it’s here. My hope is that as you enjoy this collection, you’re reminded of the beautiful hard earned moments of life, and that you give yourself a little grace on the moments that were hoped for but didn’t happen as you wanted.
