Alive to the loving past / She conjures her own, nothing is wholly lost ~May Sarton
This post — written on a day that feels like a Day One of significant value and meaning — is a declaration. I am abiding with color for Art Every Day Month. Seeking out colors and patterns, light and contrasts each day during my walks. The vibrancy of reds seemed everywhere this past week; berries are ripening and appear almost neon in color, especially in the shadows of the afternoon.
I include collected lines from May Sarton’s poem, “Now I Become Myself” and these images of the vibrancy of red as it is featured in Autumn’s light.
I see red as an attitude … of {living}.
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
~May Sarton
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. ~Edgar Degas
This quotation cues various responses when I read it; when I posted it last week it meant “This is how I experienced the primary color of yellow, what do you see?” for me.
This week, these words feel more like, “My life is my art: how I experience maturation, chronic illness and exploring what is my Onward, my Next. What do you see?”
Red is the color I identify as the color of fierceness … the energy necessary for pressing through.
… a color that feels like a visual for my own “necessary fierceness.”
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