Here is a photo from years past when I had great photography equipment other than my phone. I don’t even remember where I was when I took this but I remember clearly spending a lot of time waiting for a prairie dog to get into an interesting position. I worked hard to get the lighting and framing just right with my 35mm camera. I wanted to make Ansel Adams, my teacher via books, proud.
I spent a lot of time taking photos. My dream had been to be a fine artist or a photographer. Yes, sometimes I glamorize those days. It was nice to have a nice camera. It was nice to have so much passion for the artistic outlets I had in painting, and photography, and later for stained glass. I sometimes ask myself in my current life, “why don’t you still engage in some form of art? Where has that passion gone?”
I’ve been through many chapters. Every chapter of my life had things about it I loved, and things I survived in one form or another. As the youngest from the family I was raised in, my early life was highly dominated by the whims of other people. Sometimes I was okay with that. Other times I wanted it to be different, but I loved everyone, and needed life to be just the way it was for the developmental stage I was in.
In older life, a lot shifted when I was thrust in to realities of this world. You have to work to live because you need to live somewhere. That takes juice from creativity, and independent thought. Even if you enjoy what you do and value how your are contributing, work is more like living in a family. There is always someone to relate to, and always something to do in the context of community. Your relationships, your art, your true identity, your soul’s growth, fits in a box outside work hours.
There are the lucky ones. Their life passions coincided with how they evolved their vocation. I tried to do that, but the way I like to approach my art is not about money, therefore it doesn’t make much. It was hard for me to think in those terms because if my art became my income, it stopped serving the wider way that it served, the way I WANTED it to serve. For me it is about unconditional giving, expressing, and soul growth.
It is easy to glorify the days I painted more, took more pictures, or the days I published my novel. THEN I was ‘there.’ Where is ‘there?’ Yes, I sometimes miss the soul-level creative immersion, but I wouldn’t trade now for then.
Today has more life balance. My creative side is still there and just as active. It is active in the form of perception and integration rather than needing to be engaged in actual art. I am more secure, and therefore more content. When I do engage in art, it has a deeper point.
Previous chapters of life were fine. They served their developmental purposes and brought me to who I am today. I appreciate the lessons, and the relationships. I don’t glorify any particular life chapter. In all of them, some things were pleasant, and some were hard, just like today.
If given a choice to go to a different time, of all the chapters I have lived in my life, now is the one I would choose. I would not trade the wisdom I have gained to go back in time.
The good ol’ days are today.