Wednesday 2 February 2011

Reaching Up

Today I've pulled a piece of ZIA out of my play journal to share.  As life has gathered its complications over the past few years, my stress level has risen and I began to lose close contact with my innate optimism.  This made me sad to think about; dear friends once christened me "Mistress of Rainbows" for my relentless optimism.  Sometimes life gets tough.  There is always someone who has it tougher.  Life can get complicated.  There is always someone whose life is infinitely more complex.  Life gets crazy.... you get the idea.  And yet, our own experiences are valid.  Their impact on us is real.  The emotional toll is authentic.  Even while acknowledging that "life could be worse", I think it's also important to realize that the smaller challenges we may be facing are equally deserving of notice, and overcoming them is equally reason for celebration.  Every small act of creation I commit (yes, these words are deliberately chosen) is a tiny symbol of my revolt against the ugly, the hard, the harmful, the unkind, the negative.  My placing pen to paper, bead to thread, metal to form, is my personal revolution, my declaration that life is meant to be good, that we have the power within ourselves to make it so.  The sketch I share today is an early work; unshaded, simple in design, limited in tangles, and yet it remains a piece of work that I am profoundly pleased with in some visceral way.  At first I though to call it "Reaching Out", but then I had another look and realized that what my hand is REALLY doing is reaching UP - up towards the Creator, up towards opportunity, up towards the sun....  Can you see this or does it show something else to you?  Is your response the same or different?
Happy Wednesday!

5 comments:

  1. Another beautifully tangled hand…
    After reading your text I know pretty well what this hand means to you.
    And my response? 'Give me five' ;-) – I agree!

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  2. I do see how the hand is reaching up, but I also see growth. Rich soil and leaves and seeds and grass. This hand looks like a garden of potential to me!

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  3. I love this hand. You have included a couple of tangles that I really like but have not yet mastered.
    But the real treat for me was your post. My mind has run in a similar vein many times. I will be thinking about this most of the day, I suspect.

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  4. What you say is so true, and so eloquently written. Such an elegant hand which does seem to symbolise all you have said.

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  5. It took me a minute to "get" what a ZIA is...but as soon as I realized what it stood for, I knew that I'd be using it a lot! Is that an acronym you came up with, or is it used in other Zentangle blogs & forums, and I just somehow missed it? (I'm just now starting to seriously explore Zentangle blogs...there are so many, and I have a lot of reading to do!)

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