Learning to Fly: Fear, Love, and Letting Go (Offering 7.1)
Art’s riptide, love’s question, and choosing a path forward.
Welcome to the first fall offering of Eclosion: An Artist’s Path to Power and Peace. This offering steps into two thresholds—one where fear nearly silenced my art, and another where love invited a choice I wasn’t sure I could make.
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Fear in the Face of Art
Like a riptide on my insides
I think I’m gonna drown.
~Riptide by Gone Gone Beyond
The Plastic Whale Project’s success was a pinnacle on my artist journey. But it was only a half-truth; the successful artist was what people saw on the outside. Even with this wild success, I was often incapacitated by fear in the face of art.
My current painting sits on the easel, unfinished. I like it, but it doesn’t feel done. There’s more that needs to happen. But what if I mess it up? What if I ruin what I’ve already done? The anxiety rises, gripping my heart and lungs, making it hard to breathe. I step outside my studio and sink down onto the wooden steps, so filled with anxiety about the possibility of messing up that I am paralyzed, physically unable to walk back into my studio and paint.
Sometimes though, the art must come out. It tears through me with a vengeance.
I grab my pastels and paper and head outside. The need to create, to express the feelings inside through art, is like a riptide pulling me out to sea, the current of emotions so strong it is unstoppable. I draw a huge owl eye with myself seated in the center of its pupil, meditating. In the painting, my face is serene as I literally rip my chest open, exposing my bleeding heart. This is what it feels like when I share my deeper truths with those I love—like I am ripping myself open and exposing parts of myself that were never meant to be revealed.
I turn the heat on in the studio, walk in, and just stand there. The brush weighs a thousand pounds, so I don’t even pick it up. I think about getting a drink, then I think of Jackson Pollock, just one more famed artist whose life was ruined by alcohol. I don’t want to be that person, have been fighting being that person for the past six years, but it’s too late.
Even before I went to Alaska it was too late. My studio in the last house I lived in before Alaska was in a garage. I had an easel and paints, plus a small table and chair. Instead of painting, I would sit and read while I smoked and drank. Today, I fight the urge for a drink. I don’t want to lose my art to alcohol, so I just stand there, staring at my canvas, until I eventually give up and walk out.
I was an artist—an artist afraid to put paint on canvas.
The world continued to close in on me. Even though I meditated, even though I practiced yoga, even though I quit eating gluten and changed my diet, my world kept getting smaller. Some of these practices help for a while—my gluten-free diet resulted in more energy and joy than I’d experienced in a long time—but I couldn’t hide from myself forever. I kept trying to find balance, to feel like I was okay.
I was very much not okay.
Where Everything Is Music
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
~Rumi
I was, however, very much in love.
Shon and I were hiking on one of our favorite trails in the Olympic mountains, the LoFoSoSko as I like to call it, short for the Lower Fork of the South Skokomish River Trail. We were a couple of miles out when we decided to take a break under the canopy of the old growth forest, high on a cliff overlooking the Skokomish river. It was fall and we cozied up together in our warm sweaters, enjoying a snack of carrots and peanut butter, letting the peace of the forest soak in. Setting aside his snack, Shon looked at me, his eyes glowing with something both tender and certain, then pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. He read the poem Where Everything is Music by Rumi. My heart caught as he said he loved me and wanted to live his life with me.
Slipping a ring onto my finger, he asked me to marry him. The ring was beautiful, if not traditional—the silver band crafted with two bodies, intertwined just as we so often lay together.
I loved Shon with all my heart, and I wanted to marry him, but there was something that kept getting in the way. I wanted to have a baby, and he wasn’t sure. No matter how many times we had the conversation, he could not commit to becoming a parent with me. Could I marry him, knowing my dream of having a child might never come to be? As I sat there, a recent memory pushed forward—the two of us arguing in our cabin about this very same subject.
The recurring argument is heated and painful as we go round and round. It’s not as if I want a baby right now. Just someday. I am so frustrated. Why can’t he commit? I don’t understand why he doesn’t want what I want. Doesn’t he love me as much as I love him? Is that why? Doesn’t he think I’d make a good mom? He says it’s not about me, but it must be.
I have to get away from him—away from these sharp feelings of worthlessness, of not being loved, of never being enough. Slamming the door, I run from our cabin, through the garden, down the hill, and across the meadow. I push through the wall of blackberries, earning only a few small scratches, and step into the cedar forest that stands like a quiet guardian over a small stream. I sit by that stream, and try to just breathe, to find my equilibrium.
The stillness of the forest begins to soak in. I watch the water babble by, tiny fir needles caught in the slow current. As I sit in the quiet, the water’s babble turns to laughter—the laughter of both an innocent child and an ancient, wise soul floats through me like the sound of crystal bells. Playful and kind, it is the laughter of a soul that knows something that I do not. Its presence speaks to me as the essence of my child, and I feel solace.
I may have found solace by the stream that day, but Shon and I never came to agreement about having a child. And now he wanted to marry me. As I sat above the Skokomish river with Shon, I told him the only truth I knew: I didn’t know. I really loved him, and I wanted to, but I just didn’t know if I could marry him. I did keep the ring on, though.
I pondered this over the days and weeks that followed. I needed to make a choice. If I was going to marry Shon, I had to let go of my dream of having a child. I imagined our lives together as artists, able to freely travel without the added responsibility of a child. It was a beautiful vision. I remembered the laughter of the child from the cedar forest—my child. That child was out there somewhere—maybe waiting for me—but Shon was here, right in front of me. It took some time, but eventually I let go my dream of a baby and embraced a vision of Shon and me—married, supporting each other as artists.
I chose Shon.
🦋 Sometimes fear and love both demand we lay our hearts bare. When has creativity—or love—asked you to take a risk you weren’t sure you could?