Meeting Her

Ok so I stink at this blogging thing...but I was so inspired yesterday by Jen's posting about her journey.

As women it seems that between the ages of mid 30-40 a new birth occurs. One that is often unexpected and a quite bold.

I recall sitting in a big comfy chair at a women's retreat about 5 years ago. We were writing letters to ourselves. I was writing something about God and I began to use She rathter than He. The floodgates opened that day and my soul has never been the same.

In the weeks following...everything turned upside down. One afternoon while journaling on my deck I was overcome with a need to paint. Now understand I am no "real" painter. My earliest memory of painting is standing next to Julie Johnson in Preschool and the teacher would walk by and praise the neatness of her picture. There is nothing neat about me so I bowed out of the art thing early.

But this inner hunger to paint had to be fed...there was no walking away. I recall walking into the paint store...awkward..as though I was looking for something illicit. The clerk tried to help by asking my medium...uhh..watercolors..yes watercolors is my medium...don't know where I came up with that but that is how watercolors entered my life.

Arriving home with the watercolors and the huge pad of paper, I was nervous...kind of like a first date. What am I doing I wondered? I took the paper out on the deck with a big bowl of water in my favorite ceramic bowl....baptism occured.

I dipped my hands in the cool water and slowly squeezed the tube of paint...a perfect blue...onto the page. My fingers moved between the water and the paint. Something in my soul began to loosen... a bit of air breathed into my heart that day. The picture from that first day is one of my most treasured possessions. For the casual observer it is a simple blue fingerpainting with a handprint...for me it was the day I met a long buried part of my soul.